But if, amid hints and samples of such luxuriance, the well-clad visitor feels his spirit “falter in the mist” and be inclined to “languish for the purple seas” of the South, let him consider how with a certain relief he escapes from the damp, dripping, sticky heat of these glass-houses into our untempered breezes, a little exercise soon setting his blood in tune with a climate that from the cradle goads one to be always doing something, if only throwing stones, that here would be a most objectionable pastime for our versatile youth. It is the sons of a temperate zone who are stirred into building palm houses or setting out to hunt for treasures of the tropics, when tired of hunting in play wild animals kept for the purpose at home. As further comfort, let a stay-at-home study the reports of travellers to note how soon they grow sick of tropical glare and glow, of the crude and garish tints of rank evergreenery, of the “chromo-lithograph midsummer” that wants tenderness, sweetness, variety, and contrast, of the endless monotonies of shade and the blinding dazzle of perpetual sunshine chequered by a “scorched darkness” that brings no rest--how they sigh for refreshing showers that come in their season as a devastating deluge, for weeks and months together turning into feverish mud the choking dust and the soil cracked as if gasping for breath, where masterful Nature, if at least she knows her own mind, is always in violent extremes. I was once in a desert oasis when it had the prodigious experience of a wet day, not in bursts of storm but in gently dropping rain, and I shall never forget the satisfaction with which the natives turned out to bask in weather so familiar to us as to be hardly worth grumbling at. I, too, have peeped into those stifling Arcadias, and have known what it is to hail a “mango shower” or a sea breeze. But I quote for high and wide authority a Ulysses indeed, Dr. A. R. Wallace, who after years spent in the richest regions on both sides of the world, can tell us that the luscious shows picked into a nosegay in our hot-houses ill counterfeit those natural jungles where blossoms are drowned in a flood of sombre green, and the brightest flowers, climbing upwards in the universal struggle for light, waste their full blown beauty on the parching sky, invisible to the wanderer, unless in an airship he could surmount the lofty roof of foliage beneath which he may have to push and hew his tunnelled way through obstruction of dense underwood. This explorer declares that he has wandered for days in tropical forests without coming on any bloom so gay as a hawthorn or a honeysuckle; and he has never seen in Brazil or Malaysia “such brilliant masses of colour as even England can show in her furze-clad commons, her heathery mountain-sides, her glades of wild hyacinth, her fields of poppies, her meadows of buttercups and daisies.”