Then the road begins to wind steeply upwards, up and up. Every now and then one catches the delicious sound of running water from the jealously guarded stream that helps to supply Melbourne. As the forest grows more dense the trees rise higher and higher in their efforts to catch the light, their white-skinned forms hung with long, russet-tinted rags and tatters of bark. Such trees! One’s eye follows them upwards with a feeling that is little short of worship—not for the trees themselves, though one might adore worse gods, but for the something pure and elevating to which they seem to lift one. Surely no cathedral ever built with hands could be so sacred or awe-inspiring as this sanctuary of the woods, with its tapering white pillars, some as much as 300 feet in height. Far above one, on the right as one winds up the tortuous road, tower these giant gums, their very roots adapting themselves to the steep graduate; those on the highest part of the slope short and sturdy, stuck out like feet at an acute angle to the trunk. The tap-root thick and straight, and the roots on the lower slopes long and slender like ropes, while beneath them flourish a mass of saplings and tree-ferns. To the left one looks down on a sea of green, out of which the tallest of them stretch white arms, and now and then, as the road turns, one catches a glimpse of more mountains, blue with distance; or a stretch of hillside where the trees have been stripped by fire, or ring-barked, and stand all naked and ashen white, strangely glacial in appearance, against the blue background.