Over the mountain is “Lindt’s,” where the motor disgorges its passengers for a couple of hours or more before the return journey. There is no need, should you wish to go there, to waste your breath in explanations to anyone around Melbourne; you have simply to mention the name, and they will all be ready to tell you the distance and the way to reach the place. It is a boarding-house, such as in England we could never even imagine, built all on one floor, with many meandering passages and odd corners, the whole structure having spread gradually to supply the demand made upon it. But, after all, it is not an ordinary boarding-house, and it is not an ordinary hotel, though as many as twenty casual guests will often lunch there on a fine day, while a number of the best class of Melbourne people stay there from Saturday till Monday, or even for the entire summer holidays; though, to my mind, in the winter—when the big wood-fires are all burning and the forest shivers around it—there is a more subtle delight to be found in the place; besides, though high, it is sheltered from the coldest winds, and it is glorious to feel fresh and vigorous enough for real long walks. Still, it is not the scenery, the giant gums, and tree-ferns, the mountains, and the peep between them of an immensity of distance—no words can ever describe the all-exquisite blue of the distance in Australia—that makes the place so distinctive, for there are other spots as favoured. It is Lindt himself, the great man, the mighty talker. He is so vigorous that he must be moving and talking the whole time, and he moves in a large breezy way; while he talks—well, he talks like nothing in the world so much as Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.” For years he lived in New Guinea, and has some of the most beautiful photos I ever saw taken there by himself. He will show them to you—he will show you anything, including his own heart—I do not know that he would not even show you his bank-book. The coming of the motor every day is either a tragedy or a comedy to Herr Lindt; it is quite enough, anyhow, in the play of the emotions that overflow on to you from “mine host” to make an entire drama. Each midday when he goes down to the gate to await the arrival of this chariot of fate, it is heralded by a sort of Greek chorus, in which all the parts are taken by Lindt, at one moment a pæan of hope, and at another a dirge of despair. As the motor rounds the last corner—even if you are some yards away up the rustic steps which lead to the house and cannot see it approach—a subtle but distant change in the atmosphere tells you in a single moment whether the luncheon-table is going to be full to overflowing or graced only by a bare two or three beyond the resident guests. But deep as Herr Lindt’s feelings are, they do not long remain too deep for words, and if the worst has happened, the storm bursts in a torrent.