The great main Dividing Range, indeed, can be traced from New Guinea across the Torres Straits to Cape York, and thence southward through Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria to Wilson’s Promontory, being from there continued by the Flinders group of islands to Tasmania, a second spur traversing Victoria in a westerly direction. South Australia and Western Australia alone lie out of touch of this great backbone of the continent, possessing a mountain system of their own. Thus, by the help of forests, and mountains, and streams, the continent does not, on the whole, present to its inhabitants such a flat desert waste as is popularly supposed. How oddly English it is, too, in parts! I know one place on the Dandenong line, not half an hour’s journey from Melbourne, where there is open waste land, broken by pine-trees and ablaze with yellow gorse in the autumn. I remember, the first time I saw it, getting out at the nearest station and hunting about till I found a decent lodging, then staying there for two months, and enduring all the disadvantages of a daily journey to town—a thing I abominate—merely for the sake of living within sight and scent of the gay homelike stuff, with its delicious perfume. CHAPTER X OF THE COUNTRY AND CLIMATE, AND OF MELBOURNE GARDENS VICTORIA, and, indeed, Australia as a whole, has been spoken of as the “Paradise of the working-man”—a paradise in which Melbourne, as the busiest and richest city in the Commonwealth takes the foremost place, this according to its people. The inhabitants of Sydney think differently, so do those of Adelaide and Brisbane. Yet, on the whole, I think Melbourne has the best reason for her proud boast. Wages may not be higher than they are in Sydney, while they are certainly lower than they are in Brisbane or the West; but the disadvantages are far less. The heat is never really unendurable, while at the worst it is stimulating, instead of enervating as in Sydney, only coming in bursts, with constant cool intervals between in which to recoup. For two or three days it may perhaps be over 100 in the shade, when the asphalt in the street bubbles and the pavement feels red-hot beneath one’s feet; but after about three days comes a change, and only once during eight whole years have I known the thermometer remain for a whole week above 100° in the shade. That was, if I remember rightly, in 1907, when whole families turned out to sleep in the public parks and gardens. But usually at the end of about the third day of heat there comes a terrific scorching north wind, laden with thick yellow dust, a thousand times worse, if the Australian would but believe it, than any London fog. It whirls in through every crack of window or door, it fills eyes, and lungs, and mouth, and nose till one feels on the verge of choking, and one’s skin is so gritty that one could smooth a plank with it—a demon of a wind, making every woman it encounters look a hag, and every man a fiend. If the