You will say that all this has very little to do with Melbourne gardens. But really it has a great deal to do with them, in that it has produced a people with very little of the real home-making spirit; while if a man will not trouble to make a home, it is certain sure that he will not trouble to make a garden. There was one man in Melbourne—I except, of course, the curator of the Botanical Gardens, whose work is too well known to need any comment—who veritably created a garden out of a rubbish-heap—a garden such as Australia needs, full of shade and greenery, and massed flower and foliage that helped to conserve the moisture of the ground. But there did not seem much money to be made out of it, and so one of the endless succession of Ministers for Agriculture—with that eternal craze to be up and doing which makes Australian officialdom so galling to the real worker—decided to change the garden into a dairy farm. It had not been in any way a useless appendage, for it was a public place, and thronged with people on Sundays and holidays; moreover, it had a horticultural school attached to it, where boys and girls whose parents lived near, and who could not afford to send their sons to some distant and costly agricultural college—for their daughters no other possible training-ground existed—could be taught fruit-growing and horticulture. At the time the place was started the then Minister for Agriculture was interested in fruit-growing; and by some good chance the next Minister happened to be the same, judging, rightly enough, that it was likely to be one of the most profitable minor industries of Victoria. But after them arose yet another Minister, whose interests were all on the side of dairy-farming, and the garden—to many a veritable oasis in the desert—was, as such, condemned. What has ultimately happened I do not know, but I believe that one flower-bed, some six half-starved cows, and as many boys, instructed after the methods of Mr. Squeers, somehow fight it out together, though certainly when I last saw it all the beauty and repose of the place had vanished for ever. Yet this is but a single example of the restlessness with which the country is infected, and the difficulty of producing and maintaining anything really staple under such constantly-shifting conditions. The suburbs of Melbourne are beautifully wooded. If you climb to any eminence of the city, such as the fire-station, and look down and around, it seems as if it were indeed built in a veritable forest of trees, while you imagine the most beautiful gardens luxuriating beneath their shade. But, on the whole, you are doomed to disappointment.