Best of all I love the gardens in the autumn, when all the borders are gleaming with the pale masses of chrysanthemums, bed after bed, border after border of them, tawny yellow and pale gold, white and amethyst, not one single glaring or sharply-defined tint, the very soul of colour. The autumn in the Melbourne Botanical Gardens is exquisite. The little, sharp chill in the morning air, the noon of clear warm sunshine; and the mist-haunted evenings, when standing on the high ground, one watches the trees grow ghostlike and unreal in the fading light, while the lamps of the distant town glimmer out beyond the grey veil of the river. Autumn evenings in England smell very good, but not as good as autumn evenings in an Australian garden, where the sun has been shining warmly through the day, drawing all the perfume from the blossoms, the fallen leaves, and humid earth. Then, there is not the same sense of sadness, of loss, which is inseparable from the autumn at home; for here it is not the end, but rather the beginning, the time when the burden and heat of the long summer is past, while life is all ready to start afresh during the damp coolness of the winter days; for, however cold it may be, it is always a cold that quickens, and does not deaden as does that of northern climates. Besides the Botanical Gardens, ‘Melbourne boasts, among others, the Exhibition Gardens, famous for their roses, and the Treasury Gardens, windswept, and dirty, and desolate, their ragged garments incongruously patched by a Japanese garden, railed all round with spiked iron rails, into which no one but the gardener can ever penetrate, though city urchins sit on a mangy bank near and toss stones into it. Just beyond these gardens, separated from them, indeed, only by a road, lie the Fitzroy Gardens, which come first and foremost in the affections of many people. They have not the grandeur of the Botanical Gardens, though they display an even more perennial greenness and a certain wild charm of their own, and the lawns are not so smoothly kept, while in places the grass grows deliciously lush and high. There are more English trees there, too, and in the autumn the ground is all golden with fallen leaves, while there are fewer precisely-set flower-beds and more borders—a far more artistic arrangement, to my mind.