But these are not all the strange characters to be found in the book of Nature, which lies open before us in the Australian Bush—a book of fantastic contradictions, of Rabelaistique twists and turns, and of the oddest humours. There is the flying squirrel—which does not fly, and is not a squirrel at all,—with a long fold of skin stretching from the front to the back leg at either side, enabling its possessor to glide through the air for a considerable distance, though always from a greater to a lesser height. And there are kangaroos—though not in Victoria—which climb the trees and browse on the top of the highest eucalypti; and birds which hatch their eggs, after the manner of reptiles, in the warm sand or gravel; and there are so-called legless lizards, peculiar to Australia, and the water-holding frog found in the central deserts, which can blow its body out with a sufficiency of fluid to support it for a year or more in a dried-up mudhole—completely independent of any “Wowser.” And there is a fish with a lung, and in Gippsland an earthworm 7 feet long, and the thickness of a man’s finger—fit bait for the leviathan, indeed. There are now in Victoria 4,016,995 acres of state forests and timber reserves, apart from the other tracts of forest land, and this in spite of the fact that ever since the white man put his foot in the state he has been, year in, year out, stubbling up and cutting down, burning, and ring-barking. Once up in the woods above Macedon I remember coming across a tiny two-roomed cottage in the heart of the forest. For the distance of a hundred feet or so the ground had been cleared at either side, save for ragged stumps, while all around tall trees stood in thick ranks, like the straight white pillars of a cathedral, in the middle of which the tiny homestead appeared like an altar, with the curl of blue smoke uprising from its chimney as incense; the only tree quite near, and, indeed, towering over it, being one gigantic gum, on which, even as I lingered there, the men were busied with their hatchets; and I remember it seemed to my mind an incredible piece of vandalism that such a beautiful tree should be destroyed, the one possible shade that the little house could hope for through the blazing summer day; more particularly as there were miles upon miles of forest all round if they needed wood. I stood and watched the men at work till they had chopped all round the tree, leaving only a slender spindle of wood in the centre, when, by the help of ropes which they had already fastened to it, it was dragging, crashing, to the ground. It hurts me horribly to see a great tree fall, for it seems to tear the very heart out of one with its last rending cry. Something in my throat chokes me, and my eyes grow misty. To see a tree fall, or a mighty ship launched, both overpower one with the same intense excitement. Birth or death—they are much the same in their first breath—joy or sorrow, they tear you alike.