Every principal street in Melbourne seems to be possessed of a poor relation—meagre, dreary, and more or less unpresentable. There is Collins Street, for instance, wide and majestic, and—may I say?—awful in its unbroken length, leading straight up to the Houses of Parliament, and yet not emblematical, I hope, of that other wide and straight path that leadeth to destruction. Keeping step with it all the way, dim and narrow, noisy and bustling, in the shadow of its skirts runs Little Collins Street. Then there is to the right, still looking upwards towards the seats of the mighty, Flinders Street and Little Flinders Street; to the left, Burke Street and Little Burke Street—the haunt of John Chinaman—Lonsdale Street and Little Lonsdale Street, and so on; the transverse streets that cross them alone being free of these poor relations. “The most irrelevant things in Nature,” as Charles Lamb calls them. Indeed, I wish that more of the streets were without them, or that, at least, they did not run in such unbroken continuity—that one might tear the middle out of them in places, as one does out of a French roll, and form a hollow, instead of a block. Even in the place of a single warehouse, here and there, to have a little open space, a few trees—the city-loving plane or large-leaved maple—and a seat or two, so that the unnumbered city clerks and warehousemen might have some little open place and some greenery in sight of which to eat their lunch. Melbourne is rich in public gardens of rare beauty, while in the Botanical and Fitzroy Gardens there are kiosks where one may get a meal served in the open. But they are all too far from the centre of the city to be of much use during the short hour or half-hour allowed for lunch; while for all the tiny people whose fathers are caretakers, or whose mothers are charwomen, in the very heart of the town, they are indeed a far journey, fraught with untold dangers. For many years I lived and worked in a great mass of buildings, offices, single rooms, and chambers, rather to the west of the town, starving for the breath of a tree, the sight of a little greenery within easy reach; even the Flag-Staff Gardens, the nearest in that direction, being a good twenty minutes’ walk away. Then, to my joy, I discovered the little Old Cathedral, packed away among warehouses and offices, with its tiny garden, its patch of green sward, its few shady trees, and its herbaceous borders, where there grew a blue flower, whose name I do not know but which I imagine belonged to the borage tribe, of the intensest blue I have ever seen. There were other flowers, of course—geraniums and nasturtiums and dahlias, I believe—but it is the blue alone that lives in my memory, for, like Thoreau, I feel that there is something intensely exhilarating “even in the very memory of blue flowers growing in patches.”