CHAPTER XXIII.

Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

We left Adelaide in due course, and went to Horsham, in the colony of Victoria; a good deal of a journey, if I remember rightly, but pleasant.  Horsham sits in a plain which is as level as a floor—­one of those famous dead levels which Australian books describe so often; gray, bare, sombre, melancholy, baked, cracked, in the tedious long drouths, but a horizonless ocean of vivid green grass the day after a rain.  A country town, peaceful, reposeful, inviting, full of snug homes, with garden plots, and plenty of shrubbery and flowers.

“Horsham, October 17.  At the hotel.  The weather divine.  Across the way, in front of the London Bank of Australia, is a very handsome cottonwood.  It is in opulent leaf, and every leaf perfect.  The full power of the on-rushing spring is upon it, and I imagine I can see it grow.  Alongside the bank and a little way back in the garden there is a row of soaring fountain-sprays of delicate feathery foliage quivering in the breeze, and mottled with flashes of light that shift and play through the mass like flash-lights through an opal—­a most beautiful tree, and a striking contrast to the cottonwood.  Every leaf of the cottonwood is distinctly defined—­it is a kodak for faithful, hard, unsentimental detail; the other an impressionist picture, delicious to look upon, full of a subtle and exquisite charm, but all details fused in a swoon of vague and soft loveliness.”

It turned out, upon inquiry, to be a pepper tree—­an importation from China.  It has a silky sheen, soft and rich.  I saw some that had long red bunches of currant-like berries ambushed among the foliage.  At a distance, in certain lights, they give the tree a pinkish tint and a new charm.

There is an agricultural college eight miles from Horsham.  We were driven out to it by its chief.  The conveyance was an open wagon; the time, noonday; no wind; the sky without a cloud, the sunshine brilliant —­and the mercury at 92 deg. in the shade.  In some countries an indolent unsheltered drive of an hour and a half under such conditions would have been a sweltering and prostrating experience; but there was nothing of that in this case.  It is a climate that is perfect.  There was no sense of heat; indeed, there was no heat; the air was fine and pure and exhilarating; if the drive had lasted half a day I think we should not have felt any discomfort, or grown silent or droopy or tired.  Of course, the secret of it was the exceeding dryness of the atmosphere.  In that plain 112 deg. in the shade is without doubt no harder upon a man than is 88 or 90 deg. in New York.