Those sad gums stood up out of the dry white clay, pictures of patience and resignation.  It is a tree that can get along without water; still it is fond of it—­ravenously so.  It is a very intelligent tree and will detect the presence of hidden water at a distance of fifty feet, and send out slender long root-fibres to prospect it.  They will find it; and will also get at it even through a cement wall six inches thick.  Once a cement water-pipe under ground at Stawell began to gradually reduce its output, and finally ceased altogether to deliver water.  Upon examining into the matter it was found stopped up, wadded compactly with a mass of root-fibres, delicate and hair-like.  How this stuff had gotten into the pipe was a puzzle for some little time; finally it was found that it had crept in through a crack that was almost invisible to the eye.  A gum tree forty feet away had tapped the pipe and was drinking the water.

CHAPTER XXIV.

There is no such thing as “the Queen’s English.”  The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares! 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

Frequently, in Australia, one has cloud-effects of an unfamiliar sort.  We had this kind of scenery, finely staged, all the way to Ballarat.  Consequently we saw more sky than country on that journey.  At one time a great stretch of the vault was densely flecked with wee ragged-edged flakes of painfully white cloud-stuff, all of one shape and size, and equidistant apart, with narrow cracks of adorable blue showing between.  The whole was suggestive of a hurricane of snow-flakes drifting across the skies.  By and by these flakes fused themselves together in interminable lines, with shady faint hollows between the lines, the long satin-surfaced rollers following each other in simulated movement, and enchantingly counterfeiting the majestic march of a flowing sea.  Later, the sea solidified itself; then gradually broke up its mass into innumerable lofty white pillars of about one size, and ranged these across the firmament, in receding and fading perspective, in the similitude of a stupendous colonnade—­a mirage without a doubt flung from the far Gates of the Hereafter.

The approaches to Ballarat were beautiful.  The features, great green expanses of rolling pasture-land, bisected by eye contenting hedges of commingled new-gold and old-gold gorse—­and a lovely lake.  One must put in the pause, there, to fetch the reader up with a slight jolt, and keep him from gliding by without noticing the lake.  One must notice it; for a lovely lake is not as common a thing along the railways of Australia as are the dry places.  Ninety-two in the shade again, but balmy and comfortable, fresh and bracing.  A perfect climate.