Chapter 18

It is easier to stay out than get out.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

The train was now exploring a beautiful hill country, and went twisting
in and out through lovely little green valleys. There were several
varieties of gum trees; among them many giants. Some of them were bodied
and barked like the sycamore; some were of fantastic aspect, and reminded
one of the quaint apple trees in Japanese pictures. And there was one
peculiarly beautiful tree whose name and breed I did not know. The
foliage seemed to consist of big bunches of pine-spines, the lower half
of each bunch a rich brown or old-gold color, the upper half a most vivid
and strenuous and shouting green. The effect was altogether bewitching.
The tree was apparently rare. I should say that the first and last
samples of it seen by us were not more than half an hour apart. There
was another tree of striking aspect, a kind of pine, we were told. Its
foliage was as fine as hair, apparently, and its mass sphered itself
above the naked straight stem like an explosion of misty smoke. It was
not a sociable sort; it did not gather in groups or couples, but each
individual stood far away from its nearest neighbor. It scattered itself
in this spacious and exclusive fashion about the slopes of swelling
grassy great knolls, and stood in the full flood of the wonderful
sunshine; and as far as you could see the tree itself you could also see
the ink-black blot of its shadow on the shining green carpet at its feet.

On some part of this railway journey we saw gorse and broom--importations
from England--and a gentleman who came into our compartment on a visit
tried to tell me which--was which; but as he didn't know, he had
difficulty. He said he was ashamed of his ignorance, but that he had
never been confronted with the question before during the fifty years and
more that he had spent in Australia, and so he had never happened to get
interested in the matter. But there was no need to be ashamed. The most
of us have his defect. We take a natural interest in novelties, but it
is against nature to take an interest in familiar things. The gorse and
the broom were a fine accent in the landscape. Here and there they burst
out in sudden conflagrations of vivid yellow against a background of
sober or sombre color, with a so startling effect as to make a body catch
his breath with the happy surprise of it. And then there was the wattle,
a native bush or tree, an inspiring cloud of sumptuous yellow bloom. It
is a favorite with the Australians, and has a fine fragrance, a quality
usually wanting in Australian blossoms.

The gentleman who enriched me with the poverty of his formation about the
gorse and the broom told me that he came out from England a youth of