Chapter 23

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.

The road lay through the middle of an