it emerged years ago fresh from the hands of the
local builder. For the Lomaxes, unlike many Australians, respected the
hand of Nature even when it had traced Australian rather than English
designs on their land. And the young gum trees still tossed their light
heads here and there, and clumps of noble old ones stood everywhere
smiling benevolent encouragement to the beginners.

It had been the Judge's original intention to have nothing but native
trees and shrubs and flowers on this summer estate, and a well-clipped
hedge of saltbush at present flanked the drive, and a breakwind
plantation of Tasmanian blue gum, alternated with silver wattle, ran for
several hundred feet where the westerly winds had at first caught one
side of the house.

The tennis-court was guarded along both ends by soldierly rows of
magnificently grown waratahs, that from October to Christmas time were
all in bloom and worth coming far to see. And you approached that same
tennis-court through a shady plantation, where every tree and shrub was
native-born, and the ground carpeted with gay patches of boronia and
other purely aboriginal loveliness. Rarely did the Judge take his walks
abroad on the hills or in the gullies but he returned carefully
cherishing in one hand some little seedling tree or plant he had dug up
with his penknife. And he would set and water and shade it in his
plantation, and tell you its name and its species, and its manner of
growth, for the bushland was an open book to him and every letter of it
had been lovingly conned.

But Mrs. Lomax, English-born, while he was Australian, through two or
three generations, hankered, after a year or two of this native garden,
for the softer and richer greens and more varied loveliness of the trees
and flowers of English cultivation. So they laughingly drew a line of
division through the estate; and it must be confessed that, whatever the
Judge's opinion, the average eye gathered more permanent pleasure and
refreshment from Mrs. Lomax's division than from the stiff, though
brilliant, portion under the Judge's jurisdiction.

After ten years the demarcation was not so clearly defined: pines and
young oaks, ashes and elms, stood about in perfectly friendly relations
with the gum trees and wattles, and the boronia looked up at the rose
and saw that it, too, was good.

"Have you washed your hands? Max, Muffie--go into the bathroom
instantly, please, and wash your hands," said Miss Bibby, as t