aps and lingers, and lingers and leaps for miles in
front of you. You look downward and the ball of the earth has split at
your feet and the huge fissure has widened and widened till a limitless
valley lies there. You look down hundreds of feet and see like sprouting
seedlings the tops of gum trees,--gum trees two hundred feet high.

The far side of the valley shows a rolling mountain chain washed in in
tender shades of purple, paling nearer at hand to blue, the tender
indescribable mountain blue. Great jagged headlands hang perilously over
the deep, and the silver thread of a distant waterfall gleams here and
there down the face of the gorges of whose wonderful beauty the tourist
has heard and comes thousands of miles to see.

A billowy cloud, soft and dazzling as snow, has fallen from the sky or
risen with the mist, you are not sure which, and lies bewilderingly low
and lovely on the purple hills. Then there comes that damp, delicate
sensation on your face and all is mist again.

It is just as if a lovely girl now playfully hid her exquisite face with
the gauzy scarf twined round her head, and now showed it, each fresh
glimpse revealing a newer and tenderer beauty.

Lynn, who, though but eight, is given to quaint and delicate turns of
thought, calls it all "God's kaleidoscope."

Nearer to the station cluster the weatherboard business places of the
little township of Burunda. The butcher does a trade of perhaps two
sheep a week during the winter, but leaps to many a score of them when
"the strangers" begin to come up from the moist city at the first touch
of November's heat. The bakers--there are two of them--fight bitterly
for "the strangers'" custom.

All the winter a few decrepit-looking tarts and buns form the shop
window display of each. But when signs of life begin in the cottages the
battle starts.

"Seven for sixpence," Benson writes in red letters on a card in the
midst of his "drop" cakes.

"Eight for sixpence," Dunks retorts in larger type in the midst of _his_
heap of the popular confectionery.

"Nine for sixpence," is Benson's desperate challenge,--the cakes of
course shrinking somewhat in size.

The baker does not live who can afford to give ten for sixpence.

Benson has now to create new signs. "No second-class flour used in the
cakes of _this_ establishment," is one of his efforts.

Dunks caps it.

"No miserable counting out of currants in cakes baked _here_. Visitors
are invited to samp