CHAPTER XIX.
Pity is for the living, Envy is for the dead.
-- Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
The successor of the sheet-iron hamlet of the mangrove marshes has that other Australian specialty, the Botanical Gardens.

We cannot have these paradises.

The best we could do would be to cover a vast acreage under glass and apply steam heat.

But it would be inadequate, the lacks would still be so great: the confined sense, the sense of suffocation, the atmospheric dimness, the sweaty heat--these would all be there, in place of the Australian openness to the sky, the sunshine and the breeze.
Whatever will grow under glass with us will flourish rampantly out of doors in Australia .-- [The greatest heat in Victoria, that there is an authoritative record of, was at Sandhurst, in January, 1862.

The thermometer then registered 117 degrees in the shade.