CHAPTER XXIII.
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.