Brisbane evokes it will always be the Botanical Gardens, cool and quiet with their banks sloping to the river, that wake the pleasanter memories. Here we came often to escape from the all-pervading dust, and here we came on our last evening in the brief twilight that intervenes for some few minutes between sunset and the fading of the afterglow. The level rays of the sun silhouetted the grotesque bunya-bunya trees on the river-banks so that they looked like bunches of crooked housemaids' mops. The peace and calm of the quiet place were intensified by the rapidly falling dusk. Except for the scolding and chattering of a party of white Australian cockatoos in an aviary, there was no sound but the swishing of the wind in a grove of dry bamboos, and the little cropping noise of some kangaroos feeding and skittering about in a paddock. In a small round pond fringed by Cape lilies a bull-*frog was beginning to cluck. Already the palm trees were black against the fading orange after-*glow. A too peremptory custodian cut short the enchanting moment; it was closing time he said. So we made our way back through the busy clangour of the crowded streets, and for the last time sat out on the balcony after dinner in the dusty half-light of the street lamps and the stars, and watched the Southern Cross above the palms,
