CHAPTER XXI.
THREE MONTHS AFTERWARDS.
A hot December day, with a cloudless blue sky, and a sun blazing down on the earth clothed in all the beauty of summer garments. Such a description of snowy December must sound strange to English ears; and a hot Christmas day must strike them as being as fantastic as the play in a Midsummer Night's Dream did to Demetrius, when he remarked of it, "This is hot ice and wondrous cold fire." But here in Australia is the realm of topsy-turvydom, and many things, like dreams, go by contraries. Here black swans are an established fact, and the proverb concerning them, when they were considered as mythical a bird as the Phoenix, has been rendered null and void by the discoveries of Captain Cook. Out here ironwood sinks and pumice stone floats, which must strike the curious spectator as a queer freak on the part of Dame Nature. At home the Edinburgh mail bears the hardy traveler to a cold climate, with snowy mountains and wintry blasts; but here the further north one goes the hotter it gets, till it terminates in Queensland, where the heat is so great that a profane traveller of an epigramatic turn of mind once fittingly called it, "An amateur Hell." But however contrary, as Mrs. Gamp would say, Nature may be in her dealings, the English race out in this great continent are much the same as in the old country—John Bull, Paddy, and Sandy, all, being of a conservative turn of mind, and with strong opinions as to the keeping up of old customs. Therefore, on a hot Christmas day, with the sun one hundred odd in the shade, Australian revellers sit down to the roast beef and plum pudding of old England, which they eat contentedly as the orthodox thing, and on New Year's eve the festive Celt repairs to the indoors of his "friends" with a bottle of whiskey and a cheering verse of Auld Lang Syne. However, it is these peculiar customs that give an individuality to a nation, and John Bull abroad loses none of his insular obstinacy, and keeps his Christmas in the old fashion, and wears his
