mountain-top to the cooler sea. The highest peak, which presents a
buttressed face to the north, and overlooks our peaceful bay, is crowned
with a forest of bloodwoods, upon which the jungle steadily encroaches.
The swaying fronds of aspiring palms, adorned in due season with masses
of straw-coloured inflorescence, to be succeeded by loose bunches of red,
bead-like berries, shoot out from the pall of leafage. In the gloomy
gullies are slender-shafted palms and tree-ferns, while ferns and mosses
cover the soil with living tapestry, and strange, snake-like epiphytes
cling in sinuous curves to the larger trees. The trail of the lawyer vine
(CALAMUS OBSTRUENS), with its leaf sheath and long tentacles bristling
with incurved hooks, is over it all. Huge cables of vines trail from tree
to tree, hanging in loops and knots and festoons, the largest (ENTADA
SCANDENS) bearing pods 4 feet long and 4 inches broad, containing a dozen
or so brown hard beans used for match-boxes. Along the edge of the
jungle, the climbing fern (LYNGODIUM) grows in tangled masses sending its
slender wire-like lengths up among the trees--the most attractive of all
the ferns, and glorified by some with the title of "the Fern of God," so
surpassing its grace and beauty.

September is the prime month of the year in tropical Queensland. Many of
the trees are then in blossom and most of the orchids. Nocturnal showers
occur fairly regularly in normal seasons, and every sort of vegetable is
rampant with the lust of life. It was September when our isolation began.
And what a plenteous realisation it all was that the artificial emotions
of the town had been, haply, abandoned! The blood tingled with keen
appreciation of the crispness, the cleanliness of the air. We had won
disregard of all the bother and contradictions, the vanities and
absurdities of the toilful, wayward, human world, and had acquired a
glorious sense of irresponsibleness and independence.