“We have very few rivers, and none of them come from far in the interior. Most of them are low in summer or altogether dried up. There is only one river, the Murray, that can be relied upon to have any reasonable depth of water in it throughout the entire year. The other rivers dwindle almost to nothing, and, as I have said, entirely disappear. The greater part of the country is absolutely without trees, and the dense forests which you have in America are practically unknown. We have summer when you have winter, and we have night when you have day. When you are in your own country, and I am here, our feet are nearer together than our heads; that is to say, our feet are pressing the ground on opposite sides of the earth, and so we may be said to be standing upon each other.”
“That is so,” remarked Harry; “I was thinking of that this morning. I noticed also that the ship’s compass pointed to the south, and that the sun was traveling along the northern heavens. I observed, too, that the south wind was cold, and the north wind hot.”
“You are quite right,” said the gentleman; “and if you have been studying the barometer, you have found that it falls with the northerly wind and rises with the southerly one. When you travel over the country, you will find that the valleys are cool and the mountain tops warm. The bees have no sting, and many of the beautiful flowers have no smell. The leaves of the trees are nearly always perpendicular instead of horizontal, as in your country, and consequently one gets very little shade under an Australian tree.”
“I have heard,” said Ned, “that the trees shed their bark instead of their leaves. Is that really so?”
“It is so with most of the trees,” was the reply; “in fact, with nearly all of them. A few shed their leaves every year, and on many of the trees the leaves remain unchanged, while the bark is thrown off. One tree is called the stringy bark, on account of the ragged appearance of its covering at the time it is shed.
“In your part of the world,” the gentleman continued, “cherries grow with the stones inside; but here in Australia we have cherries with the stones on the outside. We have birds of beautiful plumage and very little song; the owls are quiet at night, and screech and hoot in the daytime, which certainly is not a characteristic of the English or American owl. The geological formation of the country is also peculiar, and the scientific men who have come here from England and America are a good deal puzzled at the state of affairs they find in Australia. Would it not surprise you to learn that we have coal in this country as white as chalk?”
“That is, indeed, a surprise,” one of the youths remarked. “I wonder if the conditions are continued so that your chalk is black.”
“The contrasts do not go quite so far as that,” said the gentleman, with a laugh, “as the chalk of Australia is as white as that of England. I don’t mean to say that all our coal is white, but only the coal of certain localities. It generally takes the stranger by surprise to see a grateful of white coal burning brightly, and throwing out smoke at the same time. I must tell you that this coal is bituminous, and not anthracite.”
“I hope,” said Ned, “that men’s heads do not grow out of their sides, or from their breasts, and that they do not walk topsy-turvy, with their feet in the air.”
“No, they are not as bad as that,” was the reply; “but you will see some queer things before you are through with Australia. Bear in mind that the country contains no antiquities of any kind; it is a new land in every sense, as it was first settled in 1788, and all these cities are of modern foundation and growth.”