Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/144

the scarlet geraniums stand in rows like grenadiers. I have just brought in a basket of lilac, which fills the whole room with the flavour of spring. This is a pleasant, long-shaped, lattice-windowed room, not much more than an attic, but furnished with two lovely views. One low window opens over the ever-blue glades of the bay, flawed and veined here and there with a moving network of light that seems to float upwards from the quivering depths of sea below. The other is shaded by two sighing pine-trees, which murmur their ‘perpetual benedictions’ over my head. I love the voice of the pines; but for real musical, sympathetic melancholy give me the wind-harp of our Australian casuarinas. Do you remember that indescribable long-drawn sighing cadence that whispered night and day all over the vast, solitary, sun- beaten plains of our youth?

“We have done wonders in our arrangement of the ‘studio,’ as the servants insist on calling my room. The ceiling follows the natural gable of the roof, and is lined with a sort of cedarwood native to this country. It has a yellow satiny effect, and harmonizes with the red curtains, with my little store of books, and the etchings in their narrow black frames. Two stout timber beams undisguisedly traverse the roof, and from one we hang a basket of trailing