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ALICE LAUDER.
153

ing-flowers—those curious Australian daisies, with lifeless silvery blossoms and strange sabbatic fragrance. I remember how the wheels whistled over the dry foliage of the immortelles, and how the ground seemed to roll away visibly before us, in the billowy volcano-formed barrows which we call ‘dead men’s graves’ over there. I don’t know what particular cupboard of the brain holds our earliest associations, but ‘as long as life shall hold’ that sad floating music will bring back to my mind the white-flowered, balsam-scented plain—once rained over with a fiery deluge, and covered still with fragments of lava as thick as shells on the seashore; the dark abrupt precipices and cliffs of the one great mountain on the horizon; the flaming gorgeous sunset, opening its wings in the west and fleeing away over the desert; and the intense loneliness, the Sabbath-like blank of all sign of man’s daily labour, the strange indescribable sense of tragedy and solitude, still soothes my memory with a draught of opiate sweetness. All the while I thus listened to the inward voice of the charmer, seeing visions and dreaming dreams of long past days, I was conscious of the various disconnected fragments of conversation borne in on our ears from various resting-places in the hall or reception rooms. I could hear Mrs.