twenty millions, not all was paid up, and comparatively little reached Western Australia.
The greater part of the area of Western Australia is dry, sandy, desert country, which would seem to be the natural home of sandal-wood and quandongs, and where most of the gum-trees are "piped." And yet so vast are the resources of the colony that there is an area of forest country in its south-western portion which is equal in size to the whole of Great Britain, and which contains a mass of marketable timber which is, perhaps, only equalled in the famous red-wood districts of North California. The classic description of Australian forest scenery was written by Marcus Clarke, the author of the most widely-read Australian novel, "For the Term of His Natural Life." He says: "The dominant note of Australian scenery is a weird melancholy. The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern; their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle in their black gorges a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade. In other lands the dying year is mourned. The dying leaves drop lightly on his bier. In the Australian forests no leaves fall. From the melancholy gums strips of white bark hang and rustle." Perhaps, as is averred by later writers, this description partakes too much of the gloom of the writer's own imaginings, but the traveller is not likely to dispute the truth of what has been so poetically expressed. The forests of Australia are, to a large extent, wanting in the umbrageous wealth which is the glory of the sylvan recesses of other lands. The trees, those, that is, which have a value for timber, run up in narrow tapering stems to a height of from 70 feet to 100 feet without a limb; and then there is a small head, with thin, long leaves widely scattered, and affording little shade. But many of these forest
