A Colonial Reformer, Volume III

The untoward season had not been without its effect upon the thousand and one gardens that paint, in each vivid delicate hue, with flower tracery and plant glory, the rocky steeps and fairy nooks which engirdle Sydney. The undulating lawns were dimmer, the plant masses less profuse, the showery blooms less dazzling, the trailers less gorgeous, than in other years. Yet were not the shores of the fair, wondrous haven, beloved by Ocean for many a long-past eon of lonely joy, before the bold scion of a sea-roving race invaded its giant portals, without some tokens of his favour. In the long, throbbing, burning days, when the sun beat blistering upon the heated roof, the white pavement, the dusty streets, he summoned from beyond the misty blue horizon the rushing wind-sisters fresh from the ice-galleries, the snow-peaks, the frozen colonnades of that lone land where sits enthroned in dazzling splendour, during days that die not or nights that never end, the sorceress of the Southern Pole. From their wings, frost-jewelled, dripped gentlest showers, refreshing the shore, though they passed not the great mountain range which so long guarded the hidden treasure-lands of the central waste. Hot and parched, compared with former seasons, the autumn seemed endless, yet were the gardens and shrubberies of Morahmee so comparatively verdant and fresh, from their proximity to the sea, that Ernest would have hailed it as an Eden of greenest glory, in comparison with the ‘sun-scorched desert brown and bare' which Rainbar had long resembled.

Among the inhabitants of Sydney who made daily moan against the slow severity of the hopeless season (and who had in some cases good cause, in diminished incomes and receding trade, for such murmurings), Paul Frankston, to his great surprise, found his daughter to be enrolled.