It is
of free and stately growth, the bark white, compacted of numerous sheets
as thin as tissue paper. When a great wind stripped the superficial
layers, exposing the reddish-brown epidermis, the whole foreground was
transfigured. All during the night alone in the house, I heard the great
trees complaining against the molestation of the wind, groaning in
strife and fright; but little had I thought that the violation they had
endured had been so coarse and lawless. The chaste trees had been
incontinently stripped of their decent white vestiture, leaving their
limbs naked and bare. In the daylight they still moaned, throwing their
almost leafless branches about despairingly, their flesh-tints--dingy
red--giving to the scene a strangely unfamiliar glow. This outrage was
one of the most uncivil of the wrong-doings of the storm wind "Leonta."
But within a week or so the trees assumed whiter than ever robes; pure
and stainless, the breeze had merely removed soiled linen. The picture
had been restored by the most ideal of all artists.
The blossoms of the melaleuca come in superabundance, pale yellow
spikes, odorous to excess. When the trees thus adorn themselves--and they
do so twice in the year in changeless fashion, in the fulness of the wet
season--the air is saturated with the odour as of treacle slightly
burnt.
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