"run-down" condition, was of the latter company. The question: "Was I fit to be left?" obtruded itself into the settled policy: it logically resolved itself into the further question: "Was I fit to go?" There was nothing whatever to prevent my going if I could "stand" it, and a long sea-voyage had been doctors' prescription for me for years. Mysteriously and, as it were, automatically, I brisked up from the moment the second question was propounded, and before I knew it found myself enrolled as a member of the expedition. The two-berth cabin was engaged; travelling trunks, and clothes to put in them, bestrewed my bedroom floor. I was going home—at last!

And was it too late? Had I outlived my long, long hope? Not a bit of it. I had outlived nothing, and it was exactly and ideally the right time. "You will be disappointed," said more than one of my travelled old friends, who had known the extravagance of my anticipations. "It will be sad for you, finding all so strange and changed." "You will feel dreadfully out of it, after so many years." "You will be very lonely"—thus was I compassionately warned not to let a too sanguine spirit run away with me. They were all wrong. I never had a disappointment: nothing was sad for me, of all the change; no one could have been less out of it, or less lonely. Every English day of the whole six months was full of pleasure; I was not even bored for an hour. At no time of my life could I have made the trip with a lighter heart (being assured weekly that all was well behind me). Children would have meant a burden, however precious a burden, and had I gone in my parents' lifetime it would have been with them and me as our ship's captain said it was with his wife during his brief sojourns with her; for half the time she was overwrought with the joy of his return, and for the other half miserable in anticipation of his departure, so that he never knew her in her normal state. That my father and mother had long been dead, and that the tragedies of home love and loss, with which I was so familiar, were not pressing close about me, probably accounted more than anything else for my being so well and happy. Also, it is not until a woman is sixty, or thereabouts, that she is really free to enjoy herself.

Well! I never was so well since I was born. The long sea-voyage did all that was asked of it, and incidentally brought home to me the truth of the old adage that silver lines all clouds. "If only we were not so far away!" had been my inward wail for eight and thirty years. "If only we had emigrated to Canada, or South Africa, or almost any part of the British Empire but this! Then we might have flown home every few years as easily as we now go from Melbourne to Sydney, and at no more expense." I have the same regret, intensified, now that I am back in Australia again. But there is no gain without its corresponding loss. Not only might the joys of England after exile have become staled by this time, but a voyage of a week or two would not have prepared me to make the most of them. I am convinced that years of health and life are given to those who, at the right juncture, can afford six weeks of sea-travel at a stretch, and they may have been given to me and my companion; I quite believe so. Each of us was a stone heavier at the end of our holiday than at the beginning, and in the interval we forgot that we were a day over twenty-five.

Consider for a moment the perfect adjustment of the conditions to the needs of the invalid with no disease but exhaustion. I pass over the special favours vouchsafed to me, in idyllic weather and tranquil seas, and the mothering of a devoted stewardess who is my friend for life; also in finding quiet and pleasant company in a saloon party of but eighteen. That sort of luck cannot be purchased even with a first-class steamer ticket, nor is it necessary to the efficacy of the treatment. Take only the itinerary—that of the Suez route at a suitable season—as it may be observed by anybody.

First, the run across the Indian Ocean—in the case of the mail-steamers from Adelaide to Colombo, in our case from Adelaide to Aden. Three whole weeks, without a break, without an incident, if all goes well. I had never imagined the sea could be so blank as it presented itself to us on this first section of our voyage. Ships may have passed in the night, but I saw none by day; no land, no birds, no whales, no phosphorescent wakes, no anything, except sea and sky and lovely sunsets. It may have been monotonous, but it was monotony in the right place. It brought to me, at the outset, that complete rest from all effort and excitement which was the necessary preliminary to recovery and repair. I reposed on my comfortable lounge from morn till eve, playing with a trifle of needlework (too stupid with blissful torpor to read, while the strangeness of quite idle hands would have induced the fidgets, sea-drugged as I was). I ate, and slept, and basked, like a soulless animal; forgot there were such things as posts and newspapers, as dinner-planning and stocking-mending, as calls and committee-meetings; forgot that I was the mother of a family, and had abandoned it for the first time in history; forgot whether I was ill or well, or had nerves or not; and thus soaked and steeped and soddened in peace, insensibly renewed and established my strength, not patching it anyhow just to carry on with, as one does on land, with a casual week at a watering-place or in the mountains, but unhurriedly, uninterruptedly, solidly, rebuilding it from the bottom up.

Then, when strength becomes aware that it is ready for use—at the moment when one begins to feel that the monotony has lasted long enough—then back comes the delightful world, with a new face of beauty to match the new ardour of love for it that has been silently generating within us. All the light of enterprising and romantic youth was in the gaze I levelled through my binoculars (given to me for my voyage in 1870) at the first substantial token that I was in the gorgeous East, one of the fairylands of imagination (comprising, roughly, all the unknown earth) from the days of infancy when I learned to read. It was an Arab dhow. I knew that pointed wing as well as I knew the shape of chimney-pots, but the wonder that I was seeing it with my bodily eyes, even as a speck upon the horizon, was overwhelming. I stared and stared, but could not speak.

The rest was pure enchantment. As we drew near to the magnificent rock of Aden—hateful place, I know, to its white inhabitants, and an old tale not worth mentioning to the average Australian tourist—I said, in my ecstasy: "This pays for the voyage, if we see nothing more." The first white-awninged launch that bustled up to us, manned by two nondescripts, one huge Nubian negro and one beautiful Somali boy, bore through the brilliant air and water an official gentleman who probably would have sold his soul for a London fog; it was not he, but another official gentleman who swallowed nearly a bottle of ship's brandy while attending to ship's business, and was presented with another bottle on his departure by a sympathiser who understood his case. It was a hot morning in the middle of May, and I had been accustomed from my youth to atmospheric light and colour as glorious as the radiant setting of this strange outpost of Empire in the East. Evidently it is in the eye (backed by a strong imagination) of the gazer that poetic beauty lies.

After this, the unspeakable experiences followed thick and fast. Night in the Straits, with Venus so bright that she cast a reflection like moonlight across the water; the Red Sea in the morning—minarets on the horizon, and those rocks of desolation, with the loneliest human dwelling conceivable (the arcaded lighthouse) on the top of one of the most impressively desolate; that other lighthouse at the gulf entrance, with its flashing rays of red and white, its rock-base velvety purple against a solemn sunset sky; Mount Sinai amongst the hills of Holy Land; the majestic desert of so many dreams. Time was when I sniffed at the colour of