We’d intended to walk back to the hotel from Circular Quay through the Botanical Gardens, but we ended up going down McQuarrie, a beautiful, shady street lined with old, handsome, golden-colored civic buildings — Sydney Hospital, the BMA, even a small house apparently used for storing visiting celebrities. We stopped to visit the New South Wales State Library, set magnificently back on a street called Shakespeare. On a traffic island in front of it is a statue of The Man Himself on a pedestal and below him Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Portia, and Falstaff.

Like all of the old buildings in Sydney it the library is gold. It is enormous. It is beautiful and rambling. Echoing halls, impossibly high ceilings, a map of Australia on the marble floor of its lobby. We paused to stare, awed, at an enormous room of old fashioned stacks, then wandered downstairs, to more broad halls, exhibits of old Shakespeare folios (or facsimiles of old Shakespeare folios), a wall of small lockers, so shiny they looked polished, a few scattered formica tables where people, most of them high school or college age, sit with their laptops, and another smaller, more modern library, a sort of reference room mostly filled with more people staring at computers. Upstairs was a wonderful bookstore, where a thin, debonaire bookseller in her fifties with abundant brown hair helped Michael find materials on Frank Hurley. It was near the end of the day, and an announcement declared the library closed. As we left we passed through the locker room we’d seen earlier. All the young people had folded up their laptops and were opening the lockers and taking out belongings.

***

On our walk through the twilight, we were going down some back street when we passed a police station. Occupied sleeping bags lined the pavement in front of it, and the vacant lot nearby. The homeless apparently sack out for the night near the police station, which would seem to indicate a sensible and humane policy of not arresting the homeless for being homeless.