ing the dwarf cedars which grow above high-water mark. Nevertheless the sands at Fremantle are less dazzlingly white than those to the northward of the colony at Champion Bay, where, as a woman-servant told me, clothes, after starching, might be laid upon the ground to dry without any fear of the linen becoming soiled. The fig-trees and geraniums that grow around the houses of the town were all peppered with the sand blown on them by the wind, giving a comfortless untidy look to the little gardens. The heat was extreme, the month being December, the Australian midsummer, and our feet were quite burnt in walking through a small remaining part of the old primeval forest, deep with sand, which formed a short cut to the Parsonage. The shrubs which we passed on our way attracted our attention as being of a kind which we had hitherto seen only in conservatories or arboretums, and also as being our first specimens of Australian vegetation.
Our kind guide, by way of introducing us as quickly as possible to all objects of interest in our new country, hailed for us a native who was passing at a little distance, but he was a very sorry specimen, being without exception more ugly and ill-favoured than any whom we ever saw afterwards, and one-eyed into the bargain. The English reader should remember, when he peruses the accounts given by many travellers of the low and degraded appearance of the Australian natives, that no one can form a just opinion of them until he has seen them in their natural state, far away from towns and living the free wild life of the bush. It is as unfair to accept as samples of their race those natives who hang idling about the colonial towns, as it would be to suppose that a common street
