luxuriant beauty of an Australian summer. But I feel it will be some comfort to you to know we have been exempted by a kind Providence from sufferings which we would gladly have shared to alleviate. For the last two years we have enjoyed a state of almost uninterrupted health, while the emoluments of "my situation have procured us many comforts, though we have hardly yet recovered from the difficulties of our first year in the colony. At the present time my income (which is always fluctuating) is not sufficient for our support, in consequence of the stagnation of the shipping interests at Sydney, which, together with all other mercantile transactions, wear a deplorable aspect. Insolvency, like some fearful epidemic, is daily discovering itself in some new place, and all kinds of goods (British goods in particular) are being sacrificed every day, at considerably less than their invoice value in England. There are no pawnbrokers in Sydney, but there are auctioneers who serve the necessitous in a similar manner, with this difference, that the man who sends his goods to the pawnbrokers has a hope (which too frequently is never realised) of redeeming them, while he whose goods go to the auction mart knows at once that they are gone from him for
