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VARIATIONS IN WEATHER.
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CHAPTER VIII.
Length of summer and winter—Rapid change of weather—Bull-frog—Perplexing sounds—Healthiness of hot weather—No palliatives to heat except sea-breeze—Flies—Ants—Housekeeping difficulties—Fleas—Flowers—Raspberry-jam blossoms—Cow-keeping—Goats and Sabbatarianism—Churning—Scarcity of cheese—Cow-tenting—Bells and herd attractive to cow—Sameness of diet—Australian mutton tastes differently to English mutton—Bunbury beef—Pink everlastings—Road making and mending—"Governor Hampton's cheeses"—Horses and foals—Colonial gates—Aptness of horses to stray—Horse hunting—Obliged to hobble our horse—Horse gets rid of side-saddle—"Gum-suckers"—Headlong riders—Eating a dolghite—Description of one—Evergreen trees—Clearness of atmosphere—"Choosing frocks out of the sky"—Southern Cross—Thunder-storms—Chimney struck—Twisted trees do not attract lightning—Suitability of climate to consumptive patients—Peculiarities of climate—Bishop Salvado's opinion of it.
The length of the summers in Western Australia was somewhat variable, taking one year with another. The hot weather usually began in November, though I have also known it to commence a month earlier: and there was a similar degree of irregularity with regard to the setting-in of the winter rains. I remember that one season they began upon the 31st of March, and in another that the heat continued very great till the 17th of April, when a thunder-storm occurred and broke up the weather; but the transition from summer and excessive drought to a moist and rainy time was seldom otherwise than sudden.
Nothing more instantaneously marked the change of seasons than the sound of the bull-frog, whose business it
