black ant, which would swarm over our provisions, and even get into tin canisters which had been placed for security upon tables standing with their four legs in water. It took some pains to discover how the ants managed to circumvent the saucers of water, but we found that the spiders were their engineers, and that the ants had passed over the cobwebs which they had stretched between the wall and the table.
House-flies were so numerous that they left ugly traces of themselves upon all that was not originally black, destroying wall-papers and the binding of books; everything, in fact, which could not be restored with soap and water. Ladies' bonnets and white muslin dresses lost their freshness unless stowed away on the instant that they were taken off, and if people were not perpetually cleaning their windows and looking-glasses they refused either to reflect or to be seen through. A neighbour of ours, who said that he could never see to read a book unless he cleaned a window first, wishing the world hereby to understand what an exceedingly idle wife he had, chose but a poor, and I may say unfair illustration of his lady's failings, so infinitely less idleness being required to produce a similar effect in Western Australia than would be the case in England.
The time at which the house-flies gave us really the most vexation was in our mid-day rest, when they rendered sleep quite impossible unless the bed was protected as against mosquitoes, of which last we had but few, excepting close to the river-side or in the neighbourhood of swampy land.
But we had this consolation, that all the pests did not
