beautiful; now the climate of Western Australia, as if determined to reduce good looks to their lowest possible level, is not only inimical to the teeth but to the eyes also. As far as regards healthfulness I have no other drawbacks to mention, but these are very decided ones, and interfere not less with comfort than with beauty.
Severe cases of ophthalmia are happily less common now than in the early days of the settlement; whilst on the other hand influenza, or colonial fever as it is sometimes more correctly called, has become a prevalent complaint, almost an annual epidemic. Nevertheless affections of the eyes begin from the cradle, and are so often repeated during childhood as much to diminish the size of the feature, and to render a fine pair of eyes of rather unusual occurrence. Grown people are by no means exempt from this kind of affliction, yet the children seemed to have the largest; share of it, partly, as I believe, from their eyes being nearer to the ground, off which, in summer-time, the radiated heat strikes like the hot breath of an oven.
Besides other predisposing causes, there is a species of fly which bites the eyelid in a most vicious manner, producing so much inflammation and swelling as to completely close up the eye—"bunging" it as the colonial phrase goes, an expression rather perplexing to a stranger when asked for the first time in a sympathizing manner, "whether he has ever been bunged?" With children the evil of a bunged eye does not always vanish with the subsiding of the swelling, but occasionally leaves a permanent squint.
As soon as the poor people found that we could compose eye-water it was in continual request, and though we
