obliged to drink it. They regarded it as a thing of the past, belonging to the hard old times when China tea was often beyond the reach of thirsty colonists.
The great medical authority of persons residing in the bush is Mr. Holloway, whose merits receive ample compensation abroad for being somewhat overlooked at home: His portrait is hung affectionately upon the parlour walls, and his advertisements, which set forth the suitability of the same medicine to a dozen different disorders, are swallowed with as much good faith as the pills themselves. All things considered, the bush folks might have a worse guide, for Mr. Holloway's system has at least the recommendation of simplicity, and as there appears to be no greater mortality amongst those who take the pills than those who leave them alone, the natural conclusion is that they must be harmless.
Nothing shows the perfection of the climate more than the impunity with which persons can sleep out of doors at all times of the year, and the extraordinary recoveries which take place after bad accidents, aggravated as they generally are by the great delay that necessarily occurs in a large and thinly-populated country before medical help can be procured. A proof of this postponement came under our own immediate notice. We were sitting one evening, reading quietly, when a rap at the door startled us, and on opening it we found a man standing outside, who begged us to tell him how he could procure admission into the hospital for a young woman who had been most dreadfully burnt many hours before. She was subject to fits, he said, and in one of them had fallen down close to the hut fire with one of her legs across the burning brands
