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or thirty miles; near Northam it was 400, and at York full 500 feet above the sea, the distance from tidal water, even following the windings of the river, certainly not exceeding one hundred miles. The structure of the river among the hills was very peculiar; just above York, near Mr. Landor's house, there was a pool in the river bed 200 yards long, 80 yards wide, and 36 yards deep, full of water to the brim, while just beyond each end of this pool the river was dry, or had only a little winding, trickling stream among the grass and pebbles. A succession of these dry spaces and "water-holes," as they are called, occur all down the river. That near Mr. Slade's house, below Northam, was three-quarters of a mile long, thirty or forty yards wide, very deep, and bank full of the most beautiful clear water, with winding reaches like any other river. A stranger to the country, coming suddenly upon it, would have concluded of course he could have placed a boat on it, and gone down in it to the sea, and yet it suddenly ended each way, with a steep square termination, and the bed of the river beyond was merely a grassy hollow, full of trees and bushes, a little above the level of the water in these pools I had, indeed, ridden across the bed of the Swan lower down, without knowing it, and only became aware of the fact by finding a long reach of water on my right, whereas I knew the last I had passed had been on my left, It seemed as if somebody intending to deepen the bed of the river had set parties to work at different places, and that these parties, after having excavated different lengths of work to considerable depths, had all suddenly left off, and the holes thus made had absorbed all the water that formerly ran down the river. I should have supposed that this peculiar character had been the result of the rapid rise of the bed of the Swan above-mentioned, but it is a character which, from the accounts of travellers, and from all the brooks and rivers I saw in the country, is more or less common to the whole of the rivers of Australia, with the exception perhaps of the Murray. They all consist of a regular river bed and channel, which is only used, as it were, in extenso, in wet weather, the various holes remaining more or less full according to the dryness
