come together. Ants were busiest in summer-time, but intense heat lessened the house-flies considerably, and in July and August even blue-bottles seemed to be ready to lay down their arms and to proclaim a two months truce. However, what we gained in one way we lost in another, for at the precise period when the last-named enemies discontinued their hostilities the fleas proclaimed war, and that in such a manner as to leave no doubt in a reasonable mind that their design, had their power equalled their blood-thirstiness, was the extermination of the whole human race.
At home fleas are generally supposed to beat a retreat before cleanly housemaids, and to a certain extent even in Western Australia they have an aversion to the use of buckets and brooms; but in spite of unremitting scrubbings and sweepings, the fleas, with apparently "nil desperandum" for their motto, caused us such nights of broken rest that, in suffering from their misdirected energy, we wished often and devoutly that the excellent man who founded a school of industry for them in London, had thought fit to establish a branch seminary in a colony where so much larger a class existed of those whom he sought to educate.
With the first commencement of rainy weather the mignonette would begin to flower and the peach-trees to blossom in our garden. It is curious to observe of the latter that those trees which have been propagated by grafts invariably lose their leaves at the end of summer, whereas seedling peaches follow the laws of the indigenous trees and preserve their foliage. As the rainy weather continues, flowering bulbs of all kinds, which have been
