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SKETCHES IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA.

Those persons who kept cows were always glad when they calved early in the winter months, first because there was then a probability of plenty of grass by the time that the calf could eat it, and next because they thus secured as long a time as possible before the heat prevented them from churning. It must not be supposed that grass, in the common acceptation of the word, is often made into hay; what were called hayfields in our part of Western Australia were for the most part wheat or oat crops, sown to be used as hay, and cut green as soon as they came into flower. Pasture of all kinds was in fact very precious, and we, who generally had a fair amount of grass in the winter, were exposed to much annoyance from neighbours who made a practice of keeping live-stock without the means of feeding it at their own expense. There is no need, however, to visit Australia in order to find similar stock-owners. In an English village I have known dumb animals to be kept in good condition under precisely parallel circumstances, and a removal of their owner in consequence to a Government institution naïvely described to us as "Penton Villa" by his friends. Neither he nor his friends, however, took up religious grounds in pleading excuses for his fancy of feeding his live-stock at his neighbour's granary. But one lives and learns. An old pensioner, whose children had more than once brought pigs into our field and depastured them there as on a common, deliberately tethered his goats upon our ground on one especial Sunday, and because another person pulled up the tether pins and told us of the trespass, the proprietor of the goats appeared at our door as an aggrieved party very early on Monday morning, with a request to