our cow bran mashes throughout the greater part of the year, the lack of cheese and vegetables would have restricted our bill of fare almost entirely to mutton. This last is of excellent quality, and the perceptible difference of taste that it possesses to English mutton has led, perhaps, to the colonial opinion (in which I do not coincide) that the flavour is much superior to that of mutton at home. The dried-up appearance of the sheep-runs, in summer, causes a new-comer to wonder what the sheep can find to eat upon them, until his eye ceases to regard the colour of green as an indispensable accompaniment to the existence of grass. In so vast a country as Western Australia, however, the description of one part of it cannot serve as a picture for the whole. Some travellers overland to Albany, (who had left Barladong in its parched midsummer condition, and who wrote us an account of their eleven days' journey,) described the delight which they felt at finding an abundance of fresh grass and lovely flowers at that season of the year in the cooler southern districts. The district of the Vasse in the south-west of the colony, where I have been told that a blanket is never willingly dispensed with for the whole of even one night throughout the year, produces very good cheese; and the beef which the neighbouring district of Bunbury supplies to Perth at Christmas would do credit to a London market.
The bush immediately around us showed very little variety in the low-growing flowers, whole tracts being covered with nothing but pink everlastings in such immense profusion as to redden the ground at a distance. There were also yellow everlastings very large and double,
