of tree to which he alludes is one that is commonly called the fluted gum, with a stem resembling a twisted Elizabethan pillar.
Whirlwinds we were well accustomed to, and the sound of one of them coming up was a signal for shutting all doors and windows immediately, to prevent the ruthless scattering of our papers and letters over the garden, though the untidy effect thus produced was generally the extent of the damage. On one occasion, however, a large piece of the thatch was whirled off our house by the sudden action of the air, which had been perfectly tranquil a few minutes previously. There is something very grand in the roaring of the wind amongst the forest trees that precedes the approach of a really heavy storm.
The great point of superiority enjoyed by the colony of Western Australia over its neighbours on the eastern shores of the continent is its complete freedom from the scourge of dust-storms and hot winds, and perhaps to this immunity may be partly owing the extraordinary suitability of the climate of Swan River to weak lungs. We not only met several persons who told us that in this colony they enjoyed a relief from affections of the chest to which in England they had been always victims, but we were also intimately acquainted with two cases of real pulmonary disease, which when we first visited the patients we expected to terminate fatally in a few weeks or even days, and yet the progress of the complaint was arrested by the warm weather, and both the sufferers recovered to an extent that admitted of their fulfilling the ordinary duties of life. Unfortunately I kept no daily register of the thermometer, and can therefore only
