dragging in weary file from the eastward to the sea-coast, whence much of the wood is shipped for China, there to be burnt as incense in joss houses. On the day of the accident to which I have alluded, no fewer than nine teams were close on the heels of each other at this point of the road, whither a fire was rapidly approaching; but a wide thoroughfare is generally a sure barrier to such flames, and the travellers all passed safely with their loads, excepting the last teamster, who, although the fire was then close to him, saw no reason for supposing that he should not be equally fortunate, when a blazing tree suddenly blockaded the road by falling right across it. He tried to turn his horses on one side, and to make a little circuit in the forest, but the poor frightened animals would not obey, and he could not loose them from their gearings, for the flames were too quick for him. "It took but ten minutes," as his father told us, "and all that remained of the horses was a little heap of white bones by the road-side." The cart and its load were also consumed; nothing in fact was left but the poor man himself, shockingly burnt, especially about the hands.
Not far from the scene of this mournful occurrence we passed a saw-pit where men were hard at work amongst the gigantic mahogany-trees, and a woman with a child in her arms stood at a hut door watching us as we drove by. She seemed to have found what Cowper sighed for—"a lodge in some vast wilderness." The lodge itself would perhaps have pleased the poet less than the wilderness, for bush huts are of the very rudest construction, and those which are called V huts, from their resemblance to the letter V turned upside down, are nothing but thatched
