Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/178

 CHAPTER VIII.

length of the summers in Western Australia was somewhat variable, taking one year with another. The hot weather usually began in November, though I have also known it to commence a month earlier: and there was a similar degree of irregularity with regard to the setting-in of the winter rains. I remember that one season they began upon the 31st of March, and in another that the heat continued very great till the 17th of April, when a thunder-storm occurred and broke up the weather; but the transition from summer and excessive drought to a moist and rainy time was seldom otherwise than sudden.

Nothing more instantaneously marked the change of seasons than the sound of the bull-frog, whose business it