Page:Diary of ten years.djvu/114

 96 After adding wages and the value of garden vegetables, you may see the present expenses of a colonist here.

8th.—Dined with Mr. Mackie. His grant, with the new house and garden, are the pride of the colony. The house is prettily situated on a gently-rounded eminence, rising from an extensive meadow flat, on the bank of the river. The house, when completed, is to be flat-roofed with boards, pitched and caulked like the deck of a ship. He has great quantities of melons and cucumbers, which probably produce as much money as pays his steward's salary—£52 a year—besides rations for a family of eleven persons. From the front of my little crib I can see into his hall door.

10th.—Opened my chest of books, which has been at Fremantle since my arrival; they are in better condition than I could have expected after so long and close a confinement, and looked very like, and, by association of thoughts, reminded me of old friends. The collection of English grasses which Furlong gave me is a source of great amusement to me. The botanists here say, that though our grasses resemble many of the British sorts, there is some slight characteristic difference in each; but such is the similarity, that I am justified in asserting that there are here several species of Poa, and we have the Holcus, and Avena. Thirty species have been enumerated on no very extensive space.

11th.—I have heard that a vessel was about to sail for Van Diemen's Land and take a mail, as I sat down beside a party who were talking despondingly about the want of flour, and of cattle, neglect of servants, and many other désagremens of this kind.

I have frequently spoken of the climate. I think it the very beau idéal of one. We are now in the hottest month of the year, enjoying a delicious breeze, with the thermometer at 77°. It is true that when there is neither breeze nor cloud to darken the sun's noontide rays, the heat is very great; but this is not often the case. Since March last, the imagination