Page:Extracts from the letters and journals of George Fletcher Moore.djvu/201

 Rh of artificial green food in the midst of a wilderness of coarse grass, will be a rich and beneficial treat to the sheep.

I hear that the Sulphur is ordered home; if so, and I can see one of her officers to take it, I shall send you a box of curiosities, consisting of specimens of shrubs, flowers, and grasses in a kind of hortus siccus; spears, cockatoos, and feathers; a variety of skins, snakes, centipedes, &c.; but the box is not made yet. I shall, however, make one in a very rough way, and you can get it cleaned and planed afterwards. All the odds and ends which I have in my room at this moment form a very whimsical and incongruous assemblage. Among many others there are four bags of flour, two ditto of wheat, one ditto of oats, a chest of tea, a box of sugar; spears, guns, pistols; the feet and feathers of kangaroos and emus; clothes, books, and old shoes. I am now quite reconciled to the irregularities of a settler's life, and can sit as contentedly among these things as if they were the handsomest paintings, or the most elegant articles of furniture arranged in the most fashionable order.

3rd.—The crows have been attacking my newly-sown wheat. Their character for depredations of this kind is just as bad as in England or Ireland. I must shoot some of the rogues, pour encourager les autres.

I had an agreeable surprise to-day; Letty