Page:Extracts from the letters and journals of George Fletcher Moore.djvu/221

 Rh distance, but much finer. The hills are generally of the granite formation; but they are frequently covered with vegetation and trees up to their very summits. At this time of the year, spring, you find very luxuriant grass on them. Mr. Drummond says he counted fifty-four varieties of native grasses, most of them perennial; but the most abundant grass is annual: he says there are many varieties of the British genera, but that few, if any, of the species are similar.

This is a healthy climate; the heat is well suited to me, and I do not perceive it has enervating effects on any one. The mornings, evenings, and nights, are always cool enough; and very often the land and sea breezes (the latter particularly) make even the middle of the day in Midsummer quite cool.

Oct. 4th.—I shot and skinned a bittern this day; it is the ghost of a bird, its body not so large as that of a pigeon, yet it measures from the point of the bill to the tip of the toes, as the skin now hangs, no less than two feet eight inches; it is, in fact, a great long tube of feathers. Mr. Browne made me an offer of a mare for 50l., which I accepted; and I rode from his house on the first horse (for every mare is a horse) which has called me master in this colony.

5th.—On my return home, after remaining at Mr. Brockman's last night, in consequence of flood in the river, I found my men washing the