Page:Extracts from the letters and journals of George Fletcher Moore.djvu/237

 Rh other; a stranger (a sailor in particular) could not admire the settlement. Now there is a town laid out in regular streets of stone houses with low walls, and in some places palisades in front; two or three large well kept inns or hotels, in which you can get clean beds and good private rooms. The soil there is loam resting upon a stratum of easily worked limestone, and possessing a fertility almost exceeding belief, with abundant water near the surface. You inquire, "if there be any fish in the rivers," I thought I had mentioned my having assisted in taking ten thousand at one haul near Perth; up here they are not numerous, or rather I cannot take them without a net: you say, "winter will bring them;" remember I have often called this a topsy turvy country as compared with home; the fish are abundant in the river in summer when the salt water makes its way up at Guildford; the people on one occasion were actually astonished at the noise of the fish leaping and rushing up the river in multitudes, and this I must have mentioned in my Journal, for I have, ever since my arrival given you a pretty copious narrative of my own life, which, though not dressed up and embellished to entertain others, yet gives you a true and homely picture of a working settler in his every day clothes. You may expect with certainty a publication from Governor Stirling, or under his authority, which will supersede the necessity of giving private communications to