Splendid plains covered with the fleecy tribe, and here and there (alas! only but _here_ and _there_) a speck of water, enough to vindicate nature from the charge of utter neglect--and no more. A glance thrown in another direction brings to your view an endless tract of country deprived even of these solitary specks, where the grass grows as high as your knee, and where no man dare take his flocks and herds for lack of the sweet element. If the surface of this land were blessed with spring water as England is, the wealth of this colony would surpass the calculation of any living man. As it is, who can tell the ultimate effect of this important deprivation? There are one or two stations, on which spring water has been discovered, but it is a rare discovery, and dearly prized. In Melbourne we have no water, but such as is carted by the water barrel carters from the river _Yarra-Yarra_. Every house has its barrel or hogshead for holding water. The _Yarra-Yarra_ water is brackish, and causes dysentery. The complaint is now prevailing. In many parts of the interior puddle holes are made, and water is thus secured from the heavy rain that falls in the early part of summer. Water saved in this manner never becomes putrid. The leaves of the gum-tree fall into the pool abundantly, and not only give to the water a very peculiar flavour, but preserve it from all putrefaction. This gum water is safest when boiled with a little tea, and drunk cold. Every settler in the Bush drinks water in no other way, and--for want of better things--he takes tea and fresh mutton at least three times a-day. His bread is a lump of flour and water rolled into a ball, and placed in hot ashes to bake. The loaf is called "_a damper_." The country, as far as I have seen it, bears evident marks of great volcanic change. You meet with a stone, round like a turnip, as hard as iron, like rusty iron in appearance, and on the outside honey-combed. There are large beds of it for miles. You then come to the flat country where the soil surpasses any thing you can conceive in richness, fit for any cultivation under heaven, and upwards of fifteen feet in depth. Before I quitted London, I heard that the climate of Australia was fine and equable, seldom varying, and well suited to a delicate constitution. I am satisfied that many consumptive persons _live_ here, who in Scotland would be carried off in a month. You seldom hear a person cough. In church I have listened in vain for a single _hoste_; no, not even before the commencement of a psalm do you find the _haughting_ and _clachering_ that are indispensable in England. All pipes are clear as bell. I noticed this as a phenomenon on my first arrival. We are now, as you would say, in the dead of winter; a strange announcement to a British ear in the month of July. The air is chill in the morning and evening, before sunrise and after sunset, but during the day the weather is as fine as on the finest September day in Scotland.