Nor did the exterior lack any of those embellishments that are required to invest a cottage with those charms which the hand of nature alone can fully set forth. The tasteful mind and apt hand of Whitney mingled art and nature so well that the first could hardly be distinguished by the luxuriance of the latter. The workman laid first the train, and then allured nature in a manner to follow and adorn his handy-work. He first erected an open verandah of posts, saplings, and laths along the whole front of his cottage, leaving three or four door-ways, or spacious apertures for entrance. Against these posts he planted rose-trees, which in Australia grow to an extraordinary height; and around them he carefully trained beautiful creepers, passionflower, and other wild plants of the Bush, so that in the course of a short time the framework became almost invisible. The posts seemed to have grown into pillars of rosebush, thickly entwined with flowery creepers, threading their way the whole length and height of the verandah, and here and there forming the most fanciful festoons over the doorway, or round the tiny windows, thus throwing a coolness and a freshness of shade into the inmost recesses of the little cottage. There also might be observed two or three well-trained vines intermixed with all, which produced the most tempting clusters of grapes, as they could be seen to hang through the open lattice of the verandah; while, all over the roof of the house grew fine water-melons, the strong stems of which closely encircled the chimney. It was truly delightful to view this sylvan cottage in the calm and balmy coolness of a dewy morning, and to behold this structure, as it were, of rose-trees and creepers, as the warmth of the morning sun opened those closed flowers that seem thus to take their rest for the night, and the fresh-blown rosebuds that were hardly to be seen the evening before; most of those could now be observed to be tenanted by that busy little creature, the bee, sent “as a colonist,” from England to Australia, humming, in all the active vivacity of its nature, a joyful morning carol to the God of Nature. Indeed, were it not that there were appearances of some more substantial domestic comforts to be seen in the background—such as rows of beans, sweet peas, beds of cabbages, &c., set in the garden, and some young fruit-trees; while near a shady corner might be noticed young ducks feeding under a coop, and “little roasters” gambolling outside the pig-stye, which by the way was deeply shaded by large bushy rose-trees, this cottage at a distance might have been mistaken for a green-house. We ought not to omit that a number of fowls could be observed quietly roosting in some trees at the end of one of the outer buildings.