114 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. X111. 
cold weather. On the other side of the sand ridge, as I have said, there is a 
beautiful beach, one that would make the fortune of any sea-side town in 
England; and here, on a silvery moonlight night, it used to bea favourite 
custom, when I was much younger, for a few of us to ask the girls to come 
out for a ramble after dinner, and going along the beach we used to look for 
and try and turn turtle, In those good old days, and I am referring now to 
some twenty years ago, the turtle were fairly numerous and many and many 
amerry evening have I spent after them ; but the fortifications have since 
then been extended, the turtle have been somewhat disturbed, or are, per- 
haps, better educated, and I am told that there are nothing like the number 
seen now that there used to be. Harking back now tothe entrance of the 
harbour, to the right or south side, as the vessel enters, one sees three or four 
ragged islets standing half-a-mile or so away from the channel,and these 
were our happiest hunting grounds, But of this more later on. Then, as 
you go up the harbour you come to the groin, which has only been built in 
comparatively late years to influence the set of the tides, and to help the 
scour from silting up the harbour, The end of this groin also marks another 
first class fishing spot, to which I will also refer later on; while the groin 
itself runs right up to Keamari, where the wharves have been built, and 
where all the large cargo steamers go alongside to discharge. The harbour 
is nowhere more than three-quarters of a mile broad, and it is about three 
to three and-a-half miles in length, but in the season (and the season some- 
how or other seems to stretch into nearly all the year round) there is most 
excellent sport to be had with one or other of the numerous species of fish 
which inhabit this harbour. 
I have mentioned that Karachi at first appears to have a depressing effect, 
and that the cause of this is, ina measure, due to the fact that there is not 
much vegetation, and, consequently, very few forms of bird life were ordi- 
narily to be seen ; in fact if one excepted the common crow and a few fish 
hawks and terns there were hardly any. Yet one had only to go a short dis- 
tance inland and in the cold weather first rate shooting was to be had among 
black partridge, florican, bustard, hare, snipe and teal and duck innumerable, 
and then it was that one realized what a wonderful land this really is. 
Bleak and barren with a stunted vegetation and a very limited rainfall, you 
could never expect leafy Devonshire-like lanes with high moss-covered banks 
for your pedestrian rambles, nor did you ever come across wayside inns 
with honey-suckled arbours, kept by a jolly-looking host and his buxom 
dame in which to refresh the inner man ; but wild stretches of sandy moor- — 
land, covered with prickly thorn ates are from a sporting point oe view 
a not altogether disagreeable substitute, 
These are some of the charms and advantages of Karachi; and when all 
this shooting is there for you, absolutely free, one can readily understand 
how, to a poor man fond of this sort of thing, Karachi would naturally be a 
