2go



Mr. D. Seth-Smith,



Now and then a small party of White-eyes would appear,

busily searching for small insects amongst the foliage and flowers.

This Western form is the Green-backed species {Zosterops gouldi),

which, at the time of my visit was not nearly so numerous as I

found the Grey-backed form, Z. caerulescens , in the Eastern

States. The pretty Yellow-rumped Tit (.Acantliiza chrysorrhoa)

was also fairly common.


We started to drive back to Fremantle at eight o’clock ; the

horses we had used on the outward journey being unavailable we

had to be content with a couple of noted “jibbers” which how¬

ever took us allright to the ship. Here it took me some time to

make arrangements to break my journey here and to pack up my

belongings, and it was about eleven o’clock when we left the

second time for Perth.


All went well for the first part of the journey where the

road was good, but presently the horses began to show signs of

fatigue and we suddenly remembered that before us the road was

uncommonly bad, having been pounded up into masses of loose

chalk and sand by the heavy traffic occasioned by the building of

a bridge. My companion knew that if once this pair of jibbing

horses were to stop, it would be extremely difficult to persuade

them to start again, and so it proved. As we approached the loose

track the horses were whipped up to a canter, but as the wheels

sank in the loose surface both steeds suddenly stopped dead, and

nothing that we could do by whipping and pulling would persuade

them to move forward one single step. Some navvies engaged

on the new bridge came from their shanties to help us, and after

some three-cpiarters-of-an-hour had been spent in pulling both

horses and buggy along we got on to a better piece of road and

the horses condescended to pull, but, as one of our navvy friends

observed, by far the worst part of the road was }^et to come, and

we saw visions of a night spent in the bush. The horses travelled

well enough on the hard surface, but we soon approached a stiff

incline where the surface was if anything worse than at the first

place. We rushed full tilt into this and, as before, our steeds

pulled up at once and commenced to plunge and kick while the

traces hung slack and nothing that we could do would make them

try in the least degree to pull. The only thing to be done was



