The Houses Are All Of Mud And Thatch; The Fort Is Only A Mud Enclosure; And The Custom-House And Church Are Built Of The Same Mean Materials, With No Attempt At Decoration Or Even Neatness.

The whole aspect of the place is that of a poor native town, and there is no sign of cultivation or civilization round about it.

His Excellency the Governor's house is the only one that makes any pretensions to appearance, and that is merely a low whitewashed cottage or bungalow. Yet there is one thing in which civilization exhibits itself - officials in black and white European costume, and officers in gorgeous uniforms abound in a degree quite disproportionate to the size or appearance of the place.

The town being surrounded for some distance by swamps and mudflats is very unhealthy, and a single night often gives a fever to newcomers which not unfrequently proves fatal. To avoid this malaria, Captain Hart always slept at his plantation, on a slight elevation about two miles from the town, where Mr. Geach also had a small house, which he kindly invited me to share. We rode there in the evening; and in the course of two days my baggage was brought up, and I was able to look about me and see if I could do any collecting.

For the first few weeks I was very unwell and could not go far from the house. The country was covered with low spiny shrubs and acacias, except in a little valley where a stream came down from the hills, where some fine trees and bushes shaded the water and formed a very pleasant place to ramble up. There were plenty of birds about, and of a tolerable variety of species; but very few of them were gaily coloured. Indeed, with one or two exceptions, the birds of this tropical island were hardly so ornamental as those of Great Britain. Beetles were so scarce that a collector might fairly say there were none, as the few obscure or uninteresting species would not repay him for the search. The only insects at all remarkable or interesting were the butterflies, which, though comparatively few in species, were sufficiently abundant, and comprised a large proportion of new or rare sorts. The banks of the stream formed my best collecting-ground, and I daily wandered up and down its shady bed, which about a mile up became rocky and precipitous. Here I obtained the rare and beautiful swallow- tail butterflies, Papilio aenomaus and P. liris; the males of which are quite unlike each other, and belong in fact to distinct sections of the genus, while the females are so much alike that they are undistinguishable on the wing, and to an uneducated eye equally so in the cabinet. Several other beautiful butterflies rewarded my search in this place, among which I may especially mention the Cethosia leschenaultii, whose wings of the deepest purple are bordered with buff in such a manner as to resemble at first sight our own Camberwell beauty, although it belongs to a different genus.

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