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The country-side was very beautiful, more English, and less unfamiliar-looking, than anything we had yet seen, with steeply undulating hills and valleys, springing young green crops, and orchards, with apple trees whitened against some parasitical scab, or oranges and lemons. The comfortable homesteads had a more finished and abiding air than anything we had yet seen; for Bridgetown, as our host explained to us, “is a very old settlement—sixty years old!” It even possessed a tiny stone church, which gave it a pleasantly homely and established air. We crossed the beautiful Blackwood river by a picturesque wooden bridge where the river flows through a deep gorge up which black and white wild duck were sailing. In the fading glow of the sunset the country looked still more English, for the groups of gum trees that crowned the hills were indistinguishable, and the evening light seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of calm contentment over the thriving country-side, as of a day’s work well done. We ran through the little scattered township, to the Freemason’s Hotel, at which our friend the motorist deposited us, and vanished into the dusk.