hand again. The rabbit in Australia increases its numbers very
quickly: the doe will have up to eighty or ninety young in a year. There
is no natural check to this; no winter spell of bitter cold to kill off
the young and feeble. The only limit to the rabbit life is the
food-supply, and that does not fail until the pasturage intended for the
sheep is eaten bare. Not only is the grass eaten, but also the roots of
the grass, and the rabbit is a further nuisance because sheep dislike to
eat grass at which bunny has been nibbling.

The campaign against the rabbit in Australia has had all the excitement
and much of the misery of a great war. The march inland of the rabbit
was like that of a devastating army. Smiling prosperity was turned into
black ruin. Where there had been green pastures and bleating sheep there
was a bare and dusty plain and starving stock.

At first wholesale poisoning was tried as a remedy for the rabbit
plague. It inflicted a check, but had the evil of killing off many of
the native birds and animals. There was an idea once of trying to
spread a disease among the rabbits, so as to kill them off quickly, but
that was abandoned. Now the method is to enclose the pasture-lands
within wire-netting, which is rabbit-proof, and within this enclosure to
destroy all logs and the like which provide shelters for the rabbits, to
dig up all their burrows, and to hunt down the rabbit with dogs. The
best of the lands are being thus quite cleared of rabbits. The worst
lands are for the present left to bunny, who has become a source of
income, being trapped and his carcase sent frozen to England, and his
fur utilized for hat-felt. But be sure that if you bring to Australia
your rabbit pets with you from England they will be destroyed before you
land, and you may reckon on having to face serious trouble with the law
for trying to bring them into the country.

Whilst you have been hearing all this about the rabbit the train has
climbed up from the plains to the Blue Mountains and is rushing down the
coast slope towards Sydney, the capital of New South Wales, the chief
commercial city of Australia, and one of the great ports of the Empire.
Sydney is, I do really think, the pleasantest place in the world for a
child to live in, though two hot, muggy months of the year are to be
avoided for health's sake.

On the Blue Mountains, as you crossed in the train, you will have seen
wild "gullies," as they are called in Austral