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But ere we descend to the beach to wander by rock and pool in this glowing Australian sun, the warm, loving rays of which are fast drying the frost-coated grass, let us look at these square, old-time monuments to the dead, placed on the Barrack Hill, and overlooking the sea.  There are four in all, but around them are many low, sunken headstones of lichen-covered slabs, the inscriptions on which, like many of those on the stones in the cemetery by the reedy creek, have long since vanished.

There, indeed, if you care to brave the snake-haunted place you will discover a word, or the part of a word—­“Talav——­,” “Torre——­Vedras,” “Vimiera,” or “Badaj——­,” or “Fuentes de On——­,” and you know that underneath lies the dust of men who served their country well when the Iron Duke was rescuing Europe from the grip of the bloodstained Corsican.  On one, which for seventy years has faced the rising sun and the salty breath of the ocean breeze, there remains but the one glorious word, “Aboukir!” every indented letter thickly filled with grey moss and lichen, though the name of he who fought there has disappeared, and being but that of some humble seaman, is unrecorded and unknown in the annals of his country.  How strange it seems! but yet how fitting that this one word alone should be preserved by loving Nature from the decaying touch of Time.  Perhaps the very hand of the convict mason who held the chisel to the stone struck deeper as he carved the letters of the name of the glorious victory.

But let us away from here; for in the hot summer months amid these neglected and decaying memorials of the dead, creeping and crawling in and out of the crumbling masonry of the tombs, gliding among the long, reedy grass, or lying basking in the sun upon the fallen headstones, are deadly black and brown snakes.  They have made this old, time-forgotten cemetery their own favourite haunting place; for the waters of the creek are near, and on its margin they find their prey.  Once, so the shaky old wharfinger will tell you, a naval lieutenant, who had been badly wounded in the first Maori war, died in the commandant’s house.  He was buried here on the bank of the creek, and one day his young wife who had come from England to nurse him and found him dead, sat down on his grave and went to sleep.  When she awoke, a great black snake was lying on her knees.  She died that day from the shock.

The largest of these four monuments on the bluff stands nearest to the sea, and the inscription on the heavy flat slab of sandstone which covers it is fairly legible:—­

Sacred to the Memory of
James Vaughan,
Who was a Private in Captain
Fraser Allan’s Company
of the 40th Regiment,
Who died on the 24th November, 1823,
of a Gunshot Wound Received
on the 20th Day of the Month,
when in Pursuit of a
Runaway Convict. 
Aged 25 years.

The others record the names of the “infant son and daughters of Mr. G. Smith, Commissariat Storekeeper,” and of “Edward Marvin, who died 4th July, 1821, aged 21 years.”