Mr. Tietkens Extracted A Long Mulga Stick From His Fetlock:

Neither of the two staked horses ever became sound again, although they worked well enough.

In the night, or rather by morning (daylight), the thermometer had fallen to 30 degrees, and though there was a heavy dew there was neither frost nor ice.

We now passed up to the head of the picturesque valley, and from there wound round some of the mounds of bare rocks previously mentioned. They are composed of a kind of a red conglomerate granite. We turned in and out amongst the hills till we arrived at the banks of a small creek lined with eucalyptus or gum-trees, and finding some water we encamped on a piece of beautiful-looking country, splendidly grassed and ornamented with the fantastic mounds, and the creek timber as back and fore grounds for the picture. Small birds twittered on each bough, sang their little songs of love or hate, and gleefully fled or pursued each other from tree to tree. The atmosphere seemed cleared of all grossness or impurities, a few sunlit clouds floated in space, and a perfume from Nature's own laboratory was exhaled from the flowers and vegetation around. It might well be said that here were

"Gusts of fragrance on the grasses, In the skies a softened splendour; Through the copse and woodland passes Songs of birds in cadence tender."

The country was so agreeable here we had no desire to traverse it at railway speed; it was delightful to loll and lie upon the land, in abandoned languishment beneath the solar ray. Thirty or forty miles farther away, west-north-westward, other and independent hills or ranges stood, though I was grieved to remark that the intermediate region seemed entirely filled with scrub. How soon the scenery changes! Travelling now for the new hills, we soon entered scrubs, where some plots of the dreaded triodia were avoided. In the scrubs, at ten miles we came upon the banks of a large gum-timbered creek, whose trees were fine and vigorous. In the bed we found a native well, with water at no great depth; the course of this creek where we struck it, was south-south-east, and we travelled along its banks in an opposite, that is to say, north-north-west direction. That line, however, took us immediately into the thick scrubs, so at four miles on this bearing I climbed a tree, and saw that I must turn north to cut it again; this I did, and in three miles we came at right angles upon a creek which I felt sure was not the one we had left, the scrub being so thick one could hardly see a yard ahead. Here I sent Jimmy Andrews up a tree; having been a sailor boy, he is well skilled in that kind of performance, but I am not. I told him to discover the whereabouts of the main creek, and say how far off it appeared.

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