of
stick, clubs, and calabashes, on which to beat time. Some thirty of
the men then stood up, armed with spears, tomahawks, nullah-nullahs
(war-clubs), and boomerangs, and commenced a series of ludicrous
antics, to a most melancholy dirge chanted by the women, a kind of rude
time being observed. Gradually, however, they grew excited, and worked
themselves up by going through a sort of mock fight; and when at the
last the women danced round them with torches, all howling and
shrieking at the top of their voices, and banging the calabashes with
kangaroo bones or anything that would add to the noise, the whole scene
reminded one of the infernal regions broken loose. This lasted an
hour, at the end of which time we withdrew, after expressing ourselves
highly gratified, and the whole camp was shortly buried in repose. We
kept double sentries, but we might all have gone to sleep, for there
was no symptom of treachery. At daylight we had breakfast; gave the
warriors and gins a few trifling things we could spare, such as knives,
two or three blankets--for we hoped to reach the township that
night--and, wonder of wonders to the savages, some matches (nearly all
of which they expended in verifying the fact that they would go off),
and then took our departure from the "bora ground," guided by a native,
who showed a very short way, unknown to Lizzie, by which we arrived at
the 'Daylight' early in the afternoon, to find that the latter had been
joined by the 'Black Prince', the steamer that had brought up the
Cleveland Bay party. We quitted in our little craft for Cardwell, and
the Townsville men went south in their steamer, intending to get some
shooting at the Palm Islands before going home for good. Eleven
o'clock that evening saw us at our township, fully determined to carry
out the work thoroughly by searching the Macalister River, an account
of which I hope to give in a future chapter.

AN AUSTRALIAN SEARCH PARTY--V.

BY CHAS H. EDEN.

HOW WE EXPLORED THE MACALISTER RIVER.

The reader who has been good enough to follow me so far, will see that
hitherto our efforts had been unattended with the slightest success,
and that the fate of the missing schooner and her living freight still
remained buried in the deepest mystery. To say that we were not
disheartened by our numerous disappointments would be untrue, for we
well knew that each closing day rendered our chances of affording
relief to the survivors more