s of this continent. So exquisite was the aroma, that I
recalled to my mind Gordon's beautiful lines:--

"In the spring when the wattle gold trembles,
Twixt shadow and shine,
When each dew-laden air draught resembles;
A long draught of wine."

So delightful indeed was the evening that it was late when we gave
ourselves up to the oblivion of slumber, beneath the cool and starry
sky. We made a fire against a log about eighteen inches thick; this
was a limb from an adjacent blood-wood or red gum-tree, and this
morning we discovered that it had been chopped off its parent stem
either with an axe or tomahawk, and carried some forty or fifty yards
from where it had originally fallen. This seemed very strange; in the
first place for natives, so far out from civilisation as this, to have
axes or tomahawks; and in the second place, to chop logs or boughs off
a tree was totally against their practice. By sunrise we were upon the
summit of the mountain; it consisted of enormous blocks and boulders
of red granite, so riven and fissured that no water could possibly
lodge upon it for an instant. I found it also to be highly magnetic,
there being a great deal of ironstone about the rocks. It turned the
compass needle from its true north point to 10 degrees south of west,
but the attraction ceased when the compass was removed four feet from
contact with the rocks. The view from this mount was of singular and
almost awful beauty. The mount, and all the others connected with it,
rose simply like islands out of a vast ocean of scrub. The beauty of
the locality lay entirely within itself. Innumerable red ridges
ornamented with fig-trees, rising out of green and grassy slopes, met
the eye everywhere to the east, north, and northeast, and the country
between each was just sufficiently timbered to add a charm to the
view. But the appearance of water still was wanting; no signs of it,
or of any basin or hollow that could hold it, met the gaze in any
direction, This alone was wanting to turn a wilderness into a garden.

There were four large mounts in this chain, higher than any of the
rest, including the one I was on. Here we saw a quantity of what I at
first thought were white sea-shells, but we found they were the
bleached shells of land snails. Far away to the north some ranges
appeared above the dense ocean of intervening scrubs. To the south,
scrubs reigned supreme; but to the west, the region for which I was
bound, the