entrate all the usual heat of an Australian summer
into the two remaining months that were left to her. The thermometer
usually stood for several hours of each day at 104, 105, and 106
degrees in the shade.

After leaving Colona, an out sheep station belonging to Fowler's Bay,
lying some thirty-five miles north-west from it, and where Mr. Murray
resided, we traversed a country alternating between belts of scrub and
grassy flats or small plains, until at twenty miles from Colona we
reached the edge of a plain that stretched away to the north, and was
evidently of a very great extent. The soil was loose and yielding, and
of a very poor quality. Although this plain was covered with
vegetation, there was no grass whatever upon it; but a growth of a
kind of broom, two to three feet high, waving in the heated breezes as
far as the eye could reach, which gave it a billowy and extraordinary
appearance. The botanical name of this plant is Eremophila scoparia.

At fifty miles from Colona and eighty-five from the bay, we reached a
salt lagoon, which, though several miles long, and perhaps a mile
wide, Mr. Murray's black boy informed us was the footmark or track of
a monstrous animal or snake, that used to haunt the neighbourhood of
this big plain, and that it had been driven by the Cockata blacks out
of the mountains to the north, the Musgrave Ranges of my last
expedition, and which are over 400 miles from the bay. He added that
the creature had crawled down to the coast, and now lived in the sea.
So here was reliable authority for the existence of a sea serpent. We
had often heard tales from the blacks, when sitting round our camp
fires at night, about this wonderful animal, and whenever any native
spoke about it, it was always in a mysterious undertone. What the name
of this monster was, I cannot now remember; but there were syllables
enough in it to make a word as long as the lagoon itself. The tales
that were told of it, the number of natives it had devoured, how such
and such a black fellow's father had encountered and speared it, and
how it had occasionally created floods all over the country when it
was angry, would have made an excellent novel, which might be produced
under the title of a "Black Romance." When we laughed at, or joked
this young black fellow who now accompanied us, on the absurdity of
his notions, he became very serious, for to him and his
co-religionists it was no laughing matter. Another thing was rather