of our remaining stock of water for this unfortunate last
victim to our enterprise. We gave him about two quarts, and bitterly
we regretted it later, hoping he might still be able to stagger on to
where water might be found; but vain was the hope and vain the gift,
for the creature that had held up so long and so well, swallowed up
the last little draught we gave, fell down and rolled and shivered in
agony, as Chester had done, and he died and was at rest. A singular
thing about this horse was that his eyes had sunk into his head until
they were all but hidden. For my own part, in such a region and in
such a predicament as we were placed, I would not unwillingly have
followed him into the future.

The celebrated Sir Thomas Mitchell, one of Australia's early
explorers, in one of his journeys, after finding a magnificent country
watered by large rivers, and now the long-settled abodes of
civilisation, mounted on a splendid horse, bursts into an old cavalier
song, a verse of which says:

"A steede, a steede of matchless speede,
A sworde of metal keane;
All else to noble mindes is drosse;
All else on earthe is meane."

I don't know what he would have thought had he been in my case, with
his matchless "steede" dead, and in the pangs of thirst himself, his
"sworde of metal keane" a useless encumbrance, 168 miles from the last
water, and not knowing where the next might be; he would have to admit
that the wonderful beasts which now alone remained to us were by no
means to be accounted "meane," for these patient and enduring
creatures, which were still alive, had tasted no water since leaving
Wynbring, and, though the horses were dead and gone, stood up with
undiminished powers--appearing to be as well able now to continue on
and traverse this wide-spread desert as when they left the last oasis
behind. We had nothing now to depend upon but our two "ships of the
desert," which we were only just beginning to understand. I had been a
firm believer in them from the first, and had many an argument with
Nicholls about them; his opinion had now entirely altered. At Youldeh
he had called them ugly, useless, lazy brutes, that were not to be
compared to horses for a moment; but now that the horses were dead
they seemed more agreeable and companionable than ever the horses had
been.

When Jimmy brought them to the camp they looked knowingly at the
prostrate form of the dead horse; they kneeled down close beside it
an