le girl.
Although no doubt they still continued watching us, we saw them no
more.

I got Mr. Young to plant various seeds round this well. No doubt there
must be other waters in this neighbourhood, as none of the natives
have used our well since we came, but we could not find any other.

The following day was Sunday. What a scene our camp would have
presented to-day had these reptiles murdered us! It does not strike
the traveller in the wilderness, amongst desert scenes and hostile
Indians, as necessary that he should desire the neighbourhood of a
temple, or even be in a continual state of prayer, yet we worship
Nature, or the God of Nature, in our own way; and although we have no
chapel or church to go to, yet we are always in a temple, which a
Scottish poet has so beautifully described as "The Temple of Nature."
He says:--

"Talk not of temples; there is one,
Built without hands, to mankind given;
Its lamps are the meridian sun,
And the bright stars of heaven.
Its walls are the cerulean sky,
Its floor the earth so green and fair;
Its dome is vast immensity:
All nature worships there."

We, of a surety, have none of the grander features of Nature to
admire; but the same Almighty Power which smote out the vast Andean
Ranges yet untrod, has left traces of its handywork here. Even the
great desert in which we have so long been buried must suggest to the
reflecting mind either God's perfectly effected purpose, or His
purposely effected neglect; and, though I have here and there found
places where scanty supplies of the element of water were to be found,
yet they are at such enormous distances apart, and the regions in
which they exist are of so utterly worthless a kind, that it seems to
be intended by the great Creator that civilised beings should never
re-enter here. And then our thoughts must naturally wander to the
formation and creation of those mighty ships of the desert, that alone
could have brought us here, and by whose strength and incomprehensible
powers of endurance, only are we enabled to leave this desert behind.
In our admiration of the creature, our thoughts are uplifted in
reverence and worship to the Designer and Creator of such things,
adapted, no doubt, by a wise selection from an infinite variety of
living forms, for myriads of creative periods, and with a
foreknowledge that such instruments would be requisite for the
intelligent beings of a future time, to traver