gun and
ammunition, is the native bear, sometimes called monkey bear. Its
flesh is strong and muscular, and its eucalyptic odour is stronger
still. A dog will eat opossum with pleasure, but he must be very
hungry before he will eat bear; and how lost to all delicacy of
taste, and sense of refinement, must the epicure be who will make the
attempt! The last quadruped on which a meal can be made is the
dingo, and the last winged creature is the owl, whose scanty flesh is
viler even than that of the hawk or carrion crow, and yet a white man
has partaken of all these and survived. Some men have tried roasted
snake, but I never heard of anyone who could keep it on his stomach.
The blacks, with their keen scent, knew when a snake was near by the
odour it emitted, but they avoided the reptile whether alive or dead.

Before any white man had made his abode in Gippsland, a schooner
sailed from Sydney chartered by a new settler who had taken up a
station in the Port Phillip district. His wife and family were on
board, and he had shipped a large quantity of stores, suitable for
commencing life in a new land. It was afterwards remembered that the
deck of the vessel was encumbered with cargo of various kinds,
including a bullock dray, and that the deck hamper would unfit her to
encounter bad weather. As she did not arrive at Port Phillip within
a reasonable time, a cutter was sent along the coast in search of
her; and her long boat was found ashore near the Lakes Entrance, but
nothing else belonging to her was ever seen.

When the report arose in 1843 that a white woman had been seen with
the blacks, it was supposed that she was one of the passengers of the
missing schooner, and parties of horsemen went out to search for her
among the natives, but the only white woman ever found was a wooden
one--the figure-head of a ship.

Some time afterwards, when Gippsland had been settled by white men, a
tree was discovered on Woodside station near the beach, in the bark
of which letters had been cut, and it was said they would correspond
with the initials of the names of some of the passengers and crew of
the lost schooner, and by their appearance they must have been carved
many years previously. This tree was cut down, and the part of the
trunk containing the letters was sawn off and sent to Melbourne.
There is little doubt that the letters on the tree had been cut by
one of the survivors of that ill-fated schooner, who had landed i