hat the Tom Tough had not yet arrived at the rendezvous; and
Gregory, leaving a marked tree with a message indicating the situation of
some instructions he had buried, pushed onwards.

His route from the Albert lay along much the same line of country as that
followed by Leichhardt during his journey to Port Essington. He did not,
however, make such a wide sweep to the north, up to the Mitchell, but
struck away from Carpentaria at the Gilbert River. He corrected the error
Leichhardt had fallen into over the situation of the Albert, and re-named
the river that he had mistaken the Leichhardt. The exploring party
reached the settled districts at Hay's station, Rannes, south of the
Fitzroy; and thence reached Brisbane on the 16th of December, 1856.

To advance the search after Leichhardt, the interest in whose fate had
been stimulated by the discovery made by Gregory, a public meeting was
held in September, 1857, at which resolutions were passed requesting
monetary assistance from the Government, and offering the leadership of a
new expedition to A.C. Gregory. The appeal was successful, and
accordingly in March, 1858, Gregory left Euroomba station on the Dawson
with a party of nine in all, one of his brothers going as second. The
expedition was equipped for light travelling, taking as means of carriage
pack-horses only, of which there were thirty-one, as well as nine
saddle-horses.

Gregory crossed the Nive on to the Barcoo, which he proceeded to run
down, finding the country in a very different condition from that in
which it bloomed when Mitchell rode rejoicingly along what he thought was
a Gulf river. A sharp look out was of course kept for any trace of the
missing party, and on the 21st of April they came across another marked
tree.

"We discovered a Moreton Bay ash (Eucalyptus sp.), about two feet in
diameter marked with the letter L on the east side, cut through the bark
about four feet from the ground, and near it the stumps of some small
trees that had been cut with a sharp axe, also a deep notch cut in the
side of a sloping tree, apparently to support the ridge-pole of a tent,
or some similar purpose; all indicating that a camp had been established
here by Leichhardt's party...No other indications having been found, we
continued the search down the river, examining every likely spot for
marked trees, but without success."

Approaching the Thomson River, they found the country suffering from
drought although the