ty through the tumbled boulders that lay
in the chasm; and then there was a cool brisk wind on his forehead, and
a glare in his eyes. The chill breath of the west wind from the
mountain--the glare of the snow that filled up the upper end of the
valley, rising in level ridges towards the sky-line.

He had been this path before; and if he had gone it a hundred times
again, he would only have cursed it for a rough, desperate road, the
only hope of a desperate man. Not for him to notice the thousand
lessons that the Lord had spread before him in the wilderness! Not for
him to notice how the vegetation changed when the limestone was passed,
and the white quartz reefs began to seam the slaty sides of the valley
like rivers of silver! Not for him to see how, as he went up and on,
the hardy Dicksoniae, still nestled in stunted tufts among the more
sheltered side gullies, long after her tenderer sister, the queenly
Alsophylla had been left behind. He only knew that he was a hunted wild
beast, and that his lair was beyond the snow.

The creek flashed pleasantly among the broken slate, full and turbid
under the mid-day sun. After midnight, when its fountains are sealed
again by the frosty breath of night, that creek will be reduced to a
trickling rill. His horse's feet brushed through the delicate
asplenium, the Venus'-hair of Australia; the sarsaparilla still hung in
scant purple tufts on the golden wattle, and the scarlet correa lurked
among the broken quartz.

Upwards and onwards. In front, endless cycles agone, a lava stream from
some crater we know not had burst over the slate, with fearful clang
and fierce explosion, forming a broad roadway of broken basalt up to a
plateau twelve hundred feet or more above us, and not so steep but that
a horse might be led up it. Let us go up with him, not cursing heaven
and earth, as he did, but noticing how, as we ascend, the scarlet
wreaths of the Kennedia and the crimson Grevillea give place to the
golden Grevillea and the red Epacris; then comes the white Epacris, and
then the grass trees, getting smaller and scantier as we go, till the
little blue Gentian, blossoming boldly among the slippery crags, tells
us that we have nearly reached the limits of vegetation.

He turned when he reached this spot, and looked around him. To the west
a broad rolling down of snow, rising gradually; to the east, a noble
prospect of forest and plain, hill and gully, with old Snowy winding on
in broad b