e summit bends over like a horse's neck, with two peaked crags
for ears. And the Major comes somehow to connect this horse with the
Highflyer colt mentioned by our Irish friend, and observes that Sam
takes to wearing his old clothes for a twelvemonth, and never seems to
have any ready money. We shall see some day whether or no this horse
will carry Sam ten miles, if required, on such direful emergency, too,
as falls to the lot of few men. However, this is all to come. Now in
holiday clothes and in holiday mind, the two noble animals cross the
paddock, and so down by the fence towards the river; towards the old
gravel ford you may remember years ago. Here is the old flood, spouting
and streaming as of yore, through the basalt pillars. There stand the
three fern trees, too, above the dark scrub on the island. Now up the
rock bank, and away across the breezy plains due North.

Brushing through the long grass tussocks, he goes his way singing, his
dog Rover careering joyously before him. The horse is clearly for a
gallop, but it is too hot to-day. The tall flat-topped volcanic hill
which hung before him like a grey faint cloud, when he started, now
rears its fluted columns overhead, and now is getting dim again behind
him. But ere noon is high he once more hears the brawling river beneath
his feet, and Garoopna is before him on the opposite bank.

The river, as it left Major Buckley's at Baroona, made a sudden bend to
the west, a great arc, including with its minor windings nearly
twenty-five miles, over the chord of which arc Sam had now been riding,
making, from point to point, ten miles, or thereabouts. The Mayfords'
station, also, lay to the left of him, being on the curved side of the
arc, about five miles from Baroona. The reader may, if he please,
remember this.

Garoopna was an exceedingly pretty station; in fact, one of the most
beautiful I have ever seen. It stood at a point where the vast forests
which surround the mountains in a belt, from ten to twenty miles broad,
run down into the plains and touch the river. As at Baroona, the stream
runs in through a deep cleft in the table land, which here, though
precipitous on the eastern bank, on the western breaks away into a
small natural amphitheatre bordered by fine hanging woods just in
advance of which, about two hundred yards from the river, stood the
house, a long, low building densely covered with creepers of all sorts,
and fronted by a beautiful garden. Right