rgan prepared breakfast, Mr.
Stuart and Mack took their guns and knocked over three ducks, that were,
I suppose, never used to be so taken in; but the remainder would not
stand fire long, and flew off to the eastward. As they passed, however, I
snatched up a carbine, and, without taking any aim, discharged it into
the midst of them, and brought one of their number down--the only bird I
had shot for many years.

After giving the horses a good feed and a good rest, I crossed the
channel of the creek to ascend the little hill I had seen from our
morning position, that by taking bearings of the distant ranges from
both, I might arrive at their approximate distance from me. From this
little hill the prospect was much the same as from the first, only that
the distant ranges seemed to be still higher, and there was a long line
either of water or mirage at their base, and we now appeared to be in a
belt of wood, for the hill on which we stood, rose in the midst of the
trees, and our eyes wandered over the tops of them to the distant plains.
We descended from it northwards, but had not gone half a mile, when we
were again stopped by another creek, still broader and finer than the
first. The breadth of its channel was more than 200 yards, its banks were
from fifteen to eighteen feet high, and it had splendid sheets of water
both above and below us. The natives, whose broad and well beaten paths
leading from angle to angle of the creek we had crossed on our approach
to it, had fired the grass, and it was now springing up in the bed of the
most beautiful green. I determined, therefore, to stay where I was until
the following day, to give my animals the food and rest they so much
required, and myself time for reflection. We accordingly dismounted, and
turned the horses out, and it was really a pleasure to see them in
clover.

The whole bed of the creek was of a vivid green, excepting where gravel
had been deposited in it, but the animals kept on the grass, close to the
water's edge. As we had approached the creek through a belt of wood, so
it extended on the other side for a considerable distance into the
plains, but the soil was not so good as in the neighbourhood of the first
channel we had crossed, since bushes of rhagodia were growing underneath
the trees, as indicative of a slight mixture of salt in the earth. The
appearance of the creek, however, embosomed as it was in wood, was very
fine, more especially the upward view of i