ver by the mourning companions of the departed
youth, who left

"Heaven's fresh gales, and the ocean's wave,
Alternate to sigh o'er the wanderer's grave."[12]

[9] "The most singular quality of this vapour or _mirage_, as it is
termed, is its power of reflection; objects are seen as from the
surface of a lake, and their figure is sometimes changed into the
most fantastic shapes."--CRICHTON'S _Arabia_, vol. i. p. 41.

[10] See two other curious accounts of the effects of _mirage_
and refraction in Sturt's Expeditions in Australia, vol. ii. pp.
56 and 171.

[11] The artless description of this sad discovery, given by one of
the natives who accompanied the party, may be not unworthy of the
reader's notice. "Away we go, away, away, along the shore away, away,
away, a long distance we go. I see Mr. Smith's footsteps ascending a
sand-hill, onwards I go regarding his footsteps. I see Mr. Smith dead.
We commence digging the earth. Two _sleeps_ had he been dead; greatly
did I weep, and much I grieved. In his blanket folding him, we scraped
away the earth. We scrape earth into the grave, we scrape the earth
into the grave, a little wood we place in it. Much earth we heap upon
it--much earth we throw up. No dogs can dig there, so much earth we
throw up. The sun had just inclined to the westward as we laid him in
the ground."--GREY'S _Travels in Western Australia_, vol. ii. p. 350.

[12] See a like melancholy history of the death of Mr. Cunningham, in
Mitchell's Three Expeditions, vol. i. p. 180, _et seq._ How thrilling
must have been the recollections of his fellow-travellers in the
wilderness at the simple incident thus related: "In the bed of the
river, where I went this evening to enjoy the sight of the famished
cattle drinking, I came accidentally on an old footstep of Mr.
Cunningham in the clay, now baked hard by the sun. Four months had
elapsed, and up to this time the clay bore the last records of our
late fellow-traveller."

It was only six weeks before this untimely end of the young explorer,
that he had set out, full of hope, on the long journey by the coast,
which the party made on their return, and had been a leading character
in such beautiful pictures of life in the Australian wilderness as this
which is given by his friend Captain Grey. "We soon found ourselves at
the foot of a lofty cascade, down which a little water was slowly
dropping; and, o