among them; and
subsequent inquiries went to prove that her father was a white man who
had penetrated into these regions and lived for some little time at least
among the blacks--much as I myself was doing. My interest in the matter
was first of all roused by the accidental discovery of a cairn five feet
or six feet high, made of loose flat stones. My experience was such by
this time that I saw at a glance this cairn was not the work of a native.
Drawings and figures, and a variety of curious characters, were faintly
discernible on some of the stones, but were not distinct enough to be
legible.

On one, however, I distinctly traced the initials "L. L.," which had
withstood the ravages of time because the stone containing them was in a
protected place.

Naturally the existence of this structure set me inquiring among the
older natives as to whether they ever remembered seeing a white man
before; and then I learned that perhaps twenty years previously a man
like myself _had_ made his appearance in those regions, and had died a
few months afterwards, before the wife who, according to custom, was
allotted to him had given birth to the half-caste baby girl, who was now
a woman before me. They never knew the white stranger's name, nor where
he had come from. The girl, by the way, was by no means good-looking,
and her skin was decidedly more black than white; I could tell by her
hand, however, that she was a half-caste.

On the strength of our supposed affinity, she was offered to me as a
wife, and I accepted her, more as a help for Yamba than anything else;
she was called Luigi. Yamba, by the way, was anxious that I should
possess at least half-a-dozen wives, partly because this circumstance
would be more in keeping with my rank; but I did not fall in with the
idea. I had quite enough to do already to maintain my authority among
the tribe at large, and did not care to have to rule in addition half-a-
dozen women in my own establishment. This tribe always lingers in my
memory, on account of the half-caste girl, whom I now believe to have
been the daughter of Ludwig Leichhardt, the lost Australian explorer. Mr.
Giles says: "Ludwig Leichhardt was a surgeon and botanist, who
successfully conducted an expedition from Moreton Bay to Port Essington,
on the northern coast. A military and penal settlement had been
established at Port Essington by the Government of New South Wales, to
which colony the whole territory then b