position, nobody being able to explain who he
was, whence he came, or what was the source of his influence; and it was
rather a curious circumstance that I should learn the explanation of what
had so much puzzled me in South America, at a solitary sheep-station in
Van Diemen's Land.

Shortly before we crossed the Great Piper River a party of convicts had
run away with a fishing boat. Although only three in number they made the
fishermen take them to Banks Strait, where they forced a party of sealers
to pass them over to Wilson's Promontory. Notwithstanding they were
several weeks on the passage, waiting for fine weather at the different
islands (the sealers, too, being twice their number) such was their
vigilance that they never allowed them a chance of escape. These men were
afterwards seen near Sydney.

CONVICTS' STORY.

The most remarkable coast-feature, between Waterhouse Island and the
Tamar, is Stony Head, a bluff three hundred feet high,* lying twelve
miles from Port Dalrymple. A small sandy bay separates it from a point to
the westward, and it is the nearest part of the main to Tenth Island. In
the neighbourhood of this headland I was induced to enter a hut at a
sheep-station, by seeing stuck round a fence a number of the heads of an
animal called by the colonists a hyena, from the resemblance it bears in
shape and colour, though not in ferocity, to that beast.** My object was
to obtain a few of these heads, which the hut-keeper, who was the only
inmate, instantly gave, along with an unsolicited history of his own
life. In the early part we instantly discovered that this loquacious
personage was, what he afterwards mildly confessed to be, a government
man, in other words a convict, sent out of course, according to the usual
story, through mistake. It appears that he had been a drover, and that a
few beasts were one morning found (quite by accident) among a herd he was
driving through the West of England. He had spent the early part of his
servitude at Circular Head, where he was for some time in charge of the
native woman caught stealing flour at a shepherd's hut, belonging to the
Van Diemen's Land Agricultural Company--a fact mentioned in a former
chapter.***

(*Footnote. Of basaltic formation; whilst the rocks that prevail to the
eastward are of primary character. But as Strzelecki has written so
largely on the geology of Tasmania, it will be needless for me to enter
further into the subject, except to sa