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Day had scarcely broke when we were again on the hill; and as objects became clearer, saw a broad belt of gum-trees extending from the southward of east to the north-west. It was bounded on either side by immense plains, on which were here and there ridges of sand, but at a great distance from each other.
The hills to the S. and S. W. of us, seemed to terminate on the eastern slopes, as abruptly as on the western; and from the point where we stood, we could distinctly trace by the gum-trees, the direction of watercourses emanating from among them, taking northerly, north-easterly, easterly and south-easterly courses, according to the point of the range they came from.
June 28. This morning we passed through a country of an inferior description, making a short stage to a watercourse, named by me the "Crystal Brook;" it was a pretty stream emanating from the hills to the north-east, and marked in its whole course through the plains to the northward and westward by lines of gum-trees.
At four miles it is more of a creek coming from north-east. Gum-trees much larger. Woodforde succeeded in catching four fish about ten inches long, something resembling the whiting. I had one cooked for tea; the skin was as tough as a piece of leather, but the inside was really good, as fine a fish as I have ever eaten. To-morrow I shall follow the water to the west; its bed is limestone.
In some of these plains we found large puddles of water much discoloured by the soil, so that it was evident there had been heavy rains in this direction, though we had none to the southward. After travelling twenty-four miles we came to a large watercourse winding from Flinders range through the plains, with its direction distinctly marked out by the numerous gum-trees upon its banks.
"I was right," he said to me one day, leaving her seated in the garden beside her quiet, patient mother, and joining me where I lay listless yet fretful under the shadeless gum-trees, gazing not on the flocks and fields that I could call my own, but on the far mountain range, from which the arch of the horizon seemed to spring, "I was right," said the great physician; "this is reason suspended, not reason lost.
Saw two detached ranges bearing 320 degrees and 329 degrees respectively, and a distant flat-topped hill, bearing 112 degrees from them, the country appearing to be open to the north. On the 13th, the party pushed on at an early hour for the gum-trees, but found no water.
Stuart had completed his work with great accuracy, and had filled in the chart so much that he saved me a good deal of trouble. The 16th being Sunday, was a day of rest to us all, but one of excessive heat. Mr. Stuart had stationed himself in the bed of the creek, which sloped down on either side, and was partially shaded by gum-trees.
A crazy groaning vehicle, drawn by four horses, emerged from the copse of gum-trees, fast, fast along the road, which no such pompous vehicle had traversed since that which had borne me luxurious satrap for an early colonist to my lodge in the wilderness. What emigrant rich enough to squander in the hire of such an equipage more than its cost in England, could thus be entering on my waste domain?
Having had his say, Mahony scamped the recital of his own sufferings: the discomforts of the month he had been forced to spend in Melbourne getting his slender outfit together; the miseries of the tramp to Ballarat on delicate unused feet, among the riff-raff of nations, under a wan December sky, against which the trunks of the gum-trees rose whiter still, and out of which blazed a copper sun with a misty rim.
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