It is on occasions such as these that the adventurer has intervals of enjoyment which amply reward him for laborious days of hardship and privation.  The sense of gratification and repose is intense in such extreme cases, and cannot be known to him whose life is counted out in a monotonous succession of hours of eating and sleeping within a house; whose food is adulterated by spices, and sauces, intolerable to real hunger—­and whose drink, instead of the sweet refreshing distillation from the heavens, consists of vile artificial extracts, loathed by the really thirsty man with whom the pure element resumes its true value, and establishes its real superiority over every artificial beverage.

ASCEND MOUNT JUSON WITH MR. CUNNINGHAM.

April 11.

At seven o’clock I proceeded with Mr. Cunningham to the summit of a cone, bare of timber, which I had observed from the Canobolas, and which bore 138 degrees east of north from our camp, distant about six miles.  The ascent was easy, and from the summit (on which Mr. Cunningham obligingly erected a pyramid) I obtained many valuable angles with my theodolite on the very distant hills which broke the western horizon.  We found the variation of the needle to be 8 degrees 40 minutes East.  This hill I named, at Mr. Cunningham’s request, Mount Juson.

ENTER THE VALLEY OF THE GOOBANG.

We returned to the camp at half-past two, when we found the party ready to start; and accordingly we proceeded forward.  Our journey was through verdant vales, increasing in width as we followed the channel of the stream we had traced from the mountain, and which now contained abundant pools of water.

MEET THE NATIVES.

At length the sound of the native’s hatchet was heard, and one came forward to meet me.  We learned from him that we were upon Buranbil creek, and that its course was south-west towards the Calare, or Lachlan.  The range whence we came they called Warre (Croker’s range of Oxley) and that north of it Goobang (Harvey’s range of the same) from which, as I was also informed, a creek of similar name issued and flowed into the Buranbil.

The evening was beautiful; the new grass springing in places where it had been burnt presented a shining verdure in the rays of the descending sun; the songs of the birds accorded here with other joyous sounds, the very air seemed alive with the music of animated nature, so different was the scene in this well-watered valley from that of the parched and silent region from which we had just descended.

SOCIAL ENCAMPMENT.

The natives whom we met here were fine-looking men, enjoying contentment and happiness within the precincts of their native woods.  Their enjoyment seemed derived so directly from nature that it almost excited a feeling of regret that civilised men, enervated by luxury and all its concomitant diseases, should ever disturb the haunts of these rude but happy beings.