EXCURSION TO MOUNT NAPIER.

Having directed the alteration to be made during my intended absence I set out for Mount Napier and soon found the broad swamp before me.  After riding up an arm of it to the left for a mile and a half I found it passable and, having crossed, we proceeded towards the hill by a rather circuitous route but over a fine tract of country although then very soft under our horses’ feet.

CROSS SOME FINE STREAMS.

We next reached a deeper ravine where the land on each side was more open and also firmer, while a small rivulet flowing through it amongst bushes was easily crossed, and we ascended some fine rising ground beyond it.  Rich flats then extended before us and we arrived at an open grassy valley where a beautiful little stream resembling a river in miniature was flowing rapidly.  Two very substantial huts showed that even the natives had been attracted by the beauty of the spot and, as the day was showery, I wished to return if possible to pass the night there, for I began to learn that such huts with a good fire before them made very comfortable quarters in bad weather.

NATIVES VERY TIMID.

We had heard voices in the woods several times this day but their inhabitants seemed as timid as kangaroos and not more likely to come near us.  The blue mass of Mount Napier was visible occasionally through the trees, but I found as we proceeded that we were not so near it as I had supposed, for at three miles beyond the little stream we came upon one of greater magnitude, a small river flowing southward with open grassy banks in which two kinds of trap-rock appeared.  The edge of a thin layer of the lowest, a nearly decomposed trap, projected over the stream; the other lay in rounded blocks in the face of the hill above, and appeared to be decomposed amygdaloid, principally felspar.  The river ran through a valley where the forest land was remarkably open, being sprinkled with only a few trees as in a park, and this stream appeared to fall into the head of the extensive swamp already mentioned.  About a mile beyond the river (which I named the Shaw) we came upon the extremities of Mount Napier, for at least so I considered some rough sharp-pointed fragments of rock laying about in heaps, which we found it very difficult and tedious to ride over:  indeed so sharp-edged and large were these rocks on the slopes of the terraces they formed that we were often obliged to dismount and lead our horses.  In these fragments I recognised the cellular character of the rocks I had noticed in the bed of the Shaw.  The rock here might have been taken for decomposed amygdaloid but, having found the vestiges of an old crater in the summit of the hill, I was induced to consider it an ancient lava.  The reefs at Portland Bay consist of the same rock in rounded nodules, a more compact trap-rock consisting principally of felspar lying above them, as was observable in the section of the coast.  In some of the fragments on Mount