January 18.

We started at dawn, following down the river, but could see nothing of Mr. Elliott’s tracks:  and our evening journey was equally unsuccessful.  I now became very anxious and indeed rather alarmed for the safety of the missing party, but resolved, as the best plan I could pursue, to strike across the mountains to Leschenault, making a due west course my true line of route, but constantly diverging two or three miles to the south of this, and again returning to it by another route.  I should thus have every chance of falling in with the track I wished to find; and in the event of my not succeeding I should be certain, if on my arrival at Leschenault no tidings had been received of Mr. Elliott, that his party must be somewhere to the southward and eastward of the course I had taken, and that I might still, by the assistance of the Leschenault natives to whom this country was known, succeed in finding him before such a period had elapsed as would render assistance useless.

KILLING A KANGAROO.

On the 19th, in pursuance of this determination, we made a rapid push of nearly twenty miles in a westerly direction without reckoning our divergencies to the southward.  Nothing however but toil and disappointment rewarded our exertions.  We killed a large Boomer, or old male kangaroo, the largest indeed I had ever seen; the dogs were unable to master him he fought so desperately, and it was not until after he had wounded two of them that I succeeded in dispatching it by a sort of personal encounter in which a club was the weapon I used.  The native who was carrying my gun had dropped it the instant the kangaroo was started, and I was thus unable to shoot it.  We cut off as much of the flesh as the dogs and ourselves required for two days and left the rest in the forest.  We halted for the night on a small stream, the only one I had seen since we quitted the Williams.

COUNTRY UPON THE HARVEY RIVER.

Our departure was delayed on the morning of the 20th for about an hour from being unable to find one of the horses which had strayed away in the night, but, the fugitive being at length discovered and brought back, we started and made nine miles before breakfast.  We then travelled nine and a half miles more, when we came upon the river Harvey near its source.  The character of the country we had travelled over since entering the mountains was monotonous in the extreme.  It consisted of an elevated tableland composed of ironstone and granite occasionally traversed by veins of whinstone.  On this tableland there was little or no herbage; the lower vegetation consisting principally of a short prickly scrub, in some places completely destroyed by the native fires; but the whole country was thickly clothed with mahogany trees, so that in many parts it might be called a dense forest.  These mahogany trees ascended, without a bend or without throwing off a branch, to the height of from forty to fifty feet, occasionally much more, and the ground