two wild beasts preparing for a deadly fight.  At length, Hooley moved his face nearer to that of the savage, until their noses almost met, and between his teeth he slowly ejaculated:  “You eat white man?  You eat me?  Eh?” Then the deep frown on Gellibrand’s face began slowly to relax, his thick lips parted by degrees, and displayed, ready for business, his sharp and shining teeth, white as snow and hard as steel.  A smile, which might be likened to that of a humorous tiger, spread over his spacious features, and so the interview ended without a fight.  I was very much disappointed, as I hoped the two man-slayers were going to eat each other for the public good, and I was ready to back both of them without fear, favour, or affection.

There is no doubt that the blacks ate human flesh, not as an article of regular diet, but occasionally, when the fortune of war, or accident, favoured them with a supply.  When Mr. Hugh Murray set out from Geelong to look for country to the westward, he took with him several natives belonging to the Barrabool tribe.  When they arrived near Lake Colac they found the banks of the Barongarook Creek covered with scrub, and on approaching the spot where the bridge now spans the watercourse, they saw a blackfellow with his lubra and a little boy, running towards the scrub.  The Barrabool blacks gave chase, and the little boy was caught by one of them before he could find shelter, and was instantly killed with a club.  That night the picaninny was roasted at the camp fire, and eaten.

And yet these blacks had human feelings and affections.  I once saw a tribe travelling from one part of the district to another in search of food, as was their custom.  One of the men was dying of consumption, and was too weak to follow the rest.  He looked like a living skeleton, but he was not left behind to die.  He was sitting on the shoulders of his brother, his hands grasping for support the hair on the head, and his wasted legs dangling in front of the other’s ribs.  These people were sometimes hunted as if they were wolves, but two brother wolves would not have been so kind to each other.

Before the white men came the blacks never buried their dead; they had no spades and could not dig graves.  Sometimes their dead were dropped into the hollow trunks of trees, and sometimes they were burned.  There was once a knoll on the banks of the Barongarook Creek, below the court-house, the soil of which looked black and rich.  When I was trenching the ground near my house for vines and fruit trees, making another garden of paradise in lieu of the one I had lost, I obtained cart loads of bones from the slaughter yards and other places, and placed them in trenches; and in order to fertilize one corner of the garden, I spread over it several loads of the rich-looking black loam taken from the knoll near the creek.  After a few years the vines and trees yielded great quantities of grapes and fruit, and I made wine from my vineyard.