The country was so agreeable here we had no desire to traverse it at railway speed; it was delightful to loll and lie upon the land, in abandoned languishment beneath the solar ray.  Thirty or forty miles farther away, west-north-westward, other and independent hills or ranges stood, though I was grieved to remark that the intermediate region seemed entirely filled with scrub.  How soon the scenery changes!  Travelling now for the new hills, we soon entered scrubs, where some plots of the dreaded triodia were avoided.  In the scrubs, at ten miles we came upon the banks of a large gum-timbered creek, whose trees were fine and vigorous.  In the bed we found a native well, with water at no great depth; the course of this creek where we struck it, was south-south-east, and we travelled along its banks in an opposite, that is to say, north-north-west direction.  That line, however, took us immediately into the thick scrubs, so at four miles on this bearing I climbed a tree, and saw that I must turn north to cut it again; this I did, and in three miles we came at right angles upon a creek which I felt sure was not the one we had left, the scrub being so thick one could hardly see a yard ahead.  Here I sent Jimmy Andrews up a tree; having been a sailor boy, he is well skilled in that kind of performance, but I am not.  I told him to discover the whereabouts of the main creek, and say how far off it appeared.  That brilliant genius informed me that it lay across the course we were steering, north, and it was only a mile away; so we went on to it, as we supposed, but having gone more than two miles and not reaching it, I asked Jimmy whether he had not made some mistake.  I said, “We have already come two miles, and you said it was scarcely one.”  He then kindly informed me that I was going all wrong, and ought not to go that way at all; but upon my questioning him as to which way I should go he replied, “Oh, I don’t know now.”  My only plan was to turn east, when we soon struck the creek.  Then Jimmy declared if we had kept north long enough, we would have come to it Agin.

Though Jimmy was certainly a bit of a fool, he was not perhaps quite a fool of the greatest size.  Little fools and young fools somehow seem to pass muster in this peculiar world, but to be old and a fool is a mistake which is difficult, if not impossible, to remedy.  It was too late to go any farther; we couldn’t get any water, but we had to camp.  I intended to return in the morning to where we first struck this creek, and where we saw water in the native well.  I called this the Krichauff.  The mercury went down to 28 degrees by daylight the next morning, but neither ice nor frost appeared.  This morning Mr. Tietkens, when out after the horses, found a rather deep native well some distance up the creek, and we shifted the camp to it.  On the way there I was behind the party, and before I overtook them I heard the report of firearms.  On reaching the horses,