“In the spring when the wattle gold trembles,
    Twixt shadow and shine,
    When each dew-laden air draught resembles;
    A long draught of wine.”

So delightful indeed was the evening that it was late when we gave ourselves up to the oblivion of slumber, beneath the cool and starry sky.  We made a fire against a log about eighteen inches thick; this was a limb from an adjacent blood-wood or red gum-tree, and this morning we discovered that it had been chopped off its parent stem either with an axe or tomahawk, and carried some forty or fifty yards from where it had originally fallen.  This seemed very strange; in the first place for natives, so far out from civilisation as this, to have axes or tomahawks; and in the second place, to chop logs or boughs off a tree was totally against their practice.  By sunrise we were upon the summit of the mountain; it consisted of enormous blocks and boulders of red granite, so riven and fissured that no water could possibly lodge upon it for an instant.  I found it also to be highly magnetic, there being a great deal of ironstone about the rocks.  It turned the compass needle from its true north point to 10 degrees south of west, but the attraction ceased when the compass was removed four feet from contact with the rocks.  The view from this mount was of singular and almost awful beauty.  The mount, and all the others connected with it, rose simply like islands out of a vast ocean of scrub.  The beauty of the locality lay entirely within itself.  Innumerable red ridges ornamented with fig-trees, rising out of green and grassy slopes, met the eye everywhere to the east, north, and northeast, and the country between each was just sufficiently timbered to add a charm to the view.  But the appearance of water still was wanting; no signs of it, or of any basin or hollow that could hold it, met the gaze in any direction, This alone was wanting to turn a wilderness into a garden.

There were four large mounts in this chain, higher than any of the rest, including the one I was on.  Here we saw a quantity of what I at first thought were white sea-shells, but we found they were the bleached shells of land snails.  Far away to the north some ranges appeared above the dense ocean of intervening scrubs.  To the south, scrubs reigned supreme; but to the west, the region for which I was bound, the prospect looked far more cheering.  The far horizon, there, was bounded by a very long and apparently connected chain of considerable elevation, seventy to eighty miles away.  One conspicuous mountain, evidently nearer than the longer chain, bore 15 degrees to the south of west, while an apparent gap or notch in the more distant line bore 23 degrees south of west.  The intervening country appeared all flat, and very much more open than in any other direction; I could discern long vistas of green grass, dotted with yellow immortelles, but as the perspective declined, these all became lost in lightly timbered