a few meals of steaks.  When that was done we had to fry or parboil them in water.  Our favourite method of cooking the horseflesh after the fresh meat was eaten, was by first boiling and then pounding with the axe, tomahawk head, and shoeing hammer, then cutting it into small pieces, wetting the mass, and binding it with a pannikin of flour, putting it into the coals in the frying-pan, and covering the whole with hot ashes.  But the flour would not last, and those delicious horse-dampers, though now but things of the past, were by no means relegated to the limbo of forgotten things.  The boiled-up bones, hoofs, shanks, skull, etc., of each horse, though they failed to produce a sufficient quantity of oil to please us, yet in the cool of the night resolved themselves into a consistent jelly that stank like rotten glue, and at breakfast at least, when this disgusting stuff was in a measure coagulated, we would request one another with the greatest politeness to pass the glue-pot.  Had it not been that I was an inventor of transcendent genius, even this last luxury would have been debarred us.  We had been absent from civilisation, so long, that our tin billies, the only boiling utensils we had, got completely worn or burnt out at the bottoms, and as the boilings for glue and oil must still go on, what were we to do with billies with no bottoms?  Although as an inventor I can allow no one to depreciate my genius, I will admit there was but one thing that could be done, and those muffs Tietkens and Jimmy actually advised me to do what I had invented, which was simply—­all great inventions are simple—­to cover the bottoms with canvas, and embed the billies half-way up their sides in cold ashes, and boil from the top instead of the bottom, which of course we did, and these were our glue- and flesh-pots.  The tongue, brains, kidneys, and other titbits of course were eaten first.

On the 19th some natives began to yell near the camp, but three only made their appearance.  They were not only the least offensive and most civil we had met on any of our travels, but they were almost endearing in their welcome to us.  We gave them some of the bones and odd pieces of horse-meat, which seemed to give them great satisfaction, and they ate some pieces raw.  They were in undress uniform, and “free as Nature first made man, ere the vile laws of servitude began, when, wild in the woods, the noble savage ran.”  They were rather good, though extremely wild-looking young men.  One of them had splendid long black curls waving in the wind, hanging down nearly to his middle; the other two had chignons.  They remained with us only about three hours.  The day was windy, sand-dusty, and disagreeable.  One blast of wind blew my last thermometer, which was hanging on a sapling, so violently to the ground that it broke.

Mr. Tietkens had been using a small pair of bright steel plyers.  When the endearing natives were gone it was discovered that the plyers had departed also; it was only Christian charity to hope that they had not gone together.  It was evident that Mr. Gosse must have crossed an eastern part of Lake Amadeus to get here from Gill’s Range, and as he had a wagon, I thought I would be so far beholden to him as to make use of his crossing-place.