us.  There was plenty of water in it, no doubt, but we did not require it.  The well seemed rather deep.  We followed the creek for some distance, at length it became very undefined, and the gum timber disappeared.  Only a few acacia bushes now indicated the flow of the water over the grassy mulga flats, which wound about so much around sandhills in the scrub, that I left the creek, and pushed on now for the South Australian Telegraph Line.

I will now give a rapid account of what I said was a narrow escape from death at those rock-holes we had just left.  I may say in passing, that what I have recorded as my travels and explorations in Australia in these volumes, are probably not half of what I have really performed, only I divide them under the two headings of public and private explorations.

In the month of December, 1882, I was in this part of the world again.  During the six years that had elapsed since my last visit in 1876, a survey party had reached these ranges on a trigonometrical survey, and upon its return, the officer in charge reported having had some trouble and a collision with the natives of the Everard Range.  I suppose my second visit occurred two years after that event.  I was accompanied on that journey by a very young friend, named Vernon Edwards, from Adelaide, and two young men named Perkins and Fitz, the latter being cook, and a very good fellow he proved to be, but Perkins was nothing of the sort.  I had a black boy named Billy, and we had twelve camels.  I approached the Everard Range from the south-westward, having found a good watering-place, which I called Verney’s Wells, in that direction.  There, we met a lot of natives who did not belong to the Everard Range tribes.  At Verney’s Wells we had a grand corrobboree in the warm moonlight; my young men and black boy stripped themselves, and young and old, black and white, danced and yelled, and generally made the night hideous with their noise till early morning.  After the ball a grand supper was laid for our exhausted blackmen and brothers.  The material of this feast was hot water, flour, and sugar mixed into a consistent skilly.  I had told the cook to make the gruel thick and slab, and then pour it out on sheets of bark.  Our guests supplied themselves with spoons, or rather we cut them out of bark for them, and they helped themselves ad lib.  A dozen pounds of flour sufficed to feed a whole multitude.  We left Verney’s Wells and made up to the well in the Ferdinand that I have just mentioned.  This we opened out with shovels, and found a very good supply of water.  From thence we proceeded to my old dinner-camp at the range, where, as I said before, the whole space about, was filled up with fig-trees.  Almost immediately upon our appearance, we heard the calls and cries and saw the signal smokes, of the natives.  We had to clear a space for the camp and put up an awning.  The water in the two lower holes was so low that the camels could not reach it,