Once more, in passing westwards, I was at Colac.  It was the month of June (midwinter), but the country, with its lake, was not the less beautiful in the universal green.  Excepting the partial post-and-rail barricade of my friend William Robertson’s 5,000 acres of purchased land, there was nothing all around but free and open squatting.  On every side was the hardly yet disturbed indigenous aspect.  Pelicans flew aloft, tall “adjutants” stalked about here and there, and cockatoos screeched everywhere.  One of the curious green knolls, so common there, was so thickly covered with the yellow-crested white cockatoo as to give the look of a cap of snow.

Leaving Morris’s huts, I made for another Boyd station, in the famous far west Eumerella district.  There were many beauties around, for I had entered Mitchell’s “Australia Felix”—­its extreme borders, to be sure, but the most beautiful of it all.  My nag was more than ever “in clover,” and we wandered on through marvels upon marvels of remarkable and richly fertile country.  The country was all but empty as I now coursed through it, but no amount of colonization could much alter its most striking scenery, geological and general.  I had some sense of awe and mystery as I gazed down into a sort of “Dead Sea” depths at the southern end of salt, salt Korangamite, and then up at the abruptly towering “Stony Rises,” capped by volcanic Porndon in my near vicinity.  I passed the Manifolds’, where a sprinkling of fat cattle left hardly an impression on the superabounding grass.

Eumerella, or rather the Boyd fragment of that large, rich, and varied cattle area, was in charge of a versatile youth of the name of Craufurd, of a good Scotch family, whom, to the great amusement of my friend Fennell, I re-christened as Squire Hopeless, owing to his utter nonconformability to the monotonies of civilized life.  I was sufficiently versed in geology to be aware of the wonders around me, so we were soon off over the Stony Rises to Mount Eeles, only a few miles away, which, like another Porndon, raised its not lofty but mysterious-looking head to arouse our curiosity.  We were guided latterly by a well-beaten native track, for this seemed a favourite walk of the aborigines.  Our trip was not without danger, for the aboriginal relations had been anything but of that peacefulness which characterized the Melbourne vicinities; but we made up a station detachment under a remarkably fine strong young fellow called Wells, of Tasmanian birth, and equal, in an emergency, to six or a dozen natives for his own share.  We saw nothing of natives, however, and were rewarded with wonders of geology.  The little Mount Eeles cone surmounted, we looked far down into a vast crater of miles in circuit, whose sharp-ridged, angry, unsettled-looking sides could barely convince us that we looked upon an extinct volcano.  Hardly did its aspect reach the solid quiet of the Vesuvian interior, as described by some scanty classic records, prior to the grand, sudden, entirely unexpected outburst of the Pompeiian eruption.  Let the crowds of the future Pompeiis and Herculaneums of Victoria look out, for their Vesuvius may some day play havoc, with similar treachery.