fire, with his head supported by his hand, my
partner lay with not a vestige of depression
in his manner. He had drunk freely of the
spirits which had circulated, and had proved
himself the best carouser of us all. He roared
out jovial songs, spun humorous yarns, and
made jokes; he evoked thundering choruses,
or uproars of laughter, or of exclamation. As
the evening wore away, under the influence of
another "tot," the spirits of the party mounted
to a wilder and more frantic pitch. Not a
star twinkled in the cloudy sky; the wind
blew with increasing violence; but my
partner had grown merrier than ever.
Suddenly, however, there was a lull in his
mirth. A gloomy frown settled upon his face,
and he went off moody and reserved to his
roost in our cart.

I had been noticing him, for he vexed and
puzzled me. Long after I had gone to roost
beside him I lay wondering, while he was fast
asleep. The wind had lulled, and the rain
poured down on the cart-cover; but it did
not wake him, or appear to wake him, for
that he often shammed sleep I was certain.
I tried to make out what had caused the
sudden alteration in his manner, and gradually
remembered a brisk conversation between
two "old hands "of the party, who had been
talking, not at all penitently, of the causes of
their having been "sent out." The darkest
crimes were talked of by those worthies cosily
enough, and rather as so many branches of a
good profession than as offences against God
and man. Theft, forgery, and burglary
seemed to be in their eyes just so many
modes of doing business. One crime,
however, they refused to look at in a business
light, and that was murder.

"What I says is this," I remembered the
most rascally-looking of the two to have
observed, with an oath, "when you have a
murderer among you, peach on him; when
he is nabbed, hang him."

That was the last remark uttered before
my partner left the party, of which he had
previously been the leader. I fell asleep that
night with the vague horrible thought that
very possibly I had a murderer for bedfellow.

The aspect of affairs when I looked out of
the cart about daybreak next morning,
certainly did not do much to remove the
disagreeable and uncomfortable impression with
which I had gone to sleep. It was miserable
weather; the rain poured incessantly. The
wet was streaming through our canvas roof
(warranted water-tight) and soaking us.
The fires were out, and the miserable-looking
horses huddling together for shelter in the
lee of the tents and drays, looked most
disconsolate. Seeing, however, that the other
men were up and moving, I aroused my
partner, and in the active preparations necessary
for another start, soon recovered elasticity
of spirits. We all contrived to get sufficient
fire to boil our kettles, and having
breakfasted uncomfortably enough in the soaking
rain and fed our horses, set off together (nine
teams in all) up Lapstone Hill, beginning our
ascent of the Blue Mountains. That was at
first comparatively easy work, but as we rose,
the acclivity grew steeper and the ground
worse; we skirted gulleys, cracked whips,
and blasphemed; waded knee-deep in mud,
pushed carts, chocked wheels, and by little
rushes of a few yards at a time made progress.
Bony exerted himself to the utmost, and
although by this time doubtless disabused of
any notion of ease in the work before him,
he still tugged and strained at his harness
most magnanimously. His imperial
nicknamesake in his celebrated passage of the
Alps could not have evinced more energy and
absolute determination. Evidently he was
not a horse to jib. If we found it hard work
to get up Lapstone Hill, we afterwards
discovered it to be as arduous an enterprise to
get down Mount Victoria; the difficulty
being, not as before, to get the horse to lift
the cart, but to prevent the cart from carrying
away the horse. With wheels carefully
skidded, and with a large, rough tree dragging
behind us, not to speak of our own
exertions spent in keeping the cart back, we
reached the bottom in safety. At the foot
of the mountain we found once more cultivated
country, and a short stage further took
us through a little nondescript collection of
houses called the town of Hartley. This
little glimpse of civilisation and this taste of
level roads we soon again lost, and began
ascending a new range of still more formidable
mountains. Our onward journey then,
from day to day, dragged its slow length
along, five or six  miles being sometimes a full
day's journey. Carcases of horses and
bullocks, in all stages of decomposition, lay by
the waysides; miserable weather had set in,
and had it not been for Browden's energy, I
frankly own that I should certainly myself
have jibbed before reaching this stage, taking
the friendly advice to "go back!" so
frequently and earnestly pressed upon us by
crowds of backward-bound adventurers.

The ascent of Mount Lambie, the highest
range we had to pass, was the worst tug of
all and the most dangerous adventure. Never
mind it. On we went. Solitary Creek, the
Green Swamp, and at last the green plains
in which the town of Bathurst stands, were
duly passed; and after sixteen days of this
sort of work, with a broken shaft, with Bony
lame and almost dead-beat, and ourselves in
not much better condition, we at last reached
within five or six miles of our journey's end.
But no fatigue could subdue the pride and
elation with which, one evening a little before
dusk, we caught from the top of a high hill
(our last descent), a view of the Turon River
winding beneath us. The sun—its only
appearance for many days—had shone out from
the clouds just before sinking, and threw
suddenly a golden hue over the scene, that
suited well our notion of the soil we had been