the brilliant accounts given by Sturt, Mitchell, Eyre, Grey,
Leichhardt, and Kennedy, constantly excited my imagination, as my own
travels may do that of future rovers, and continually spurred me on to
emulate them in the pursuit they had so eminently graced.

My object, as indeed had been Leichhardt's, was to force my way across
the thousand miles that lay untrodden and unknown, between the South
Australian telegraph line and the settlements upon the Swan River.
What hopes I formed, what aspirations came of what might be my
fortune, for I trust it will be believed that an explorer may be an
imaginative as well as a practical creature, to discover in that
unknown space. Here let me remark that the exploration of 1000 miles
in Australia is equal to 10,000 in any other part of the earth's
surface, always excepting Arctic and Antarctic travels.

There was room for snowy mountains, an inland sea, ancient river, and
palmy plain, for races of new kinds of men inhabiting a new and
odorous land, for fields of gold and golcondas of gems, for a new
flora and a new fauna, and, above all the rest combined, there was
room for me! Many well-meaning friends tried to dissuade me
altogether, and endeavoured to instil into my mind that what I so
ardently wished to attempt was simply deliberate suicide, and to
persuade me of the truth of the poetic line, that the sad eye of
experience sees beneath youth's radiant glow, so that, like Falstaff,
I was only partly consoled by the remark that they hate us youth. But
in spite of their experience, and probably on account of youth's
radiant glow, I was not to be deterred, however, and at last I met
with Baron von Mueller, who, himself an explorer with the two
Gregorys, has always had the cause of Australian exploration at heart,
and he assisting, I was at length enabled to take the field. Baron