disappointments of no common description, I was led to doubt the wisdom
of Providence, I was wrong. The course of events has abundantly shewn how
presumptuous it is in man to question the arrangements of that Allwise
Power whose operations and purposes are equally hidden from us, for in
six short years from the time when I crossed the Lake Victoria, and
landed on its shores, that country formed another link in the chain of
settlements round the Australian continent, and in its occupation was
found to realize the most sanguine expectations I had formed of it. Its
rich and lovely valleys, which in a state of nature were seldom trodden
by the foot of the savage, became the happy retreats of an industrious
peasantry; its plains were studded over with cottages and corn-fields;
the very river which had appeared to me to have been so misplaced, was
made the high road to connect the eastern and southern shores of a mighty
continent; the superfluous stock of an old colony was poured down its
banks into the new settlement to save it from the trials and vicissitudes
to which colonies, less favourably situated, have been exposed; and
England, throughout her wide domains, possessed not, for its extent, a
fairer or a more promising dependency than the province of South
Australia. Such, there can be no doubt, have been the results of an
expedition from which human foresight could have anticipated no practical
good.

During my progress down the Murray River I had passed the junction of a
very considerable stream with it [Note 3. The Darling], in lat. 34 degrees
8 minutes and long. 142 degrees. Circumstances, however, prevented my
examining it to any distance above its point of union with the main river.
Yet, coming as it did, direct from the north, and similar as it was to the
Darling in its upper branches, neither had I, nor any of the men then with
me, and who had accompanied me when I discovered the Darling in 1828, the
slightest doubt as to its identity. Still, the fact might reasonably be