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