by name, who had lost an arm in wars of some kind, and was then in
charge, ministered to my wants, and allowed me to take well-nigh the
largest breakfast on record in those parts.

I must not continue in such detail with the rest of my western tours'
incidents, especially as the second was mostly over the same ground as
the first. I dilly reached my last Boyd station, in the pretty and
varied Pyrenees district--a sheep station, then under charge of my
friend James M. Hamilton. Here the hospitalities were equal, but all the
rest sadly below The Gums, and an infinity underneath Dunmore. But
Hamilton promised us compensation in a visit to the more comfortable
residence of a squatting neighbour, Mr. John Allen. The master was not
at home, but the mistress received us with squatting welcome. She was a
young South Australian wife, charming alike in person and manners, and
surrounded by a little troop of children, some with the stamp of her own
beauty. She died not long afterwards, prematurely cut down, alas! like
many another bright flower in the world's great garden.

Next year, 1845, I reached Warrnambool, just then commencing its urban
life with a few straggling small white houses, along the edge of its
pretty semicircular bay. I had passed Mounts Noorat and Shadwell,
occupied respectively by Mr. Neil Black and Captain Webster, both early
colonists, and was once more in raptures with the spectacle of almost
continuously rich soil. I also came upon several round, deep, and
mysterious-looking lakes, one of which, with its waters far below me, I
descended to examine with no slight sensation of awe. I was told of
beautiful and grand coast scenes towards the east and Cape Otway; but
the ways were of Nature's uninviting hardness, and I apprehended a main
difficulty of the Glenmutchkin Railway kind, from want of house or human
being to help dependent humanity. I turned, however, the opposite way,