"After landing in the States, I came to think that, in spite of the
evident advantages to be gleaned by taking the two tours in one, you
might be seriously averse to my more lengthy absence. When, however, I
came to sketch out plans for the great work which I have long intended
some day to write, and of which I completed the first map during my
stay at Ottawa, I found that I must go to Australia before getting
very far through with the book, and that I could not be even so much
as certain of my basement and groundwork until after such a visit.

"Were I to postpone my trip to Australia, I might find it impossible
ever to go there, remembering that it is not a tour which can be made
from England, at any time, much more quickly than I shall have made it
now; and whenever I did make it, you would have to expect an absence
more prolonged than that for which this letter will prepare you. Of
course that absence is fully as grievous to me as to you, and nothing
but necessity would drive me to it. Of course my going will depend
upon my health, and upon the letters I shall receive at San Francisco.
I have ample funds to take me as far as Sydney, and to enable me to
live there a long time, were anything to prevent your letters reaching
there as soon as I do. I enclose a letter to Knight for Tasmanian
introductions; you can no doubt get me Australian from Sir Daniel
Cooper and others. I propose to visit Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne,
Geelong, Adelaide, Hobart Town, Wellington, and Auckland, but the
order in which I take them, of course, depends on local circumstances.
Will you send me some money to Sydney, with such introductions as you
can get? If they don't turn up, I shall start a Shaker colony, or a
newspaper, or row people ashore from the emigrant ships."

When the travellers halted to rest for some time at Denver, after six
days' journey across the plains, Charles Dilke, with a brain excited by