oint with its hoary
arms, like a spectre, to the tombs. A melancholy waste, where a level
country and boundless woods extended beyond the reach of vision, was in
perfect harmony with the dreary foreground of the scene.

[61] See Deut. xiv. 1, where the very spot is mentioned,--"between
the eyes,"--which is always torn and scratched by the Australian female
mourners.

[62] This disease made dreadful ravages among the natives about the same
time as the colony in New South Wales was settled. "The recollection of
this scourge will long survive in the traditionary songs of these simple
people. The consternation which it excited is yet as fresh in their
minds, as if it had been an occurrence of but yesterday, although the
generation that witnessed its horrors has almost passed away. The moment
one of them was seized with it, was the signal for abandoning him to his
fate. Brothers deserted their brothers, husbands their wives, wives
their husbands, children their parents, and parents their children; and
in some of the caves of the coast, heaps of decayed bones still indicate
the spots where these ignorant and helpless children of nature were left
to expire, not so much, probably, from the virulence of the disease
itself, as from the want of sustenance."--WENTWORTH'S _Australia_,
vol. i. p. 311. Third edition. See also COLLINS' _New South Wales_,
p. 383.

Indeed, to those who have been from infancy accustomed to the quiet
consecrated burying places of our own land,--spots which, in rural
districts, are usually retired, yet not quite removed from the reach of
"the busy hum of men;" to those who have always looked upon a Christian
temple,

"Whose taper spire points, finger-like, to heaven,"

as the almost necessary accompaniment of a burial-place, the appearance
of the native tombs in the desolate wilds of a savage and uncultivated
country, must be dreary in the extreme. Scenes of this character must
appear to the eye of a Christian almost emblematical of the spiritual
blank--the absence of any sure and certain hope--in the midst of which
the natives, whose remains are there reposing, must have lived and died.
How striking is Captain Grey's description of another tomb, which was
found in a totally different part of New Holland, near the western
coast, and at no great distance from the Swan River settlement! The
scenery, not, indeed, in the immediate vicinity, but very near to the
newl