ubt on my mind,
that he had been on one of that officer's encampments, and that the
hills to the north of us were those to the opposite base of which he
had penetrated. I was determined, therefore, if practicable, to reach
these hills, deeming it a matter of great importance to connect the
surveys, but I deferred my journey for a day or two, in hopes, from the
continued northerly course of the river, that we should have approached
them nearer.

In the evening we fell in with some more blacks, among whom were two
brothers, of those who were acting as our guides. One had a very pretty
girl as a wife, and all the four brothers were very good-looking young
men. There cannot, I should think, be a numerous population on the
banks of the Morumbidgee, from the fact of our having seen not more
than fifty in an extent of more than 180 miles. They are apparently
scattered along it in families. I was rather surprised that my boy
understood their language well, since it certainly differed from that
of the Macquarie tribes, but nevertheless as these people do not wander
far, our information as to what was before us was very gradually
arrived at, and only as we fell in with the successive families.
Moreover, as my boy was very young, it may be that he was more eager in
communicating to those who had no idea of them, the wonders he had
seen, than in making inquiries on points that were indifferent to him.

CHARACTER OF THE COUNTRY.

We passed a very large plain in the course of the day, which was
bounded by forests of box, cypress, and the acacia pendula, of red
sandy soil and parched appearance. The Morumbidgee evidently overflows
a part of the lands we crossed, to a greater extent than heretofore,
though the alluvial deposits beyond its influence were still both rich
and extensive. The crested pigeon made its appearance on the acacias,
which I took to be a sure sign of our approach to a country more than
ordinarily subject to overflow; since on the Macquarie and the Darling,
those birds were found only to inhabit the regions of marshes, or
spaces covered by the acacia pendula, or the polygonum. We had not,
however, yet seen any of the latter plant, although we were shortly
destined to be almost lost amidst fields of it.

CHANGE IN THE COUNTRY.

We were now approaching that parallel of longitude in which the other
known rivers of New Holland had been found to exhaust themselves; the
least change therefore, for the worse was suff