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 intelligence that we had arrived at a large marshy pool called the Lakes, on whose edge stood the little inn which was to be the end of our day's journey. There were two or three fires blazing on the water's brink, showing where some teamsters had drawn up their wagons, and were passing the night out of doors; and a number of kangaroo dogs came barking out of the inn, announcing that we had finished the first thirty miles of our road to Barladong. It was a primitive sort of a house, and in the sitting-room to which I was shown were great sofas, suggesting the idea that they often served for beds. Also there were three thick volumes of a geographical work, containing long extracts from Captain Cook's voyages, which had an air of suitability to the far-off place in which we found ourselves; but I made no acquaintance with them that night, for though we had come so short a distance, we had been more than ten hours upon the road, and, quite tired out, were very glad to get to our beds.

We resumed our journey at six o'clock on the following morning, and we should have been wiser had we set out a full hour earlier, for the heat became very great long before we had finished the nine miles which lay between the Lakes and the inn where we intended to breakfast. Growing beside the pool, and close to the ashes of the teamsters' fires, were the first paper bark-trees that I had ever seen. Their shapes were very picturesque, being much twisted and gnarled; the whiteness of the bark contrasting well with their green foliage, which is close and thick, affording more shade, in spite of the smallness of the leaf, than many other of the Australian trees. In