"He's in one of them blind gullies.

You go along the gorge of the river till you come to a saddle all over fern, and you drop down that, and follow the best o' three or four tracts till you come to a swamp." Here Pepper paused, in consideration of my face of horror; for if there was one thing I dreaded more than another in those early days, it was a swamp.

Steep hill sides, wide creeks, honey-combed flats, all came in, the day's ride,--but a swamp! Ugh! the horrible treacherous thing, so green and innocent looking, with here and there a quicksand or a peaty morass, in which, without a moment's warning, your horse sank up to his withers! It was dreadful, and when we came to such a place Helen used to stop dead short, prick her pretty ears well forward, and, trembling with fear and excitement, put her nose close to the ground, smelling every inch, before she would place her fore foot down on it, jumping off it like a goat if it proved insecure.

Generally she crossed a swamp, by a series of bounds in and out of flax bushes; and hopeless indeed would a morass be without those green cities of refuge! Horrible as a large swamp is however to a timid horsewoman, it is dear to the heart of a cockatoo.

He gladly buys a freehold of fifty acres in the midst of one, burns it, makes a sod fence, sown with gorse seed a-top, all round his section, drains it in a rough and ready fashion, and then the splendid fertile soil which has been waiting for so many thousand years, "brings forth fruit abundantly." Such enormous fields of wheat and oats and barley as you come upon sometimes,--with, alas, never a market near enough to enable the plenteous crop to return sevenfold into its master's bosom! I shall not inflict upon you a description of all our rides in search of members for our congregation.