drought and torrents, and they are of little use for navigation. The only long rivers are the Murray and the Darling, which take all the inland streams of the southeast. The Murray rises in the Australian Alps near Mount Kosciusko (Kos-i-us'-ko), and for 600 miles of its course forms the boundary between New South Wales and Victoria. The Darling flows from Darling Downs for 850 miles before it joins the Murray.

8. Though both streams have long courses and numerous tributaries, they cannot be called large rivers; they are not broad, neither are they deep except when swollen by rains. They are navigable at certain seasons by small steamers. In its lower course the Murray is a swift turbid stream, with muddy banks widening near the sea into a lagoon too shallow for navigation. The length of the river is 1400 miles.

9. The Hawkesbury River, a small stream in the southeast, rivals the most beautiful rivers of Europe in scenery; its banks present a continued succession of high headlands and bold bluffs, deep ravines and short steep valleys, with banks now steep now gently sloping, now bare and now wooded to the water's edge.

10. Mr. Forrest, an Australian traveller who has recently visited the Fitzroy River in the north-west, says that it flows through and occasionally inundates a fine open valley, surrounded by pastoral plains ranged over by thousands of kangaroos and emus. The river is navigable by small steamers for a hundred miles from the sea; it is well stocked with fish, and flocks of geese, ducks, and turkeys are frequently to be met with.

LESSON 63.-THE SURFACE.-II.

THE LAKES AND DESERTS OF THE INTERIOR.

1. The lowest land of the interior is the Lake District north of Spencer Gulf. Here are the salt lakes Torrens, Eyre and Gairdner, and many smaller lakes and saltmarshes, all so situated as regards elevation and the ocean that it is easy to imagine them to have been part of a great inland sea. The surface of Lake Eyre is but seventy feet above the sea level. Far away to the north-east is Lake Amadeus, which is also salt and is bordered by salt-crusted mud-flats.

2. These lakes fluctuate greatly in size with the seasons. After the occasional heavy rains, the water-courses bring down the drainage from the surrounding country, and the lakes extend over their low shores for miles in every direction. During droughts the rivers are dry and the waters retreat, leaving swamps which, under a burning sun, are dried and baked to the hardness of stone.

3. From the west side of Lake Eyre high lands extend north, and along these central heights Mr. Stuart in 1862 first made his way across the continent. Part of this region is fertile, with forests and grassy plains, but much of it is waterless desert.

4. A telegraph line has with difficulty been erected along Stuart's route from Adelaide on the south coast to Port Darwin on the north, nearly 2000 miles, whence an ocean cable connects Australia with Java, India, and Europe. This line is not only of the greatest service for carrying news between the mother country and the Australian colonies, but it has been made the means of extending discoveries.

5. Travellers have started from its stations and traversed

the country westward to the sea. Everywhere inland the same dreary Desert appears to prevail. It is calculated that between the telegraph line and the settlements of Western Australia there is an uninhabitable expanse 800 miles square, containing few springs and many salt lakes and marshes. Travellers have sometimes gone 300 miles

without meeting with fresh water.

6. The soil in these desolate plains is a red sandy clay, charged with salt and covered with thickets or scrubs, consisting generally of plants with hard prickly leaves.

7. North of Lake Eyre and west of the telegraph line is a region about which little is known. It is supposed to be a Table Land traversed during the rainy season by streams, which either find their way to salt lakes or lose themselves in the desert sands.

8. Travellers in the interior often suffer greatly from both hunger and thirst. Water is found, not in oases bright with vegetation, but in holes, gullies, and mud

swamps.

LESSON 64.

TRAVELLING IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIA.

1. Mr. Grey, an Australian traveller, gives the following account of the latter part of one of his expeditions:"The same sandy sterile country was around, thinly clothed with Banksia trees. We marched for an hour and a quarter, and in this time had only made two miles, when we suddenly arrived upon the edge of a dried-up bed of a sedgy swamp, which lay in the centre of a small plain, where we saw the foot-mark of a native imprinted on the sand, and again our hearts beat with hope, for this sign appeared to announce that we were once more entering the regions of animal life.

2. We soon found that another part of the swamp was thickly marked with the footsteps of women and children; and as no water-baskets were scattered about, no doubt could exist but that we were in the vicinity of water.

3. We discovered several native wells dug in the bed of the swamp, but these were all dry, and I began again

to fear that I was disappointed when Kaiber (the native guide) suddenly made me a sign. I hurried up and found him with his head buried in a hole of moist mud, for I can call it nothing else. I very coolly raised Kaiber by the hair, as words failed to make him rise, and called up the others.

4. Kaiber had completely swelled himself out with this thick muddy liquid, and from the mark upon the sides of the hole, had evidently consumed more than half the total supply. I first of all took some of the moist mud in my mouth, but finding a difficulty in swallowing it, as it was so thick, I strained a portion through a handker

chief. We had thirsted, with an intense and burning thirst, for three days and two nights, during the greater portion of which time we had been taking violent exercise under a fierce sun.

5. To conceive the delight of the men when they arrived at this little hole of mud would be difficult. Each, as he came up and cast his wearied limbs on the ground beside the hole, uttered the words 'Thank God,' and then greedily swallowed a few mouthfuls of the liquid mud, protesting that it was the most delicious water, and had a peculiar flavour which rendered it far superior to any other he had ever tasted."

6. When the water was finished they found that by scraping the hole out, it slowly trickled in again. Grey, having returned thanks to his Maker, now tottered off with his gun in search of food. Pigeons, kites, and other birds came down to drink, but the starving man raised his gun in vain, privation rendered his hand so tremulous that the shot flew wide of the mark. He now feared that he had escaped death from thirst only to perish slowly by starvation.

7. Watching a flock of black cockatoos, that were soaring in the air, he resolved to find out their roosting place, and steal upon them in the dark. At nightfall he found the birds alighted in a clump of trees, and getting a shot, one fell. Kaiber plucked and roasted it, and received for his share the entrails, feet, and first joint of the legs, while the leader contented himself with the head and wings, reserving the remainder.

8. A fearful storm with torrents of rain now came on, poor Grey nearly expired from cold and rain during the inclement night, and his hip, wounded in a recent conflict with natives, gave him much pain. In three days they came to a swamp, which they rightly guessed to be