guide, and did the honours of the road to Baròlin Gorge, which was certainly rough enough for a guide to be necessary.
It ran along the river bank—a track in places barely distinguishable from the cattle-tracks, which sloped sideways to the water, with here and there stony pinches and steep gulleys, almost hidden by the rank blady grass.
Now it ran through a patch of scrub or among glossy chestnut trees with their red and orange blossoms, or between white cedars on which the berry sprays were already yellowing. When the scrub ended, there were melancholy she-oaks, and every now and then a shrub of the lemon-scented gum, which Elsie would snatch at as they passed and crush between her fingers, for the sake of the curious aromatic perfume it gave forth. There was something strange and dreamy in this ride along the bank of the Luya—here scarcely to be called a river, a ride so wild that for the most part they had to go in single file. It all harmonized with the phase of mental exaltation which had come over Elsie during the last few days. Anything might happen in this enchanted forest.
In places the creek would make a bend, winding round a little flat, and then there would be a quick canter, with a warning from Pompo to look out for paddy-melon holes. And then they would mount a stony ridge, with weird-looking grass trees, lifting their blackened spears, and gray-green wattles, and unhealthy gums, and sparse blady grass. And then, perhaps they would get away from the river for a little way, and the gum trees would close in around them, and the whirring of the locusts would be almost deafening, and the dreaminess more intense. Elsie would almost call out in terror as an iguana scuttled up a gum tree, or a herd of kangaroo made a dash across the track. Once they had an exciting spin after an "old-man " kangaroo with all the dogs in full cry, but he escaped them, for the river had twisted round again, and they were in scrub once more. And here were deep rippleless pools surrounded by beds of poisonous arums, with the wrack of the flood-mark clinging to their
