BY THE HON. A. NORTON, M.L.C. 75 



we came to " Hell-gate," the fancy name of a deeply-channelled 

 creek, in the bed of which there is a stream of water as cool as 

 its title is hot. It was past noon when we arrived at Nowendoc 

 (18 miles), another of the A. A. Company's stations, the 

 stockman in charge of which slightly augmented his ordinary 

 allowance by keeping a bouse of accommodation ; and here we 

 made a modest lunch of salt beef and bread, with the addition 

 . of some very good vegetables grown on the place. As we 

 rode onwards in the afternoon, it was not hard to realise 

 that we were on the Tableland of New England. Beside 

 Nowendoc's boggy creek was a narrow flat, while a little to 

 the left was a spur of the range covered with immense stringy- 

 barks ; and between us and them were hundreds of well-grown 

 tree-ferns, standing so closely together that the ends of their 

 fronds, in many cases, met. For some miles we rode through 

 the stringy-barks, under tall trees which deserve to be called 

 " giants of the forest," through a tangle of undergrowth and 

 fallen logs which skirted the road on either side. Here it 

 was sheltered and warm, but no sooner had we made our 

 way to the open country, than the chillness made itself 

 perceptible. 



That night we put up at Murphy's accommodation house 

 and enjoyed a good fire and an abundance of plain food. Mur- 

 phy, however, was not a careless, go-as-you-please man. He 

 was very well known throughout the district, for nobody could 

 produce better potatoes than old Murphy, who claimed that he 

 had raised them from seed, and thus obtained a special potato. 

 Be that as it may, the fame of those potatoes spread, and the 

 sale of seed potatoes became to him a source of considerable 

 income. I shall never forget the pride with which he pointed 

 to the slabs which formed the walls and floor of his dwelling, 

 the whole of them from a couple of trees, he assured us. At 

 any rate, they indicated the size of those trees on the stringy- 

 bark ranges, for many of them were over twenty inches in 

 breadth. Rough in his ways was Murphy, but he always gave 

 good value for the money paid him by travellers, and however 

 cold the night, there was always a warm corner by the fireside, 

 and a snug bed for his visitors. 



Our journey next day was an easy one, some twenty miles 

 or thereabouts, to Tia station, the hospitable abode of William 

 Denne, one of the early settlers in that part of the district. Two 

 brothers, William and Richard Denne, were men of Kent. They 



