340 MOUNT JUSON. [CH. VITI. 



No further orders were necessary, and I could thus at once 

 mount my horse and proceed to any distant height, with the 

 certainty of finding the whole canip established, as I in- 

 tended, on my return. In arriving late at night on any spot, 

 and the party having to encamp in the dark, still every one 

 knew where to go, for by constant custom, the arrangement 

 was easily preserved. Thus, anything we wanted, could be 

 found by night or day with equal facility ; and we might be 

 said, in fact, to have lived always in the same camp, although 

 our ground was changed at every halt. 



A stockman came to our camp, whose station was about 

 six miles further up the creek, in one of the vallies amongst 

 the ranges. He had heard from the natives, that they had 

 killed a " white man, gentleman," as they said, and he added 

 a number of horrible particulars of the alleged murder of 

 Mr. Cunningham by the aborigines, which subsequent ac- 

 counts, however, proved to have been much exaggerated. 



This day I had recognized Mount Juson, a conical hill 

 where the beacon, which he had erected, while I was engaged 

 at the theodolite, still stood. Mr. Cunningham had requested 

 that I would give to the hill the maiden name of his mother, 

 which I accordingly did. This appeared to me at the time, 

 rather a singular request, and now it seemed still more so, 

 for from his melancholy fate almost immediately after, it 

 proved to be his last. 



Sept. 13. — Taking forward with me two men, to the first 

 of the two rocky places in our line, which, as already stated, I 

 wished to alter, I found that both acclivities might be avoided, 

 and the road also shortened at least a mile, by taking a more 

 easterly direction up a valley, which led almost entirely 

 through fine open forest land, to our old route. I completed 

 this alteration al>out an hour before sunset. Water was the 

 next desideratum, and I had the good fortune to find also 

 enough of it in a rocky gully, where there was also greener 

 pasturage than any that I had seen during the journey, dis- 

 tant only a quarter of a mile to the northward of my newly 



