264 Lost in the Bush. 



what a chapter of fluctuating hopes and fears is conveyed in 

 that short sentence. Of course we have no record of the last 

 sufferings of the man who has perished by this, perhaps, one 

 of the most lingering and dreadful deaths that can be well 

 imagined. Few of us, however, who have wandered much over 

 the trackless forests and plains of the Australian bush, have 

 not, at one time or another, been lost, though happily, perhaps, 

 not for long. And such men are familiar with the principal 

 scenes of the first act in the sad drama. But I have talked 

 with men who have been lost for days, and who were, by the 

 merest accident, providentially snatched from the very jaws of 

 death, when all hope of human aid had long vanished; and I 

 never met with one who had passed through such an ordeal, 

 who was not for ever after an altered man. We all know that 

 in our daily intercourse with life, surrounded as we are with 

 perils in every shape, the hurried escape from a sudden 

 accident, which would assuredly have been fatal, is soon 

 forgotten. But the case is far different when a man has to 

 stare death in the face day after day, struggling on against 

 hunger and thirst, fatigue and despair ,• buoyed up with, 

 perhaps, the vain hope that at length relief must come, yet 

 distracted with the horrid thought that his strength is fast 

 failing, and when that is gone he has parted with the sheet 

 anchor that alone holds him to this world. If such a man 

 escapes to tell the tale, depend upon it we shall find that he 

 has passed through a whole life of agony in those few days, 

 the recollection of which can never entirely be obliterated from 

 his mind. There is no excitement to sustain a man in such a 

 position, no comrade to cheer him ; he feels, as it were, cut off 

 from all intercourse with the world. The gloomy forest, per- 

 haps, stretches miles around him, but no human being is within 

 call; or he strains his anxious eye over the burning plain with- 

 out seeing one familiar landmark, and he knows his doom is 

 sealed. 



I have, more than once, been lost for days in the bush, but 

 as I always had my gun, some matches, salt, and tobacco with 

 me, it troubled me very little, and as long as my ammunition 

 lasted I was just as well there as anywhere else ; but I had one 

 night in the Australian forest, which I shan't easily forget, 

 when neither gun, matches, salt, or tobacco were of any avail, 

 and which, next to my night in the snow, was, perhaps, about 

 the longest and most dreary I ever spent in my life. It was 

 the very night when the fiercest thunderstorm raged in our 

 forest which had, perhaps, ever been known in Victoria ; none 

 of your effervescent storms which, perhaps, last for a couple of 

 hours and pass over, but a downright cannonade of thunder and 

 lightning for nearly ten hours, a thunder clap and a flash of 



