INTERCOURSE WITH THE NATIVES. 
49 
found natives, some of whom joined our party. Our old 
fiiend left us in quest of some blacks, who, as he informed 
Hopkinson, had seen the tracks of our horses on the Dar- 
ling. I was truly puzzled at such a statement, which was, 
however, further corroborated by the circumstance of one 
of the natives having a tire-nail affixed to a spear, which 
he said was picked up, by the man who gave it to him, on 
one of our encampments. I could not think it likely that 
this story was true, and rather imagined they must have 
picked up the nail near the located districts, and I was 
anxious to have the point cleared up. When we halted we 
had a large assemblage of natives with us, amounting in all 
to twenty-seven, but I awaited in vain the return of the 
old man. The night passed away without our seeing him, 
nor did he again join us. 
We started in the morning with our new acquaintances, 
and kept on a south-westerly course during the day, over 
an excellent grazing, and, in many places, an agricultural 
country, still intersected by creeks, that were too deep for 
the water to have dried in them. The country more remote 
from the river, however, began to assume more and more 
the character and appearance of the northern interior. I 
rode into several plains, the soil of which was either a red 
sandy loam, bare of vegetation, or a rotten and blistered 
earth, producing nothing but lhagodise, salsolse, and mi- 
sembrianthemum. 
We fell in with another tribe of blacks during the jour- 
ney, to whom we were literally consigned by those who had 
VOL, li. „ 
