50 
MYOLA 
CHAP. 
with sedges and tall white lilies, and beyond are masses 
of great moss-grown rocks, and the river tosses and 
tumbles round and over them, falling in countless 
cascades into the deep, dark pools below. 
Then back at the hotel in time for a nine-o’clock 
breakfast, and off I started for a day’s excursion with 
Mr. G., the engineer of this railway, and several of his 
men on a trolly down to the Barron Falls. There they 
fell in grand magnificence, 600 feet of rushing, roaring 
waters, swirling, crashing down a scarred and fissured 
face of rock into a wild turmoil of foam and spray below ; 
hence the river flows for another few yards only to cast 
itself over a second precipice down 200 feet more into 
a deep basin of foaming water ; when the last rocks are 
passed it flows away smoothly by sandy banks, past 
gardens and farms until it is lost in the great sea beyond. 
I had come here to make a sketch of the falls from 
a ledge far down the cliff, and the men had brought a 
rope with them in case I needed it. It was not so easy 
a climb as I had imagined, slipping first over the dry, 
dead leaves of the gums, scrambling down boulders of 
rock, writhing through crannies with a swing from a 
great tree-root here, and a climb from a branch there, 
then on hands and knees groping my way cautiously 
from ledge to ledge until I reached my goal at last, 
where, with feet dangling in mid-air over the precipitous 
shelving rock, I looked down hundreds of feet below 
upon the brawling river. I made a rough sketch of the 
falls from here. There were clusters of delicate orchids 
below in the clefts of the rocks, mosses and lichens and 
a lovely sundew on a ragged ledge — “that weed,” they 
afterwards slightingly called it, that I had risked my 
life to get, proved to be the rarest of its kind. 
We had our lunch under another waterfall about 
eight miles away and then started off on a flower-hunt- 
