wilder tribes of the interior. But Major Mitchell continued his excursions in search of rivers till one day, to his great delight, he came upon a noble piece of water, which might have realised all that he had imagined of the Kirdur. It was from a bank seventy feet high that he found himself overlooking a river as broad as the Thames, on which the waves, perfectly free from broken timber, danced at full liberty; but to his great disappointment, he could perceive that this broad reach terminated a little way down in a rocky dyke. This, in, deed, was the common disappointment of explorers in that country of the bush, so much of which has since become better known.
The surveys of rivers and plains successfully accomplished by Mitchell, were of the highest importance. Only one melancholy event threw a gloom over the results of his energy and enterprise. At sunset, one day in April, his indefatigable companion Cunningham was found to be missing. As he was in the habit, however, of wandering from his companions in search of plants, his absence did not at first excite alarm. On the following day, parties sent in various directions failed to discover any traces of him; and as the expedition was suffering from want of water, the misery of his situation, bewildered in a burning waste, was acutely felt by all. It was not till the fifth day of the search that traces of Mr. Cunningham were fallen in with, and in two days more his movements and those of his horse were followed through a distance of seventy miles. These were examined again and again, and the inferences founded on them were that Cunningham having wandered some time in the wood he had killed his
