But, if I come not, in some idle hour
You may with loit’ring finger turn this page,
Then pause awhile, and give one kindly thought
To him who writes at parting his last prayer—
God guard you! and—good-bye!
From Adaminaby to Trangie is roughly 300 miles; and Boake, who knew nothing of the country, had to find his road as he went. With him travelled young Boyd, who had been his associate under Mr. Commins. Each had only one horse; and a letter to a friend at Rosedale, dated from Mullah in September, 1888, gives some idea of the difficulties of the journey.
. . . We left Ann’s Vale two Sundays after we left you. It was a great ‘chuck-in’ for us stopping there: it did our horses a lot of good. In fact, if it had not been for that we would never have seen Trangie. Besides, Boydie and I were both getting full of travelling: it is not much of a lark, I can assure you.
We got on very well after we left Burrowa, till we got to Molong, where we were going to turn off to go to Dubbo. I knew there must be some shorter road, but did not know where to find it out. Just by the merest chance I went into a baker's for some bread, and happened to ask the man; and, by good luck, he told us he had been up here and knew all the country. So he directed us how to go a back road which cut off a day's journey; but the country was awfully dry—not a blade of grass—and our last day before getting to Narromine we rode the whole day and never saw a blade the whole twenty miles—nothing but the bare ground covered with leaves.
To crown all, we pushed on to get to Narromine for a camp, and got there just at dark, having to turn out at the
