For if any place could possibly combine extremest degrees of isolation, monotony, dreariness, and depressing discomfort, that place was Bilwillia. It straggled around the edge of a sombre watercourse, the ditchlike banks of which dropped perpendicularly through the clay, as if dug by some savage engineer centuries since. Around, anear, afar, all was plain and sky. The arid landscape was as boundless, monotonous, as the sea. The salsolaceous plants, within ten feet of the unbarked pine-posts of the rude verandah, were identical in appearance with every plant for a hundred leagues. Hill nor tree nor stone was there within a square of a thousand miles. There were no books; no newspaper, save the _Bourke Banner_, a fortnight old, containing sundry local incidents, a short leading article, and a lengthy advertisement of Holloway’s Pills. On the fourth day, about the exasperating period of noon, when the ‘blue fly sung in the pane,’ and all the slow torture of Mariana in the moated grange transposed to southern latitudes seemed to be in process of representation, Mr. Neuchamp, to his excessive delight, made out two separate cortèges arriving from different directions. Both comprised mounted men and spare horses, and either of them might well be the long-expected Parklands. They were plainly steering across the wide plain for the Bilwillia Inn. The first cavalcade was headed by an unusually tall athletic-looking personage riding a well-bred powerful horse, which evidently made little of his somewhat unfair weight. A sharp-looking elfish black boy and a stockman, at some distance behind, drove several spare animals, including a packhorse, upon the tracks of their leader. As they arrived at the inn, the gentleman in advance hung up his horse and walked into the house, while his attendants proceeded to unsaddle the whole troop. Almost immediately after the full and careful observation of this party had been concluded by Mr. Neuchamp, rendered desperate by long abstinence from decent society, the second group gradually ‘came up from the under world,’ like a strange sail, and disclosed the form of a charioteer, with an attendant and spare horses. The driving was like unto that of the son of Nimshi, whom, in the matter of pace, Mr. Parklands resembled. And that energetic and punctual personage it proved to be. ‘How are you, Neuchamp?’ he called out cheerily, jumping down from an express waggon with a driving seat. ‘Splendidly punctual, are we not? Had to come sixty miles yesterday, and five-and-thirty this morning. Can’t lick us!’ ‘It was very good of you,’ said Ernest most sincerely, ‘to make a push. I do not know what I should have done if I had had to wait another day here.’ ‘You don’t mean to say you came here before yesterday?’ cried Mr. Parklands in tones of horror and amazement. ‘I came three days ago, I am sorry to say.’