In the afternoon, I ventured out again, and strolled into the gum-forest on the banks of the Campaspe River, not believing the reports of the ferocity of the Victorian bunyips and alligators which have lately scared the squatters who dwelt on creeks. The black trees, relieved upon a ground of white dust and yellow grass, were not inviting, and the scorching heat soon taught me to hate the shadeless boughs and ragged bark of the inevitable gum. It had not rained for nine weeks at the time of my visit, and the thermometer (in the wind) reached 116° in the shade, but there was nothing oppressive in the heat; it seemed only to dry up the juices of the frame, and dazzle you with intense brightness. I soon came to agree with a newly-landed Irish gardener, who told a friend of mine that Australia was a strange country, for he could not see that the thermometer had “the slightest effect upon the heat.” The blaze is healthy, and fevers are unknown in the Riverina, decay of noxious matter, animal or vegetable, being arrested during summer by the drought. This is a hot year, for on the 12th of January the thermometer, even at the Melbourne Observatory, registered 108° in the shade, and 123° in the shade was registered at Wentworth, near the confluence of the Murray and the Darling. As the afternoon drew on, and, if not the heat, at least the sun declined, the bell-birds ceased their tuneful chiming, and the forest was vocal only with the ceaseless chirp of the tree-cricket, whose note recalled the goatsucker of our English woods. The Australian landscapes show best by the red light of the hot weather sunsets, when the dark feathery foliage of the gum-trees comes out in exquisite relief upon the fiery fogs that form the sky, and the yellow earth gaining a tawny hue in the lurid glare, throws off a light resembling that which in winter is reflected from our English snows. At sunset there was a calm, but, as I turned to walk homeward, the hot wind sprang up, and died again, while the trees sighed themselves uneasily to sleep, as though fearful of to-morrow‘s blast. A night of heavy heat was followed by a breathless dawn, and the scorching sun returned in all its redness to burn up once more the earth, not cooled from the glare of yesterday. Englishmen must be bribed by enormous gains before they will work with continuous toil in such a climate, however healthy. CHAPTER IV. SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY.