The end of it was, for a promise of five pounds he obtained from a friend of his a description of a country hitherto unsettled, and first-rate for cattle. These men, who can neither read nor write, have often a talent for description, which is astonishing. Having heard a minute detail of the “pack,” and studied a sort of map drawn on the lid of a tea-chest with a burned stick, I decided on exploring with my overseer, Jem Carden, and, if successful, returning for the cattle and drags, all loaded for founding a station. We only took our guns and tomahawks, with tea, sugar, a salt tongue, and small damper ready baked, being determined to make long marches, starting early, camping at mid-day, and marching again in the evening as long as it was light. Our first stage was only twenty-five miles to young Marson’s cattle-station. Marson was a cadet, of a noble family, and having been too fast at home and in India as a cavalry subaltern, had been sent out with a fair capital to Australia, under the idea that a fortune was to be had for asking, and no means of expense open in the Bush. What money he did not leave in the bars and billiard rooms of Sydney, he invested in a herd of six hundred cattle; to look after these, he had four men, whom he engaged, one because he could fight, another because he could sing, and all because they flattered him. With these fellows he lived upon terms of perfect equality, with a keg of rum continually on the tap. Then, for want of better society, he made his hut the rendezvous of a tribe of tame blacks. We found him sitting on the floor in a pair of trowsers and ragged shirt, unwashed, uncombed, pale-faced and red-eyed, surrounded by half-a-dozen black gins (his sultanas), a lot of dogs, poultry, a tame kangaroo, and two of his men. The floor was littered with quart pots, lumps of fat, and damper outside the hut; the relations of the black ladies had made a fire, and were cooking a piece of a fine young heifer. What with the jabbering of the gins, the singing and swearing of the men, and the yelping of the dogs, it was no place for a quiet meal, so we only stayed long enough to drink a pot of tea, so as not to offend, and passed on to camp an hour under the shade of a thicket near the river. Marson having, with the assistance of his black friends, consumed all his stock, has returned home; and, I hear, asserts everywhere that Australia is not a country a gentleman can live in.