They retired to their beds of dry leaves soon after that, and dreamed of the strange things they had heard. But Joshua could not sleep. Some time before midnight--it might have been an hour--he rose and wandered away from the camp, through the solemn woods. He took no notice of the groups of majestic trees through which he walked--here masses of the silver-leaved iron-bark; there thick clusters of the gigantic palm, woven together, as it were, by luxuriant vines trailing through their topmost branches. Strange effects of light and shade were produced by this natural network; but Joshua took no heed of them, nor of the other wonders of the woods by which he was encompassed. A sense of awful desolation was upon him; tremblingly he retraced his steps till he came to the camp, where he sank upon the ground exhausted by emotion. The full moon rose and shed its light upon him. He took from his breast the Bible which Dan had given him, and read upon its first page, "From Dan, with undying love and confidence." Those words did much to calm him; he kissed them, and pressed the book to his heart, and gradually fell into a deep sleep. CHAPTER XXXIV. BITTER REVELATIONS. Here in the grand Australian woods are two tents--gunyahs, Rough-and-Ready calls them--built of tea-tree bark, bound round by vine creepers. They are in the form of a hive, and are wonderfully picturesque and comfortable. Up to this time, the castaway dwellers in these gunyahs have been undisturbed by savages, and this has been a matter of surprise to all but Rough-and-Ready. "Wait till after the rainy season," he has said a dozen times; "we shall have plenty of them then." Rough-and-Ready has made this "rainy season" a pretext for lingering near the spot where they first camped after their rescue. It would be suicide, he told them, to attempt to move at present; they would not be able to make their way through the country. But indeed all of them, with the exception of Joshua, were content to remain where they were; they dreaded to encounter the horrors of the wild country through which they would have to pass. Joshua was the only one who fretted at their life of inaction. It seemed to him the cruellest thing to remain passive while Ellen and Dan and his parents were waiting for him at home. But what could he do? Without the assistance of Rough-and-Ready he was powerless; and that wise man of the woods declared emphatically that it would be madness to start upon such an expedition. So Joshua was compelled to wait for events to shape his destiny, and fretted and worried because he could take no hand in the direction of them. It was a good thing for him that he had plenty to do; he might else have lost his reason. Rough-and-Ready was the best of physicians; he would not allow any of his companions to be idle, and he took care to supply them with more work than they could conveniently accomplish. He derived a huge pleasure from this cunning