They could give no apparently satisfactory reason for holding this opinion, and, as there was evidently some deep mystery connected with it, I kept on pressing my servant Coles in order to induce him to tell me whence it arose. At last it came out that Mr. Walker had had a dream, when we were on the shores of Shark Bay and before we had commenced our return home, that some dreadful misfortune had befallen us and that Mr. Smith, Thomas Ruston, and he himself, were endeavouring to make the Isle of France in a boat, when Mr. Smith died, and the remaining two had eaten his body. Mr. Walker had, with the utmost imprudence, related this dream to some of the men, and they, with that superstition which is so common amongst sailors and Englishmen of the lower orders, had attached a great degree of importance to it; many circumstances which had hitherto been unexplained to me now flashed upon my mind; poor Mr. Smith had been very ill at the time Mr. Walker had related this inauspicious dream, and at that period an extraordinary degree of despondency had crept over him, so much so that some of the men imagined he had become deranged. When also we were working our way down the eastern coast of Shark Bay in the boats others of the party had got into a very desponding state, one of whom, Henry Woods, had even gone so far as to tell me when I remonstrated with him on this point that he knew that the greater part of us wore doomed, and that our lives were worth nothing. My anxiety for those I had left behind me now increased, and about an hour and a half before daylight I started for Perth with Imbat, leaving the others to follow as rapidly as they could, and telling them that I would have food ready for them at Williams's cottage, who was the settler living farthest north from Perth. In about an hour and a half I reached Williams's hut, which I entered, and found his wife and another woman at breakfast.