Go in the coach, for instance, for sixty miles along the high road to Launceston, which is still the main artery of the settlement, having been made in the old times, with enormous expenditure of labour, by huge gangs of convicts, clusters of whose ruined and deserted huts are still to be seen. It is by far the best road in all the Australian colonies, the only one (as far as I know) over which a common English stage-coach can travel, and travel too at the rate of ten miles an hour, including stoppages. Then mount your horse, leave highways and civilisation behind, and ride westwards along a pleasant grassy road to the foot of a long wooded range, or tier, as it is called. You ascend perhaps a thousand feet and find yourself, not on a ridge or a mountain, but on a high table-land, in a new and uninhabited country and in a new climate. It is the lake country. Five large lakes, from one to three thousand feet above the plains, are ready to pour down their waters and irrigate the whole island into a garden. The sun’s rays are as powerful as on the plains, but the air is fresh and even keen, and at night for the greater part of the year it freezes sharply. Snow falls often as early as March, the first month of autumn. There is no fear of relaxing heat there. The grass is greener, too, and feels softer and more springy to ride over. A continuous fence is on each side of the track; for the country, though uninhabited except by sheep and their keepers, is most of it purchased and fenced now. But it is a dead-wood fence of unhewn trunks, with the smaller branches built up horizontally upon them, and therefore not an eyesore, like the ugly straight post-and-rail fences; and, moreover, capable of being easily cleared by a horse at any weak place. Eight miles of this, and a large and beautiful lake startles you by shining not a hundred yards off through the trees, and, almost at the same moment, another lake on the opposite side. Between them is a log hut, the first habitation passed for twenty miles, and out of it appears a fine, active-looking old man, whose privilege it is to stop passers-by for a ten minutes’ chat. In Tasmania it is not safe to ask a stranger _why_ he left home, but you may always ask _where_ the old home was, and the old man is soon full of Oxford, and the boats, and boat races, and knows (alas!) which boat has been winning at Putney of late years. And so you may go on day after day. It may be there is nothing strikingly magnificent in this part of the country, but there is not a mile of the track that is not charming in its way. Only you must not lose it. For some distance the fences of the sheep-runs are parallel to and indicate it, and there is no fear of getting wrong, but afterwards you need some one who knows the country for a guide. For it is seldom that there are landmarks to go by. Once off the track, and there is nothing but the compass or the sun to steer by, and nothing bigger than a hut to aim at. One gum is