in Tasmania. The road henceforth is in general only a track cleared, where it is necessary, amongst the trees; and you and your horse’s feet rejoice in the absence of all pavement save nature’s own. Day after day you ride on through the pleasant bush, meeting or passing or seeing some one perhaps once in two or three hours. Bright-coloured parrakeets fly about in flocks; the blue, red, and green Rosella parrot is the commonest bird of any in the bush. Now and then, though rarely, you may see a white cockatoo raise his yellow crest, or a kangaroo or wallaby jump across the track, or a mild-eyed opossum looks foolishly at you from a tree; or you stop to kill with a whip or stick a snake basking by the roadside, as you are bound to do if possible, for they are numerous and all poisonous. Of sounds there are few. Sometimes in the early morning the native magpie fills the air with the music of his delicious dreamy note, or later in the day the jackass utters his absurd laugh. The bush is monotonous perhaps, and the foliage and vegetation grey and brown and scanty, and the ground often bare instead of grassy, as in moister climates, but here there is constant change of hill and valley, constant pleasant surprises of new scenery, such as one meets with only in travelling for the first time in country undescribed by tourists and guide-books. If it spoils the interest of a novel to be told the plot beforehand, does it not ten times more spoil the enjoyment of new country to be forewarned of its surprises of scenery, which are the most delicious morsels of our pleasure in it? And along this east coast you seldom or never need a guide, for, wild and lonely as it often is, the track is always clear enough. You may, if you please, take a cart and luggage, for it is astonishing how carts and their horses learn to dispense with roads. A horse that is used to it thinks nothing of drawing a cart over a fallen trunk a couple of feet in diameter, going at it obliquely, one wheel at a time. But as tall hats, and black coats, and crinolines, and bonnets are about as necessary on a bush journey as an Armstrong gun or a pair of skates, you will probably dispense with any such useless incumbrance, and take only a change of clothes in a valise on the pommel of your saddle or behind it, or a mackintosh-covered bundle of eight or nine pounds weight strapped neatly to the off side of your side-saddle. You are free then, and can go or stay when and where the spirit moves you. And to anyone with the faintest idea how to use pencil or brush, the sharpness of outline, the clear blue of the distance, the brilliant sunshine and strong defined shadows, offer temptations to stop at every turn, and let your horse stand quietly grazing—‘hung up,’ as the phrase is, to a tree—while you sketch at leisure. You spend a day or two perhaps on Prosser’s Plains, a level tract lying charmingly amongst bush-covered hills; or turn aside to Cape Bougainville with