Or ride out of Hobart Town, where, perhaps, towards the end of the summer scarcely any rain has fallen for two or three months, and follow the new road to the Huon, over the side of Mount Wellington. As you ascend, on a sudden it is cold and damp, and the road sloppy with wet. The vegetation, too, has changed. The gums are ten times the height of those down below, straight gigantic trunks, rising fifty to a hundred feet without a branch. People speak of trunks seventy feet in circumference twelve feet above the ground, but I have seen none so large as that. I am afraid to guess at their height: the mightiest European trees are dwarfs in comparison. Splitters are at work felling them and clearing away the underwood, and the blows of the axe sound and echo as if in a banqueting-hall of the gods. It is sacrilege to fell them; but the gaps made open out a view far away over the tops of the trees below to the mouths of the Derwent and the Huon, the jagged coast-line, the distant capes and breakwater-like islands, conspicuous amongst them, long, narrow Bruni, where Captain Cook landed nearly a century ago; and over all the south wind blows cool and fresh from the Southern Ocean, for there is nothing but sea and ice between you and the Pole. Further on the road diminishes to a narrow track, cut amongst the huge gums, and through an undergrowth of almost tropical vegetation so dense that within twelve miles of Hobart Town it remained till a few years ago almost unpenetrated. There is the sassafras, with straight, tapering stem and branches, and fragrant myrtle-like leaves; and fern trees, drooping their large graceful fronds from thick brown or red stems, from six to thirty feet high; and bright purple nightshade berries as big as cherries, and shrubs without end, and it seems almost without names, except such barbarous misapplications of English names as are in use to distinguish them, till the Heralds’ Office of the Linnæan Society gives them title, rank, and lineage—all growing in a dense mass, and baffling even the all-penetrating sun. Then the track descends a little, and it all vanishes, and the ground is dry as before, and two hours’ more riding brings you out suddenly upon the bank of a fine river, the Huon, as wide here and deeper than the Thames at Richmond. A short distance off along the bank are a roughly made landing-stage and a ferry boat, and you must _cooé_ in the best falsetto you can (if there is a lady of the party she will probably do it better) till the ferryman hears you and comes, and with some trouble persuades the horses into the boat, and punts you across, and gives you directions how to thread your way through the scrub till you emerge upon a corduroy road and upon the township of Franklin. It is the chief township of the district, with some six hundred inhabitants, exceptional in being the perfection of a country village, stretching along the base of a hill two or three hundred feet high, and fringing