I started from Roma, which is a town lying about 350 miles west of Brisbane and 200 miles from the station on which I then was located. It was fearfully dry weather when I started and there was not a blade of grass anywhere for the horses. I made long stages of thirty to forty miles a day, but how the horses endured it I do not know. When I camped out at night I would have to tie the horses to a tree alongside of me, as there was nothing for them in the bush to eat, and they would have rambled away never to be found again if I had let them go. All the food it was possible for me to provide for them was a little bread which I bought at the inns on the road at intervals of seventy or eighty miles, and in the mornings when I got up I would take a pillow-case I had and a knife and walk about in places where the ground was inaccessible to horses, such as the brinks of a gully or between large stones; there I would manage to find some dry, withered stuff, wherewith I filled the pillow-case and shared it between them. It was all I could do, and when I arrived in Roma they were both very far gone for hunger, and there, in town even, there was nothing for them either--the last bushel of corn had been sold for two pounds sterling. I fed them on bread, but even that seemed like a forbidden thing. People appeared to regard the proceeding with evil eyes. Flour was scarce and getting more scarce. There was no prospect of rain, and soon all would have to starve! In St. George, which is another town 150 miles south of Roma, I was told a perfect famine was raging. For fear of being misunderstood by people who do not know much about Queensland, I would say that want of money had nothing to do with this state of things, it was only the want of rain which prevented teams from travelling and supplies from coming forward. I left Roma again. There was nothing to do there, scarcely a prospect of getting enough to eat. I rambled away with my two horses out west, and I am now anxious, for obvious reasons, not to particularize too closely where I went. It had now become of more importance to me to save the lives of my horses than to find anything to do for myself. I travelled for a month or more at slow stages, and was now right away in the "Never Never" country. Occasionally I would find a little for the horses to eat, but very often it was scanty fare they had. I arrived at a station where shearing was in full swing, and as both grass and water seemed more plentiful there than I had seen it for hundreds of miles, I turned the horses out for a month's spell, while I made myself comfortable in my tent and occupied myself by reading such literature as I could borrow from the shearers on the station.