graculina_, the bald-headed _Tropidorhynchus corniculatus_ the "Jack ass" (_Dacela gigantea_), so highly regarded and carefully tended by the colonists on account of its admonishing them of the presence of poisonous serpents, quantities of chaffinches (_frigellidæ_), the fan-tailed flycatcher (_Muscipiada_), the _Climacteris_, which runs up and down the trunks of the trees like our own wood-pecker, the monitor lizard, four or five feet in length, which flits rapidly to and fro among the trees, the prickly chameleon, and beautiful specimens of fossil helix, all furnished a rich reward for the zoologist. After a ride of three hours the party began to approach a steep wall of rock, where the horses were left, as they had now to prosecute their journey on foot, till at length they came to a confused mass of coarse, breccia-like sandstone, constituting what is known as the Sugar Loaf, whence they had to toil laboriously among the rocks till they reached the summit. A marvellous panorama was spread out before them; the whole county of Northumberland, with its green forest clothing, was stretched out at their feet in all its sunlit splendour. To the left far in the distance was visible the township of Maitland, and the navigable part of the Hunter River, which wound along like a silver band till it was lost in the distance, where it fell into the Pacific, on whose seething billows the stately ships looked like small white specks on a confused, uncertain back-ground. Far in the distance to the right, half concealed by the forest, was Lake Macquarie. The colonial members of the party described the latter as very difficult of access, but as a veritable paradise for the sportsman, since it is frequented by black swans in hundreds, the Australian stork, curlews, the hook-billed creeper, cormorants, and an infinite variety of water-fowl. The Blue Mountains formed the back-ground of this splendid landscape. The whole neighbourhood is pretty well settled and cultivated. Here and there wreaths of blue smoke indicated where the huts of industrious colonists lay concealed in the forest. Their conductors were not a whit behind the strangers in their appreciation of the panoramic effect; they had never scaled the summit before, although the elder had lived 15 years at Ash Island, and had often been as far as the top of the first rocky ascent in search of strayed cattle.