'Which we won't describe to-night, shall we, my dear?' Mr. Vernon interpolated, appealing to his wife. 'Miss Chaloner shall do as she likes, as the daughter of the house, while here and afterwards. If she wants to go to the South Pole, John Vernon & Co. will charter a ship for her, or a camel train; if Fort Bourke requires her presence, only give us a little time--that is all I ask.' CHAPTER XX Those adventurous wayfarers only who have traced the sources of the Snowy River, which in its southward course pierces the fertile district of Gippsland, are familiar with the strange wild region which lies between it and the northern watershed, where the Ovens, the Mitta Mitta, and the King rivers swell with their hurrying waters the Mississippi of Australia. The scenery is of a weird and wondrous majesty. Far as eye can reach, a verdurous plain extends--a mountain park, in truth, it may be called, differing from almost any other such formation in Australia. Three thousand feet above the sea, a sheet of snow in the mid-winter, it is a prairie waving with giant grasses when remorseless suns are scorching the heart of the continent into barrenness. Standing on the northern edge of the Dargo plateau, what a landscape bursts upon the view! Mount Feathertop, divided by a ravine two thousand feet in depth from Mount Bogong, with Kosciusko, king of Austral Alps, like twin Titans, rise snow-crowned in awful majesty amid the mist and cloud rack of the illimitable mountain world. Storm-swept and desolate is this region in winter. The strayed traveller wanders beneath an endless succession of wooded peaks, descends abysmal glens, and seems doomed to traverse eternally the unbroken solitudes of the primeval forest. Here first arose the hamlet, later on the mining township, of Omeo, taking its name from the lonely lake so named by the wild tribes who had hunted on its borders and fished in its depths from immemorial ages. Who shall count the years from the launching of the first frail bark canoe on its lonely waters? Situated in closest proximity to the region of snows, which, if not eternal, commence to crown the mountain summits in the early autumn, it is separated from the more civilised portions of New South Wales and Victoria by roads which border precipices, by mountain tracks, known only to the cattle-drover and the horse-stealer, which, overhanging rivers thickly strewn with granite crags, offer suicide on easy terms to the careless or the despondent. Rivers, full-fed from a thousand springs which have their sources in these mountains, rush from unexplored heights in the springtime, or murmur musically the long green summer through, when the great levels of Australian deserts are sun-baked as the plains of Hindostan.