"Oh! 'tis the sun that maketh all things shine." --Love's Labour Lost. "He makes a July day short as December." --Winter's Tale. But my chief excursions, which have left a pleasantly vivid recollection of early colonizing life, were made to the far west--the one in 1844, right through to the Glenelg; the other the year after, to the newly-founded township of Warrnambool. The first of these was undertaken partly on business in the interests of the Boyd stations lately formed about Eumerella, a place of evil repute then as to the native hostility. I had previously chanced to "chum" with Boyd's Port Phillip manager, Mr. Robert Fennell, a young fellow as well-looked, gentlemanly, and pleasant as anyone could meet with, and with whom I both officed and housed to mutual satisfaction for two years, until his marriage with a daughter of John Batman. And thus I came in for some few of the many Boyd commissions that were flying freely about in those years, and which were not at all unacceptable to any of us in that time of small things. I afterwards, as I have pleasure in recording, received the hospitalities of the great commission-maker in his generously open house at Sydney. Once more, in passing westwards, I was at Colac. It was the month of June (midwinter), but the country, with its lake, was not the less beautiful in the universal green. Excepting the partial post-and-rail barricade of my friend William Robertson's 5,000 acres of purchased land, there was nothing all around but free and open squatting. On every side was the hardly yet disturbed indigenous aspect. Pelicans flew aloft, tall "adjutants" stalked about here and there, and cockatoos screeched everywhere. One of the curious green knolls, so common there, was so thickly covered with the yellow-crested white cockatoo as to give the look of a cap of snow. Leaving Morris's huts, I made for another Boyd station, in the famous far west Eumerella district. There were many beauties around, for I had entered Mitchell's "Australia Felix"--its extreme borders, to be sure, but the most beautiful of it all. My nag was more than ever "in clover," and we wandered on through marvels upon marvels of remarkable and richly fertile country. The country was all but empty as I now coursed through it, but no amount of colonization could much alter its most striking scenery, geological and general. I had some sense of awe and mystery as I gazed down into a sort of "Dead Sea" depths at the southern end of salt, salt Korangamite, and then up at the abruptly towering "Stony Rises," capped by volcanic Porndon in my near vicinity. I passed the Manifolds', where a sprinkling of fat cattle left hardly an impression on the superabounding grass.