It is unnecessary to enter into details respecting the homeward expedition. The outward track was followed as closely as possible to Laidley Ponds, and thence to Adelaide. The water was rapidly drying up, and the retreat had to be conducted like the forced marches of an army. The men were nearly all ill, more or less, and some of them, being unable to walk, had to be carried long distances. Latterly, the leader of the expedition seems to have been the chief sufferer. Long exposure to the glaring reflection of the sun on the sandy wastes had ruined his eyesight, and not long afterwards he became permanently blind. Even now his constitution was completely shattered, and he had to be laid on a bed of leaves and conveyed from the interior in a cart, from which sufferings he never fully recovered. Such was Charles Sturt, after fifteen months' wanderings in the deserts of our country; and henceforth this heroic and much-enduring man disappeared from the stage of Australian history, of which he had been long a distinguished ornament. He retired on a pension of £600 from the South Australian Legislature, and died at Cheltenham in 1869. CHAPTER VII. EYRE'S ADVENTUROUS JOURNEY ALONG THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN BIGHT. Edward John Eyre, the son of a Yorkshire clergyman, was born in the year 1815. A youthful passion for the heroic led him to chose the military profession; but, having failed to obtain a commission, he turned his attention to the colonies, and came to Sydney in 1833, with the slender capital of £400. Part of this sum was spent in obtaining colonial experience, in which he graduated so high as to become the leader in a new Australian enterprise. The newly founded settlements of Port Phillip (subsequently Victoria) and South Australia had created a great demand for stock, all of which had hitherto been carried by sea, and, on reaching their destination, were sold at famine prices. Young Eyre conceived the practicability of an overland route, and proceeded to prove it to a demonstration. In the first of these journeys he took 1,000 sheep and 600 head of cattle from the Monaro district, in New South Wales, to Adelaide, in South Australia, by way of the Murray River, and reaped a handsome pecuniary reward in the sale of the stock. Smaller men followed in the wake of this born adventurer, making overlanding the most paying game in Australia, till a glut was produced in the southern markets. Success having followed Eyre in the new path his enterprise had struck out, he was soon in possession of sufficient funds to begin squatting on his own account. He purchased the station "Murrundi," on the Lower Murray, where he resided for several years, acting also as magistrate and protector of the aborigines. Occasionally, too, he varied the monotony of bush life by feats of exploration into the unknown territory, thus keeping alive the spirit of adventure, and unconsciously qualifying himself for the romantic enterprise which will