"Pooh, nonsense!" answered the other, looking at his chronometer; "it is only a few minutes past four. This is the twenty-first of December, Midsummer-day, and we shall have light till half-past nine or longer." "We are a good bit farther north than we were at Hobart Town, five days ago, sir," replied the servant, seeing that his master still paused to gaze; "and you will not have so much light as you think for." "Well, it does not much matter," answered the officer, a good-looking young man, with a very intelligent and benevolent expression of countenance. "We can find our way down, I dare say, even in the dusk, especially if they light a fire to cook the kangaroo." He paused for a moment, and then said, in a meditative tone, "I dare say we are the first human beings, certainly the first Europeans, who ever set their feet upon this hill." "I don't think it, sir," replied Maclean, who had taken a step or two nearer to the high precipitous rocks which surrounded the vast crater. "Indeed!" exclaimed his master. "What makes you think so, my good friend?" "That, captain," answered the man, pointing with his finger to a spot on the ground, a little to the right of himself and his master, on which, when Captain M---- turned his eyes that way, he saw lying a scrap of paper with something written upon it. On taking it up, he found that it was part of the back of a letter, with the English post-mark distinct upon it. The writing consisted only of a few words, or rather fragments of words, being a portion of the original address, and it stood thus:--"----dley, Esq.--Brandon House,--onshire." It signified very little to the eyes that saw it, for he knew not where Brandon House was, nor anything about it; but yet what strange feelings did the sight of that letter call up in his breast. Where was the writer? Where the receiver of that letter? Who could he be? What had become of him? What brought him there? were questions which the mind asked instantly, with a degree of interest which no one can conceive who has not stood many thousand miles from his own land, and suddenly had it and all its associations brought up by some trifling incident like this that I relate. Putting his gun under his arm, and holding the paper still in his hand, Captain M---- walked slowly and thoughtfully on, passed through a break in the high wall of rocks, and gazed down into the basin of the mountain. The magnificence of the scene was gradually drawing his mind away from other thoughts, when his servant touched his arm, and said in a low voice, "We had better be a little upon our guard, sir, for there are more people about us than we know of, and I have heard that our friends who take to the bush are worse devils than the people of the country; and they are bad enough. Look down there, and you will see the axe has been at work--ay, and there's a man lying under that tree. He looks mighty like as if he were dead."