As he thus thought, he seated himself and ate one of the biscuits with a relish for the plain wheaten food which he had never known before. For the last eight or nine days he had tasted nothing but fish or flesh; and he now found that bread is indeed the staff of life; for he arose lighter and yet more refreshed from his simple meal by the sea-shore than he had felt since he commenced his wandering course. He then adjusted the burdens he had to carry, so as to render their pressure as equal as possible, during his long walk back; and I may remark, indeed, that his mathematical studies proved more serviceable to him in existing circumstances than he had ever thought possible. He had always regarded them as fine abstractions, the principal use of which, to a man of the station in which he was born, was to produce a habit of correct reasoning; but now, when he came to apply them practically; he felt how invaluable they are in every walk of life. With his gun under his arm, and laden with a weight of eighty or ninety pounds, he walked slowly on his way, still keeping the summit of the mountain in view. At first his course lay across an arid tract of country, near the sea-shore, producing no vegetation but some thin tall stalks of grass, and thickly strewn with small, flat, circular fragments of stone, exactly resembling the biscuits he was carrying. As the ground rose a little, however, a more prolific soil was obtained, and he entered what is called the scrub, where tall trees, and bushes, and a thousand fruit and flower-bearing shrubs, surrounded him on every side, and often cut off the view of Mount Gambier. Long brakes or paths were still to be found through the thicket, however, and every now and then, for a mile or two, the vegetation was thinner, so that, guiding his course by the sun, and calculating as exactly as he could, the distance which both he and the great orb of day had travelled, he followed a direct line as far as the nature of the ground would permit, and from time to time caught sight of the lofty rocks above the crater, over the leafy wilderness around him. Here and there, however, came a patch of bright green meadow, and at the edge of one of these, before he entered the forest again, he sat down to rest himself, and cast the burdens from his shoulders, for the fatigues he had lately undergone were very great, and he felt the unusual weight he carried. He was dreadfully thirsty too, for he had not found a drop of fresh water on the journey, and the heat was intense.