When the packhorses had been loaded and we were about to start, leaving the remainder of our provisions in charge of two men, we discovered that our native guide was missing. I had promised him for his services a tomahawk, a knife, and a blanket, and as I supposed he was already far beyond his own beat, he might have had the promised rewards, by merely asking for them. We had always given him plenty of flour, also his choice of any part of the kangaroos we killed. It had been observed by the men that the intelligence received from the old woman had made him extremely uneasy, and he had also expressed to them on the previous evening his apprehensions about the natives in the country before us. I was very sorry for the loss of Mr. Brown. He was very comical, as indeed these half-civilised aborigines generally are; he liked to be close-shaved, wore a white neckcloth, and declared it to be his intention of becoming, from that time forward a whitefellow. I concluded that he had returned to his own tribe; and that he had been unwilling to acknowledge to me his dread of the myall tribes. We proceeded up the valley, or to the eastward, with the pack animals, and endeavoured to pass to the northward, where we found a valley in that direction, but at length it became impossible to go forward with some of the bullocks, which were not used to carry packsaddles. THE RANGE IMPASSABLE. The passage was almost hopeless, indeed it was so bad that I was at length convinced it might be easier to pass to the northward in ANY other direction than this, and that it would not be prudent to struggle with such difficulties, and separate my party for the purpose of crossing a range, which, for all I could see, might be easily turned by passing between its western extremity and the river Namoi. RETURN TO TANGULDA. We had now tried the course pointed out by The Bushranger, and, having found that it was wholly impracticable, I determined upon returning to Tangulda, and by pursuing the Namoi to endeavour to turn this range and so enter the region beyond it. With this resolution I moved back to the depot, which we left in the morning, and having reached it, made preparations to retrace our course. Mr. White followed Maule's river for some miles to the westward, so that we could judge of the direction in which it fell into the Namoi. This evening as Burnett, the carpenter, was seated beside a pool with his gun, silently engaged in watching some ducks, two natives approached on the opposite side to fill a small vessel with water, they looked around very cautiously, as if conscious that we were near, but Burnett very prudently did not allow them to see him. December 21. The whole party having started early, we this day reached the former encampment near Tangulda, a distance of twenty-one miles, in seven hours. December 22.