part free from timber. But a curious formation of “islands,” as the stock-rider called them, prevailed, which tended much to the variety and beauty of the landscape.
These were isolated areas, of from ten to one hundred acres, raised slightly above the ordinary winter level of the marshes. The soil on these “islands” was exceptionally good, and, from the fact of their being timbered like the ordinary mainland, they afforded an effective contrast to the miles of water or waving reeds of which the marshes consisted. They served admirably also for cattle camps. To them the cattle always retired at noonday in summer, and at night in winter and spring-time. One “island,” not very far from our settlement, was known as “Kennedy’s island,” the gallant ill-fated explorer who had surveyed a road to the town of Portland some years before my arrival having made his camp there. How far he was to wander from the pleasant green west country, only to die by the spear of a crouching savage, within sight of the ship that had been sent to bring him safely home after his weary desert trail!
We didn’t know anything of the nature of dry country in those days. All the land I looked upon was deep-swarded, thickly-verdured as an English meadow. Wild duck swam about in the pools and meres of the wide misty fen, with its brakes of tall reeds and “marish-marigolds”—“the sword-grass and the oat-grass and the bulrush by the pool.” Overhead long strings of wild swan clanged and swayed. There were wild beasts (kangaroo and dingoes), Indians (blacks, whose fires in “The Rocks” we
