"Hurrah!" cried Pencroft, "the roast has arrived! and now we can go home."
The walk, interrupted for an instant, was resumed. The limpid waters of Red Creek flowed under an arch of casuarinas, banksias, and huge gum-trees. Superb lilacs rose to a height of twenty feet. Other giant bushes, unknown to the young naturalist, bent over the stream, which could be heard murmuring beneath the bowers of verdure.
Meanwhile the stream grew much wider, so that Cyrus Harding judged they would soon reach its mouth. In fact, on emerging from beneath a thick clump of beautiful trees, it appeared all at once.
The explorers had arrived on the western shore of Lake Grant. The place was well worth looking at. This extent of water, of a circumference of nearly seven miles and an area of two hundred and fifty acres, reposed in a border of diversified trees. Towards the east, through a curtain of verdure, picturesquely raised in some places, sparkled an horizon of sea. The lake was curved at the north, which contrasted with the sharp outline of its lower part. Numerous aquatic birds frequented the shores of this little Ontario, in which the thousand isles of its American namesake were represented by a rock which emerged from its surface, some hundred feet from the southern shore. There lived in harmony several couples of king-fishers perched on a stone, grave, motionless, watching for fish. Then, darting down, they plunged in with a sharp cry, and reappeared with their prey in their beaks. On the shores and on the islets, strutted wild ducks, pelicans, water-hens, red-beaks, philedons, furnished with a tongue like a brush, and one or two specimens of the splendid menura, the tail of which expands gracefully like a lyre.
As to the water of the lake, it was sweet, limpid, rather dark, and from certain bubblings, and the concentric circles which crossed each other on the surface, it could not be doubted that it abounded in fish.
"This lake is really beautiful!" said Gideon Spilett. "We could live on its borders!"
"We will live there!" replied Harding.
The settlers, wishing to return to the Chimneys by the shortest way, descended towards the angle formed on the south by the junction of the lake's bank. It was not with-
