'But my emotions on the "Beagle" were as a flood. Here I was sailing to a quarter of the world which the Creator, in His goodness, had provided for the support and happiness of men. Yet they did not know actually what it was like; the inheritance was still unexplored. And that land of North-West Australia was to be all my own, to designate as I wished. My feeling might be compared to that of a child waiting for a new toy. It gave rise to an ardent expectation.

'Behind was the despair of thousands, without the necessaries of life or the prospect of them; a nightmare of darkness that haunted me. But in front, as I trusted, lay hands which should afford mankind another start. Why, the busy brains of England were already unconsciously preparing every device and implement, that could be useful to the rise of the New World. We make ready in the dark for the light.'

At Cape Town, the halfway house to Australia, Sir George chartered a schooner for detailed exploring work. In it, a trifle on the water, he completed a voyage which never lost its charm to him, notwithstanding the rude hardships. He wished to make all kind of inquiries into natural history, and when the weather fell calm he would go off in a boat and shoot sea birds. Not the airy albatross, perhaps, for in it he realised the melody of motion, and it was not rare to naturalists. To shoot, from a boat, needed practice.

'You were,' he laid down the conditions, 'at issue with a heavy roll of the sea, even in glorious weather. Fortunately, I had always been an expert shot, and I quickly suited myself to the motion. You found your chances when the skiff sank into the trough of the waves, and a bird flew screaming over their tops; or, again, when you rose on the surge and had a wider target.' Thus at sea, and subsequently on land, he bagged many a fresh fact of natural history, and sent it home to enrich the British Museum. His word on that point was crisp. 'You had only to walk or row a little, and you secured a new living thing. The cry of the outlook was something discovered. The child waiting for the toy, of whom I spoke, was not half so happily situate as we. It was all surprises.'

His heart fell somewhat when he espied the land at Hanover Bay—the Promised Land, but naked and unkindly. What a contrast to the bouquet of Brazil! Still, why should there not be acres rich and worthy, behind those dull grey rocks? The idea of an incorrigible country was not to be entertained, for overcrowded England stood, with her hand for ear- trumpet, and the question on her tongue, 'What is the message?' Adventure followed adventure in the effort to secure it.

'Somehow,' quoth Sir George, 'we didn't seem to mind the risks, and I imagine that is the experience of everybody who has encountered any. A man is zealous upon some task, it quite occupies him, and the dangers are just details. Afterwards, his friends make him out to be a bit of a hero, and he has leisure to fancy so himself, which is all entirely harmless. Now, I had to swim across an arm of the sea, where a violent tide ran, and where alligators and sharks had their haunts. The latter, I believed from observations made when we bathed off the schooner, could smell a human body in the water from a long distance. But the plain necessity was that, for the succour of certain members of the expedition, I must swim the lagoon.'

A nearer hazard furnished Sir George with a knowledge, which a call from his friend Sir Charles Lyell, the geologist, enabled him to use in fun. Lyell walked in on him, in London, with a spear-head and the curiosity, 'How old do you judge that would be?' The weapon was of stone, uncouth, barbarous. 'A thousand years, eh?' Lyell pursued. Sir George let him go on for a while, then broke in, 'If that's a thousand years old, I likewise am a thousand years old, because one has been taken out of me.' 'What do you mean?' was Lyell's ejaculation. 'Oh,' said Sir George, 'a head almost similar was on the spear which an Australian native drove into my thigh.'

Whereupon laughter, and tale of the fight.

VI MAN AND NATURE ABORIGINAL

There never had been such a drama in that forest of North-West Australia. The noise of the white man's war fell upon the primeval silence, breaking it.