In flat country now. The track (over marshy alkaline-strewn ground) faces towards several low flat-topped hillocks, and passes close to some remarkable metalliferous-seeming ironstone mounds. Then to Leigh's Creek, at about 25 miles. Here are a railway siding and a coal mine, Adelaide owned, but the prospects are not bright.
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In front of a cottage somewhere about here I caught sight of—my first snake. A small one, brown, about 3 feet long. A frocked child was standing in the doorway keeping tight hold of a cotton-reel. To the unrolled length of cotton was attached a crooked pin, baited with a piece of bread. This precocious infant was fishing—when I chanced to come along and frighten away his eel.
On my thoughtlessly telling the mother (who, it transpired, had been having forty winks in a back room) she exclaimed, "Drat the boy!" Informed me that "the kid was always getting 'imself into some mischief—could never let things be," boxed the innocent little fisherman's ears, and took from him his tackle. "I wondered what he was awanting the bread for," she remarked by and bye; and when the child, who had gone to a corner to have his cry out, walked over to bury his face in her lap—"Lord bless his dirty little angel face," she said, as, spitting on one corner of her apron, she wiped the little angel face clean.
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From Leigh's Creek to Lyndhurst is very heavy road—now soft, now very stony, so travelling is hard work. Thus it was right through to Farina, 60 miles from Beltana, where Diamond and I pulled up about 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
An enthusiastic and almost intemperately hospitable wheelman, the only one in the place, made me welcome; advised me of an excellent stretch of road up to Hergott, 30 miles on; closed and locked his store door to mark the occasion of a stranger-cyclist's arrival, and accompanied me for two or three miles along the track.
Presently some railway-workmen's cottages are reached, and here kind people provided an evening meal. And as I started somebody remarked—"Look out for a bit of a rut when you get about 4 miles on."
One rut in four miles! Yet, mirabile dictu, the road to Hergott came right up to expectations.