serenaded us as we worked at night; what they live upon is not quite clear, unless it be spinifex rats.  There were other small rats in the locality, two of which the dwarf had for supper—­plucked, warmed upon the ashes, torn in pieces by his long nails and eaten; an unpleasant meal to witness, and the partaker of it badly needed a finger-bowl, for his hands and beard were smeared with blood.  He did not take kindly to salt beef, for his teeth were not fit for hard work, as he pointed out to us; and salt beef is not by any means easy to masticate.  As a rule the blacks have such splendid teeth that the dwarf’s case is remarkable, seeing that he was not at all an old man.

[* Note:  A native bark “portmanteau,” brought back from this locality, was opened at Newstead Abbey and found to contain—­

1.  Plumes of hawks’ and crows’ feathers. 2.  Neck-bands of opossum wool. 3.  String bracelets. 4.  Fragments of quartz, suitable for spear and chisel heads. 5.  Fragments of sandstone, for making red paint. 6.  Message-stick. 7.  A stick 12 inches long, wrapped in downy feathers and greasy string; on this was wound a great length of human-hair string, forming a bobbin-shaped article, the use of which I do not know.  I have now three portmanteaus still unopened.]

The Dwarf Well had a better supply than any we had seen, and it is possible that there is some soakage into it from the surrounding country.  It lies nearly five miles south of a low range of hills, the highest point of which bears 1 degree from it; to the North a sand-ridge, to the South a spinifex plain, six miles wide, then more ridges.  I make its position to be lat. 22 degrees 19 minutes, long. 128 degrees 16 minutes.  On the plain to the south are one or two small outcrops of ironstone and quartz, sticking up out of the sand, as if some hills other than sandstone had existed, and become buried by the all-spreading sand.  I carved C on a tall mulga-tree close to the well.

May 9th we left the well on a Southerly course, and were soon amongst the ridges, which continued for the next two days.  The night of the 11th, having skirted a line of rough cliffs, we camped about three miles North of a very prominent single hill, which I named Mount Webb, after W. F. Webb, Esq., of Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire.  As the sun rose that morning the mirage of a lake of apparently great size was visible for 90 degrees of the horizon—­that is, from East round to South.  Neither from the cliffs that we skirted, nor from Mount Webb, was any lake visible, but it is more than probable that a large salt lake exists in this locality, possibly connecting, in a broken line, Lake White and Lake Macdonald.  A mirage sometimes appears in exactly the opposite direction from that in which the lake lies, but I noticed when standing on the Stansmore Range that as the sun rose Lake White was clearly visible, whilst when the sun had risen a few degrees above the horizon