June 25.—­We commenced our journey early, but had not gone far before the rain began to fall, and continued until ten o’clock.  Occasionally the showers came down in perfect torrents, rendering us very cold and miserable, and giving the whole country the appearance of a large puddle.  We were literally walking in water; and by stooping down, almost any where as we went along, could have dipped a pint pot half full.  It was dreadful work to travel thus in the water, and with the wet from the long brush soaking our clothes for so many hours; but there was no help for it, as we could not find a blade of grass for our horses, to enable us to halt sooner.  The surface of the whole country was stony and barren in the extreme.  A mile from our camp, we passed a small salt lake on our left; and at fifteen miles more, came to a valley with some wiry grass in it.  At this I halted, as there was no prospect of getting better grass, and the water left by the rains was abundant.  The latter, though it had only fallen an hour or two, was in many places quite salt, and the best of it brackish, so thoroughly saline was the nature of the soil upon which it had been deposited.

As the afternoon proved fine, I traced down the valley we were upon to its junction with a stream flowing over a granite bed, about a mile from our camp.  In this the pools of water were large, deep, and brackish, but there was plenty of fresh water left by the rains in holes of the rocks upon its banks.  As, however, there did not appear to be better grass upon the larger channel, than in the valley where we were, I did not think it worth while to remove our camp.

June 26.—­I determined to remain in camp today to rest the horses, and to enable me to arrange their loads, so that Wylie and I might again ride occasionally.  We had both walked for the last eleven days, during which we had made good a distance of 134 miles from Rossiter Bay, and as I calculated we ought under ordinary circumstances to reach the Sound in ten days more, I thought that we might occasionally indulge in riding, and relieve ourselves from the great fatigue we had hitherto been subject to, especially as the horses were daily improving in strength and condition.

Whilst I was engaged in making the necessary preparations, and throwing away some things which I thought we could dispense with, such as our bucket, some harness, ammunition, cooking utensils, and sundry other things, Wylie took the rifle, and went down to the watercourse to shoot.  On his return in the afternoon he produced four teal and a black swan, as the produce of his day’s sport; he had, however, shot away every charge of shot from the belt, which had been filled on board the Mississippi, and held three pounds and a half, besides three ball cartridges; how often he fired at the swan before he got it I could never discover, but I heard shot after shot as fast as he could load and fire for some time, and he himself acknowledged to firing at it seven times, but I suspect it to have been nearer twice seven.