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The day after the wedding Mrs Mazere set out for her daughter Isabel's at Mungee, a good seventy miles away over the spur of the Great Dividing Range in a slightly south-western direction from Bool Bool. The bride and groom were to escort her and spend a couple of nights at Mungee as a wedding holiday.

If Mrs Mazere had had to supplement Charlotte's bridal deficiencies, the Pools had to fill gaps in Philip Mazere's resources, which were limited owing to his father's disinheriting propensity. This they willingly did. Bert, Charlotte's eldest brother, a youth of seventeen and already one of the most resourceful, daring and accomplished bushmen in those parts, was to conduct the party. Bert, who had never had a collar and rarely a shoe on him till Charlotte's wedding, was only a shade less knowledgeable in bush lore than the Aborigines, from whom he had received some tuition. To lose, drown, freeze or frighten him in all the south-eastern portion of the unconquered continent which had cradled him and been his playground was considered inconceivable. Any stream swimmable by a horse he could ford by that means, he could bottom holes that most men were afraid to bathe in, he could snare if not shoot anything that ran on the earth or flew above it, and he could seize deadly serpents by the tail and dash out their life on a tree trunk—or if no tree or stick was at hand, he could despatch them with whip or surcingle. And though these and a score of other accomplishments were common to all bushmen worthy of the name, Bert's prowess was already legendary.

Out of consideration for Mrs Mazere, two days were to be given to the journey. Charlotte, in natural circumstances riding like a boy, was as equal to her ninety miles in one sitting as any Bert or Philip, but the gentility of her new status and of becoming a Mazere as well meant demotion to a lady's two-horned saddle and a flowing Queen Victoria riding habit that had to be held up nearly every mile of the way owing to boggy passages or scrub. Now she rode as sedately as the mother of a large family.

Bert and his heelers chased the packhorses ahead of the riders. One pack contained the tents, another the personal valises, and perched on top of Mrs Mazere's packhorse, Curlew, was an ingenious cage containing a little bantam hen. This was one of the things the Pools had and the Mazeres had not. The tireless Bert carried in his hand a clutch of bantam eggs packed in paper and tied in a coloured handkerchief. The eggs could not be carried by packhorse, because they might have become addled. If a broody hen were forthcoming at Mungee, it was proposed to hatch from these a spouse to assist in increase and multiplication.

"Let us each take a turn with the eggs. You'll be tired, Bert," said Mrs Mazere.

"No fear! I'll sling 'em round my neck when I want to use my gun." He had a finely kept gun on top of one of the packs, and powder and shot flasks attached to his saddle. While the Mazere establishment could be relied upon to send forth sleeping apparel and fine linen, the Pool abode could be depended upon to produce the best firearms, spurs, bits and bridles, and was never without a charge of ammunition or wadding and caps.

The beginning of the journey was across open tussock land alive with the purling streams from which twenty rivers take their rise. From a height on the Pool run, a quartette of these streams could be seen forking away in the flashing, exhilarating sunshine of the perfect November morning.

Kish-swisk! went the horses' hoofs, well above the fetlocks in the bogs of the springheads, the mountain horses plunging in confidently. But one old packhorse who had been raised down the country was feeling his way like a pedestrian on thin ice until he was pushed in by Bert.

"Look at old Cootamundra—scared he'll sink! His great boats of hoofs ought to keep him up though!"

Across virgin country by bridle tracks well known to their leader, the party progressed enjoyably, cantering girth-deep in flowers on the plains and slowing up on the ridges that were crowned with snow gums, blackbutt, ribbon gums and taller eucalypts. At noon they halted to boil the billy at Dead Horse Flat, so named because of the number of carcases found there after a particularly severe winter. A number of the skeletons still remained among the flowers and tussocks. The tiny flat, like a lawn amid the timber, lay in the bend of a creek bordered with shrubs all in bloom, and their perfume mingled with a music that might have been learned in paradise.

While Bert eased all the animals of pack or saddle and let them have a mouthful of grass, Philip made the fire and Charlotte produced the tucker bags. Mrs Mazere was made to rest in state. They lunched heartily on meats from yesterday's feast and then, after Mrs Mazere was persuaded to take a sleep and while Bert saddled up again, Charlotte and Philip took a lovers' stroll through the fields of flowers.

With her multifarious activities and vigorous brood of children, with scarce a twelvemonth between some of them, it was long since Mrs Mazere had had a holiday, and right royally she appreciated it. The inauguration of Charlotte into her family thus began with a pleasant adventure, the memory of which ever lingered with her. It was like one of the "larks" of her brief girlhood, before the pack-saddle of marriage in pioneer conditions settled heavily on her withers.

On they rode through the long afternoon, the dazzling sunshine beaming down in golden shafts between the tall tree tops and glancing off their mighty trunks, snow white, lily graceful, strong as steel, a hundred feet without a branch, regal as marble pillars—Nature's sublime cathedral, a hundred miles square.

"We'll give Flea Creek the slip, I reckon," observed Bert as the afternoon shadows began to lengthen. "I camped there one night when I was after cattle and was eaten alive." Riding on ahead of the party, he reached a break in the ranges and selected another stream similarly lovely but, mercifully, without fleas. By the time the rest of the party came in, he had the camp fires blazing. Here, under the lee of mighty granite rocks rearing up like the ruins of a mediaeval castle, Philip Mazere pitched his snow-white bridal tent between two stately saplings standing like pages to the forest monarchs about them. For a couch, he chopped soft springy boughs of the ti-tree, laden with starry perfumed bloom like a cascade of fine lace in a bridal veil, and then scattered some purple aromatic senna amongst the boughs. The saddle seats were placed for pillows, and then were spread the brave red blankets of the pioneer.

What bridal bower or tour could equal this, when all the world seemed young!

The tents had been brought in honour of the ladies and the bridal nature of the journey. On their own, Philip and Bert would have covered the distance without camping at all or, if compelled to camp, would have simply wrapped themselves in blankets or coats. If it rained and no cave was available, a sheet of stringybark tomahawked from the nearest tree and raised on rocks would make a shelter.

Bert erected Mrs Mazere's tent at a little distance from the bridal tent on a site carefully selected as free from ants' nests and snake holes.

"You know, that old parson is a silly old codger," Bert confided to Mrs Mazere as he cut the ti-tree for her couch. "When I was fetching him to the weddin', I left him to unsaddle the horses and make the fire, and I'm jiggered if he wasn't sitting on a bulldog ants' nest when I came back. I got them off of his pants before they got inside or crikey, wouldn't he have jumped into the middle of next week!"

"He has not had much colonial experience," observed Mrs Mazere, laughing.

For supper, Bert prepared a treat in hot johnny cakes which he cooked on the coals. The dogs regaled themselves on kangaroo rats. At dusk Bert stole a little higher up the creek to a swamp, returning with a fine black duck whose satin green wing feathers were soon decorating the hats of the party. Then, after he had taken a look at the horses, tied up one or two of the dogs and made up a number of fires to keep away dingoes, he surrounded himself with his pack-saddles and stores and stretched out near a tent fly at the flap of Mrs Mazere's tent to be close by in case she should want him. The little bantam hen was set between himself and her, for fear of a marauding native cat.

The little party lay secure from visitors, for the straggling remnants of the Aboriginal tribes had not yet returned south from their winter retreats. The world was their own, and what a world! A thousand miles of unspoiled forest distilled an aromatic fragrance chaste as a puritan heaven, and above the regal tree tops the white stars blazed like diamonds. Across the dome spread the great white way where long ago an old woman had gone to heaven, spilling her pail of milk as she went.