The rest of the party arrived just before nightfall, and, searching the hut, found a paper of tea, and an old tin pot in which they cooked some, and then eating frogs, etc., for their supper, we all laid down to sleep, and in the silence of the night I rendered fervent thanks to my Maker who had again brought us so near the haven where we would be." OPINIONS OF THE MEN REGARDING THE FATE OF OUR OTHER PARTY.
April 21.
It had rained all night but we had been a little sheltered by the hut; though from the state of anxiety we were in sleep did not visit our eyes.
This was the first time since I had been out that I had slept so near the men as to be able to overhear their conversation; but the rain forced us all to seek the shelter of the same little hut, and I thus gathered the different stories that they narrated to one another.

Their speculations and conjectures naturally ran upon our absent comrades; some imagined that they were within a day or two's march of us, but another party held firmly to the opinion that we should never see them more.
SUPERSTITIONS OF MY MEN.
They could give no apparently satisfactory reason for holding this opinion, and, as there was evidently some deep mystery connected with it, I kept on pressing my servant Coles in order to induce him to tell me whence it arose.

At last it came out that Mr.Walker had had a dream, when we were on the shores of Shark Bay and before we had commenced our return home, that some dreadful misfortune had befallen us and that Mr.
Smith, Thomas Ruston, and he himself, were endeavouring to make the Isle of France in a boat, when Mr.Smith died, and the remaining two had eaten his body.

Mr.Walker had, with the utmost imprudence, related this dream to some of the men, and they, with that superstition which is so common amongst sailors and Englishmen of the lower orders, had attached a great degree of importance to it; many circumstances which had hitherto been unexplained to me now flashed upon my mind; poor Mr.Smith had been very ill at the time Mr.Walker had related this inauspicious dream, and at that period an extraordinary degree of despondency had crept over him, so much so that some of the men imagined he had become deranged.

When also we were working our way down the eastern coast of Shark Bay in the boats others of the party had got into a very desponding state, one of whom, Henry Woods, had even gone so far as to tell me when I remonstrated with him on this point that he knew that the greater part of us wore doomed, and that our lives were worth nothing.
My anxiety for those I had left behind me now increased, and about an hour and a half before daylight I started for Perth with Imbat, leaving the others to follow as rapidly as they could, and telling them that I would have food ready for them at Williams's cottage, who was the settler living farthest north from Perth.