We had a fairly fine passage across to New South Wales and in a week sighted Sydney Heads.
We dropped anchor out in the stream, and the old passenger went off in a tender. He had got over his adventure, and shook his umbrella good-naturedly at the boatswain, who grinned at him over the fo’c’sle head.
I was pleased to see the lovely shores of Sydney harbour again. That same night I stood on deck and saw the beautiful sea-board city rising grandly, with her spires and walls, as moonlight crept over the horizon.
Sydney by night is a sight that makes you easily understand the Cornstalks’ pride in their beloved city. Next day we berthed by Circular Quay. It was fearfully hot, real dog-day weather. Hospitality abounds in Sydney, and one never need feel lonely, for on stepping on to the wharf I was once more enthusiastically welcomed by an immense crowd of mosquitoes! We can joke after, but I did not see life then as I do now.
How I recall it all, my beautiful youth—aye, as a woman’s heart secretly remembers her first love, and gazing back feels the old passion, sees the rosy horizon of dreams, the absolute certitude of old vows, spoken by that voice that expressed all the happy Universe! Yes, so do I remember the sleepless, hungry nights under the stars that shone over the trees, nights radiant with dreams!
CHAPTER XII
Circular Quay—Figure-heads—A Derelict’s Night—The World’s Worst Men—Off to New Zealand—A Violin Prodigy—In the New Zealand Bush—My Maori Girl—A Pied Piper—A Recipe for the Happy Vagabond—The Philosophical Sun-downer
I HAD lived in Sydney five or six years before, when I had run away from a ship in Brisbane and had come across to Sydney full of dreams and hope. I was then only fourteen years of age. How vividly I recall those days and nights.
Once more I stand on old Circular Quay and seem again to breathe through my dreams the turbulent poetry of emigrant sin and sorrow; for ah! how many cargoes of human lives have been brought across the world and then dumped down on the quay. I dream on, and see the silent wool clipper-ships lying alongside the wharfs, the tall masts and long yards at rest beneath the sky. The fine carved figure-heads look alive, their grand, allegorical faces gazing, their outstretched arms pointing, towards Sydney’s silent streets. They seem to express dimly to me some substance of great poetic thought, as though I stood on the mysterious shores of the heaven whence those spiritual minds that conceived them drew their inspiration, when with creating brain and moving fingers they carved such sad, wonderful faces; faces destined to be exiled for years on voyages across wild oceans.