"Dunno about that; but are you game for a stroll ashore?" I asked.
"Right you are!" And away we went.
We met nobody. There was no Caliban of a John Hop to point out the impropriety of our appearance on a public road in pyjamas and carpet slippers, and we walked on up Hunter's Hill way, Lane Cove glimmering through the trees on one side and the sweet-scented brush on the other. We fairly bathed in the beautiful night, plucked handfuls of gum leaves and buried our noses in them. We wandered on until the declining moon warned us it was time to get back. We reached the ship again about 3 a.m., and had no difficulty in getting to sleep this time.
That glorious night! It will live in my memory, for then and there was born the idea—not so long afterwards acted on—to say good-bye to the sea life and crowded old England, and make a home for myself in this wide, free young land. I have never regretted doing so.
I have had seven years of the hardest kind of pioneering, in a heavy scrub district, and am not so very well off, financially, now; yet, if I knew I was to have another similar period on top of this, and I could have a good competence living in any other country in the world by asking for it to-morrow, I'd choose Australia and the pioneering without a second's hesitation. And that's what I think about it!
CHAPTER III.
Good-Bye to the Sea.
Again we were approaching the Australian coast. On this trip from Valparaiso we had experienced fine weather, for a wonder, and made (for us) a record run of twenty-five days. The weather had been beautifully fine.
A faint breeze right ahead brought us a heart-quickening perfume—that smell of the land which even the most desert place seems to possess, and which only the "deep-waterman" knows how to appreciate to the full. Your landlubber's nose couldn't detect it. As I climbed to the bridge after tea, and took a good long sniff of it, I determined that this would be my last trip. To the devil with ploughing the raging main! It would be ploughing the flowering earth after this, I thought.