When I returned to New York in '57, during the panic, I met Taylor in Wall Street. He must have been in terrible need of money to keep his head above water, and he at once said to me: "Why did you charge me 7 ½ per cent commission for handling that cargo of flour in Melbourne?" I looked at him in astonishment. He had forgotten the enormous profit he had made on the shipment, and remembered now only the small matter of the commission he had been compelled to pay.
I replied that the commission was our usual charge. He told me he was buying up his own paper in the street, and was not in temporary distress. "I do not think you should have charged me more than 5 per cent commission," he said. I was disgusted at this view of a transaction that had brought him in a profit that would have been considered marvelous even by a usurer. "All right," I said, "I will give you the difference now." And I gave him a check for $2,500.
I met a large number of actors and actresses in Melbourne, for it was quite the custom as early as that for stars of the stage, whether tragedians like Edwin Booth, or dancers like Lola Montez, to make a tour of the world and take in Australia on the circuit. I was astonished to meet Booth and Laura Keene, "stranded," one day, although they had made a successful tour in England. They did not appeal to the rough audiences of Australia, and so did not have enough money to take them back to the States. It so happened that I had just bought the City of Norfolk to send to San Francisco as the pioneer of a new line, which is now thoroughly established, and making rapid passages between the two ports. I gave them free passage to San Francisco. Laura Keene frequently mentioned the fact in "asides" on the stage, but I never received a word of thanks or appreciation from Booth. Kate Hayes and Bushnell also visited Australia while I was there, and I gave them a concert and started them off on their tour.
But the greatest sensation that was created in the theatrical world of Australia during my stay was made by Lola Montez, the dancer from Madrid. She danced and pirouetted on the necks and hearts of men. The rough mining element went wild over her, and she had the wealth and rank of Melbourne at her feet. One morning she burst into my office, and called out in her quaint accent, "Is Mr. George Francis Train here? Tell him that I am his old friend from Boston, and that I have just arrived from San Francisco." She had called to make a complaint against the captain of our ship, whom she wanted us to discharge for some supposed discourtesy to her. We patched up this quarrel, and I did everything I could to insure her a successful season in Melbourne. She had a tremendous vogue, and danced before crowded houses.
One night I called at the green-room of the theater to see her, sending in my card. I had seated myself on the sofa to wait until she finished her dancing. Suddenly the door flew open, and in rushed something that looked like a great ball of feathers. This ball flew toward me and I was enveloped in a cloud of lace! The bold little dancer had thrown her foot over my head!
My life in Australia, now drawing to a close, as I had made arrangements for leaving there to continue my business operations in Japan, had been very charming and profitable. Everything was novel and strange to me, and it all made a deep and lasting impression upon my mind, which was then eagerly receptive.
I find, in recalling these impressions, that my first idea of Australia still remains the most prominent one left in my memory. Australia was truly the antipodes. Everything seemed to be reversed, a topsy-turvy land. At Botany Bay I was astonished to find the swans were black, thereby demolishing our beautiful ideas about "milk-white" swans. The birds talked, screamed, or brayed, instead of singing, and the trees shed their bark instead of their leaves. The big end of the pears was at the stem, and cherry-stones grew on the outside of the fruit. I was sitting one day in the garden of the governor-general when I thought I felt some one tap me on the shoulder. Then my coat was wrenched off my back, and I turned just in time to see it disappear down the throat of a tame Australian ostrich, called an emu. The bird had taken me for a vegetable.
Sidney Smith describes the kangaroo as an animal with the head of a rabbit, the body of a deer, a tail like a bed-post, and which, when in danger, puts its young into a pocket in its stomach. But the most marvelous of all the queer things of Australia, to my mind, was the animal that laid eggs like a hen, suckled its young like a goat, and was web-footed, like a duck. This was the duckbill, or water-mole, which the Australians called the Patybus.
I also saw in Tasmania, and on Flinder's Island, the race of men that was then considered the most remarkable on the globe, the original Tasmanian savages; and I saw, also, the most curious weapon that man has ever invented, the boomerang. Holmes has described this weapon in one of his humorous verses:
"The boomerang, which the Australian throws, Cuts its own circle, and hits you on the nose."