"I hardly cared now to meet my old associates, much less my old masters. They had warned me in my overweening pride, I spurned their warning, and now I was crushed and hopeless.
"I believe to this day that I took my punishment like a man, I did not even pretend to laugh and treat my discomfiture lightly; so many of my friends would have stuck to me, and assisted me up again once more. But I shook the dust of London from my feet, and went away once more into the country to meditate and think. There still was hope for me. I was young, why should I mourn?
"The moth that tried to reach the star was able to fly again next evening, though it never could be the same moth as before. I had aimed at a too high ideal. I thought I had almost reached it. I fell. But I should rise again. Yes; but never the same man.
"I should leave this country, however and begin life anew in some far distant clime, and—so I vowed—endeavour to climb the ladder of fame one step at a time, instead of foolishly trying to rush it as I had done.
"And now I did the only wise thing I had yet done in my life. I took the little remains of my fortune—it consisted only of hundreds now—and placed it in a bank, keeping but enough to last me with economy a year. Then I left my native land, taking ship for the Antipodes as a steerage passenger. I even changed my name, so determined was I to forget all my past life.
"There was one portion of it, however, I never could forget, and that was the short but happy time I had spent during my convalescence in the little village, and the humble fisher lassie's last tearful looks of adieu. That would be the loadstone that should draw me back to Britain if anything ever could.
"But I became strangely enamoured of a sea life and of ships and sailor men. We had a long, dreary passage out around the Cape in a sailing vessel, and before I had been out a fortnight I asked permission of the captain, and obtained it too, to go before the mast.
"Perhaps I had found my vocation at last. I almost believed I had, for in a month's time there was scarcely any part of a seaman's duty I could not perform, and before we reached Australia I was dubbed a sailor.
"I had been a favourite with my messmates, and even with the few passengers aft, and I believe all were sorry to part with me.
"But the gold fever was then at its height, and what more natural than I should catch it? Not all at once, however. I stayed around Sydney for a time. I managed to beat up several newspaper men and artists like myself. But this work was all too slow, the remuneration too small, for me.