The intonation of his voice, his solemn almost deprecatory smile, set me off and I laughed till the tears ran down my face.
"I say, what's so funny?"
"Me! I am!... in your long-tailed coat."
"If I was on the rocks like you I wouldn't see anything to laugh about."
At the shipping office, the place mentioned in the advertisement, in the dimly lit, grey-paned room, there sat one lone, pasty-faced, old-youngish clerk on the traditional clerk's high stool. But he proved lively beyond his appearance.
"My God! do look who's here!" he exclaimed facetiously, and then, rapidly, without giving me room for a biting word in return, "no, there's no use now, my boy ... we took on all the cattlemen we needed by ten o'clock this morning."
I walked away, disconsolate. I bore on my back my swagman's blanket. In the blanket I carried a change of shirts the sky-pilot had given me, a razor, a toothbrush, a Tennyson, and a Westcott and Hort's Greek New Testament with glossary, that I had stolen from a bookstall in Sydney.
I found out where the dock was, nevertheless, where the men were loafing about in groups, waiting to be taken out to the South Sea King ... which lay in the harbour.