CHAPTER II.

ONE NIGHT IN PORT JACKSON.

Eight bells, noon. Our steamer, twenty-six days out from Talcahuano, lurched and rolled under the rapidly expiring influence of the snorting sou'-easter which had dogged us all the way across the Pacific. Ahead, clear-cut and blue in the rainwashed atmosphere, a stretch of the New South Wales coast. A point on the port bow, a little white finger pointing upward.

Sydney! The very thought of the place warmed our hearts with visions of the rest, beer, girls, picture palaces, newspapers and so forth, according to the particular bent of the individual seaman.

Magic name! The growling A.B.'s grew suddenly good-tempered, and evinced a certain alacrity in obeying orders from which nearly four weeks' bad weather had divorced them. Occasionally they even smiled. The skipper grew cheerful, and the mate (me) ceased his everlasting faultfinding, and cracked a mild joke with the men now and again--which called forth its due meed of obsequious merriment. Once he even said, "It's going to be a fine evening after all, Mac," to an engineer, who nearly fell over his doorstep with the shock of being addressed with courtesy for the first time in a month.

Heavily our old hooker wallows along, and we raise the land fast.

"Anchors all ready, Mr. Senex?" from the skipper.

"All clear, sir."

"Right! See everything ready for the pilot."

"Ay, ay, sir!"

A half-hour passes, and South Head is close aboard, the surf breaking high. Another few minutes and the "Captain Cook" slides in a piratical fashion from behind a rock and makes for us. After some difficulty, for we are light ship and rolling heavily, the pilot hops aboard.

"You're to go up to Woolwich, Cap'n. The dry dock's all ready for you. Full ahead, please. Port a bit," and we make for Watson's Bay. A little manoeuvring, then--"Stand by your anchor.... Let go!" and away goes the mudhook with a roar and a cloud of rust-dust.

In another few minutes a smart launch comes alongside, and the port medical officer mounts the side-ladder, slowly and majestically, as befits his official dignity. He's a broth of a boy all right--the biggest man I ever saw, I think. He looked about eight feet, and built in proportion. His boots would have made a London policeman green with envy, and he had a fist like a boxing-glove. Big as he was the suit he had on that day was too large, and hung on him like a purser's shirt on a handspike. A sport though, he took the rather audibly expressed surprise his appearance created in the mustered lines of the crew in good part, and proceeded to examine us for smallpox symptoms. A pause. Then the captain--"Where's the second engineer? Mr. Senex, I thought you had seen----"

"ALL right, sir. I'll go and rouse him up," and away I went.

Diving down the engineroom ladder, I find Mr. Crafter frantically tugging with a spanner at a refractory nut.

"Doctor's waiting, Crafter."

"Blast the doctor!"

"Right-o, old chap," I answered; "but the skipper sent me----"

"Tellim t' goter'ell!!" (Here the nut gave suddenly, and he sat down--hard.)

From the safe altitude of the first grating, I said sweetly, "All right, old man; I'll give him your message. Er--did it hurt?" and raced up the ladder just in time to miss the flying spanner.

Crafter came up, sweating and purple-faced, grumbling about disturbing men at important repair jobs, was pronounced free from small-pox, and instantly returned to his labours.

Medical and Customs inspection were over by 4.30 p.m., when we got under weigh, and proceeded up the harbour. Its beauties were even more enticing than usual to our sea-pickled eyes, as we slowly passed point after point, finally bringing up alongside the wharf at Woolwich Dock at tea-time. By this it was nearly calm, just a faint breeze wrinkling the placid water, and the sky cloudless. The daylight gradually merged, through dusk, into the soft radiance of a glorious full moon.

I leaned on the rail, drinking in the calm, peaceful beauty of the night. Across the water the innumerable lights and subdued hum of the city, the coloured lights of the moving shipping here and there, and the white reflection of South Head in the distance, the broad path of moonlit water, broken every now and then by a brilliant firefly of a ferry boat streaking across it. Nearer at hand, rocky, brush-covered points, romantic and inviting. Above all, and pervading everything, the subtle perfume of the faint breeze--a scent of flowers, hay, gum leaves, and warm rich earth, the very breath of the Goddess of Health. I don't know how long I stopped there, dreaming and thinking of the contrast between this haven of peace and the last month of turmoil, before I woke to the fact that I was dog-tired and had better turn in. Couldn't sleep, though. An hour or so of restless tossing about, and I was out again--the night more beautiful than ever. There was another form leaning on the gangway, pyjama'd, like myself.

"Hello, Crafter--that you? Isn't this just A1 at Lloyd's?"

"By jingo, Senex, you've said it. A chap ought to be shot for sleepin' on a night like this. What say we clear out and go up country, eh?" (with a laugh).

"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!