st miserable. A forlorn,
stunted, hook-visaged mortal he was too; one of those whom you know
at a glance to have been tried hard and long in the furnace of
affliction. His face was an absolute puzzle; though sharp and sallow,
it had neither the wrinkles of age nor the smoothness of youth; so
that for the soul of me, I could hardly tell whether he was
twenty-five or fifty.

But to his history. In his better days, it seems he had been a
journeyman baker in London, somewhere about Holborn; and on Sundays
wore a Hue coat and metal buttons, and spent his afternoons in a
tavern, smoking his pipe and drinking his ale like a free and easy
journeyman baker that he was. But this did not last long; for an
intermeddling old fool was the ruin of him. He was told that London
might do very well for elderly gentlemen and invalids; but for a lad
of spirit, Australia was the Land of Promise. In a dark day Ropey
wound up his affairs and embarked.

Arriving in Sydney with a small capital, and after a while waxing snug
and comfortable by dint of hard kneading, he took unto himself a
wife; and so far as she was concerned, might then have gone into the
country and retired; for she effectually did his business. In short,
the lady worked him woe in heart and pocket; and in the end, ran off
with his till and his foreman. Ropey went to the sign of the Pipe and
Tankard; got fuddled; and over his fifth pot meditated suicide--an
intention carried out; for the next day he shipped as landsman aboard
the Julia, South Seaman.

The ex-baker would have fared far better, had it not been for his
heart, which was soft and underdone. A kind word made a fool of him;
and hence most of the scrapes he got into. Two or three wags, aware
of his infirmity, used to "draw him out" in conversation whenever the
most crabbed and choleric old seamen were present.

To give an instance. The watch below, just waked from their sleep, are
all at breakfast; and Ropey, in one corner, is disconsolately
partaking of its delicacies. "Now, sailors newly waked are no
cherubs; and therefore not a word is spoken, everybody munching his
biscuit, grim and unshaven. At this juncture an affable-looking
scamp--Flash Jack--crosses the forecastle, tin can in hand, and seats
himself beside the land-lubber.

"Hard fare this, Ropey," he begins; "hard enough, too, for them that's
known better and lived in Lun'nun. I say now, Ropey, s'posing you
were back to Holborn this morning, what woul