th the shipping company's
manager.

Three months went slowly by. And then one morning a laconic note
reached me from the shipping-office.

'Could you do a bit of clerking in a purser's office? If so, please
see me to-day.'

It appeared that the assistant purser of one of the mail-boats had
died while on the passage between Melbourne and Sydney. The company
preferred to fill such vacancies in England, and so a temporary
clerical assistant for the purser would be shipped. Would I care to
undertake it for a five-pound note and my passage?

Forty-eight hours later I had said good-bye to Sydney friends, and was
installed at a desk in the purser's office on board the _Orimba_. I
had twenty-two pounds and ten shillings in my trunk, and the promise
of a five-pound note when the steamer should reach London. It was a
kind of outsetting upon my great adventure quite different from that
which I had planned. But it was an outsetting, and a better one than I
had expected, for I had been prepared to work my passage as a deck-hand
or steward.

And so it fell out that when I did actually leave Australia I was too
busy at my clerking, and at inventing soporific answers to the mostly
irrelevant inquiries of more or less distracted passengers, to catch a
glimpse of the land disappearing below the horizon--the land in which
I had spent the most formative years of my life--or to spare a thought
for any such matter as sea-sickness.

MANHOOD--ENGLAND: FIRST PERIOD

I

Of late years the printers have given us reams and reams of first
impressions of such world centres as London and New York. Not to
mention the army of unknown globe-trotters and writers, celebrities of
every sort and kind have recorded their impressions. I always smile
when my eyes fall upon such writings; and, generally, I recall,
momentarily at all events, some aspect of my own arrival in England as
purser's clerk on board the _Orimba_.

When I read, for example, the celebrity's first impressions of New
York--a confused blend of bouquets, automobiles, newspaper
interviewers, incredibly high buildings, sumptuous luncheons, barbaric
lavishness, bad road surfaces, frenetic hospitality, wild expenditure
of paper money--I think it would be more interesting perhaps,
certainly more instructive, to have the first impressions of the
immigrant, who lands with five pounds, and it may be a wife and a
child or two. Then there is the immigrant from the same end of the