ship who is not allowed to land, who is rejected by the guardians of
this Paradise on earth, because he has an insufficient number of
shillings, or a weakness in his lungs. The bouquets, automobiles,
sumptuous luncheons, and things do not, one may apprehend, figure
largely in the first impressions of these last uncelebrated people,
though their impressions may embrace quite as much of the reality
concerned as do those of the famous; and, it may be, a good deal more.

Broadly speaking, and as far as outlines go, I was in the position of
one who sees England for the first time. There were, I know, subtle
differences; yet, broadly speaking, that was my position. The native-born
Australian, approaching the land of his fathers for the first
time, comes to it with a mass of cherished lore and associations at
least equal in weight and effect to my childhood's knowledge and
experience of England. He very often comes also to relatives. I came,
not only having no claim upon any single creature in these islands,
but having no faintest knowledge of any one among them. I carried two
letters of introduction: one from Mr. Foster to a London newspaper
editor whom he knew only by correspondence, and the other from Mr.
Rawlence to a painter, who just then (though I knew it not) was in
Algiers.

The purser paid me my five pounds before I left the ship, wished me
luck, and vowed, as his habit was in saying good-bye to people, that
he was very glad he had met me. And then I got into the train with my
luggage, and set out for Fenchurch Street and the conquest of London.

The passengers had all disappeared long since. England swallows up
shiploads of them almost every hour without winking. My arrival
differed in various ways from theirs. For instance, I had had no
leisure in which to think about it, to anticipate it, until I was
actually seated in the train, bound for Fenchurch Street. They had
been arriving, in a sense, ever since we left the Mediterranean; after
a passage, by the way, resembling in every particular all other
passages from Australia to England in mail steamers.

To be precise, I think the first impression received by me was that
the England I had come to was a quite astonishingly dingy land. The
people seemed to me to have a dingy pallor, like the table-linen of
the cheaper sort of lodging-house. They looked, not so much ill as
unwashed, not so much poor as cross, hipped, tired, worried, and
annoyed about something. The