came below the bend of my knees. I laughed. The
sky-pilot did not.

Finally he stepped back, cracked a solemn smile, and remarked, "You _do_
look rather odd!"

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.

At the entrance to the pier I met a powerful, chunky lad who was called
"Nippers," he said. He, too, was going with the _South Sea King_ ... not
as a cattleman, but as stowaway. He urged me to stow away along with
him. And he gave me, unimaginatively, my name of "Skinny," which the
rest called me during the voyage.

* * * * *

We strolled up to the men and joined them.

"Hello, kids!"

"Hello, fellows! Are you the cattlemen for the _South Sea King_?"

"Right you are, my lad ... we are that!"

The men went on with their arguing. They were fighting the Boer War all
over again with their mouths. Some of them had been in it. Many of them
had tramped in South Africa. They shouted violently, profanely, at each
other at the tops of their voices, contending with loud assertions and
counter-assertions, as if about to engage in an all-round fight.

Several personal altercations sprang up, the points of the debate
forgotten ... I couldn't discover what it was about, my