tay for a
while at the Poizo, or Government rest-house, which was about half-way.
One gets tolerable Madeira there.

It was eight or half-past when we came down into Funchal under a moon
which seemed to cast as strongly-marked shadows as the very sun itself.
The rain of the morning had long ago passed away, and the air was
warm--indeed, almost close--after the last part of the ride on the
plateau, which began at night-time to grow dim with ragged wreaths of
mist. Our horses were so glad to accomplish the journey that they
trotted down the steep stony streets, which rang loudly to their iron
hoofs. When we stopped at the stable I think I was almost as glad as
they; for, after all, even to an Englishman with his country's
reputation to support, twelve or thirteen hours in the saddle are
somewhat tiring. And though I was much pleased to have seen more of the
Ilha da Madeira than most visitors, I remembered that I had not been on
horseback for nearly five years.

A PONDICHERRY BOY

When I first went out to the Australian colonies in 1876 in the
_Hydrabad_, a big sailing ship registered as belonging to Bombay, I had
a very curious time of it, take it altogether. It was my first real
experience of the outside world, and the hundred and two days the
_Hydrabad_ took from Liverpool to Melbourne made a very valuable piece
of schooling for a greenhorn. I was a steerage passenger, and the
steerage of a sailing vessel twenty-five years ago was something to see
and smell. Perhaps it is no better now, but then it was certainly very
bad. The food was poor, the quarters dirty, the accommodation far too
limited to swing even the traditional cat in, and my companions were for
the most part Irishmen of the lowest and poorest peasant class. In these
days I was quite fresh from home and was rather particular in my tastes.
Some of that has been knocked out of me since. A great deal of it was
knocked out of me in that passage.

Yet it was, take it altogether, an astonishingly fertile trip for a
young and green lad who was not yet nineteen. The _Hydrabad_ usually
made a kind of triangular voyage. She took emigrants and a general cargo
to Melbourne, loaded horses there for Australia, and came back to
England once more with anything going in the shape of cargo to be picked
up in the Hooghly. She carried a Calashee crew, that is, a crew of mixed
Orientals, and among them were native Hindoos, Klings, Malays,
Sidi-boys. In those days I