Page:Rambles in Australia (IA ramblesinaustral00grewiala).pdf/25

Rh Hours went by. Those of us who had hastened over lunch and wrestled impatiently with trunks and hold-alls that be they attacked ever so early never can be packed at leisure, wandered about the decks, finding that they had lost their friendliness with their deck chairs, and had become as little homelike as a railway platform. The deck-steward, who had become merely a deck-steward instead of philosopher and friend, recovered some of his old standing by telling us that we were to have an early dinner on board, after all. But it was an empty meal. We so much desired to be gone. And at last we were. The sunset had faded, the swift dusk had deepened into night, when at last we went down the gangway and stood in Australia It was Australia, though beneath our feet were the planks and rails of a wharf. The French have a proverb that at night all cats are grey. This wharf, might it not have been the wharf at Liverpool or Tilbury? Not quite. There was the Southern Cross overhead; and in the warm darkness there was a something—something that was not England.

The party that had been so long companions split up and were scattered. The writer of these lines became for an hour or so more single than any of them, for business took him at once into