We had already paid one visit to Pinkenbar to engage a porter, a lean, tall, weather-beaten old man, selected on the wharf, to bring a truck to the station and convey our luggage to the boat. When we arrived and got out of the train with a litter of small baggage, the first thing we saw was a large American trunk tightly jammed half in and half out of the window of the guard's van, the guard having got so much of our luggage between himself and the door that he could not get it open. Fortunately, however, our porter from the wharf was on the spot in every sense of the word. He first shouted encouraging directions to the guard, and then by the exercise of brute force thrust the trunk back through the window without doing any serious damage to that perturbed official. Eventually, with the help of another man, we got under way and proceeded to the landing-stage. The rough intervening ground was overgrown with tall blue thistles with flowers like pale yellow anemones; they looked as incongruous as if someone had stuck them on. After seeing our luggage over the ship's side and consigning it to the steward, we returned to Brisbane in search of lunch and recovered our calm, for the boat did not sail till towards evening.
It was after lunch on this last day that we saw
