weather—a favour or a force of nature to be enjoyed or defied. But to be commented upon, much less complained of? Hardly. And as fate had willed it, the worn though unwearied sea-king had seen fit to heave anchor, so to speak, and moor his vessels—for he owned more than one—in this the fairest haven of the southern main. Once before in youth had he seen and never forgotten the frowning headlands, beyond which lay so peerless a harbour, such wealth of anchorage, so mild a clime, so boundless an extent of virgin soil; from which he, "a picked man of countries," even then prophesied wealth, population, and empire in the future.
Here, then, a generation later, he brought his newly-wedded wife. Here was I, Hilary Telfer, destined to see the light.
From the mid-city street of Sydney is but a stone's throw to the wharves and quays, magnificent water-ways in which those ocean palaces of the present day, the liners of the P and O. and the Orient, lie moored, and but a plank divides the impatient passenger from the busy mart. Not that such stately ships were visitors in my school-boy days. Sydney was then a grass-grown, quiet seaport, boasting some fifty thousand inhabitants, with a fleet of vessels small in size and of humble tonnage.
But, though unpretending of aspect, to the eager-hearted, imaginative school-boy they were rich as Spanish galleons. For were they not laden with uncounted treasure, weighed down with wealth beyond the fabled hoards of the pirates of the Spanish Main, upon whose dark deeds and desperate adventures I had so greedily feasted?
Each vessel that swept through the Heads at midnight, or marked the white-walled mansions and pine-crowned promontories rise faintly out of the pearl-hued dawn, was for me a volume filled with romance and mystery. Sat there not on the forecastle of that South Sea whaler, silent,
