I have brought two somewhat curious memories out of our brief friendship. I had not been talking to him for an hour before twenty years of hard-won education and culture of a sort disappeared, and I found myself thinking the thoughts and speaking the speech of the forecastle and the sailors’ boarding-house: thoughts direct and absolutely honest; and speech terse, blunt, and equally honest, for among the toilers of the sea it is not permitted to use language to conceal one’s thoughts. The man who is found out doing that hears himself dissected and discussed with blistering irony garnished with epithets which stick like barbed arrows, and of such was our conversation on the _St. Antoine_ and the _St. Louis_; not exactly drawing-room-talk, but of marvellous adaptability to the true description of men and things. On the morning of our release as we were taking our after-breakfast walk and looking for the last time on that hatefully beautiful little cove at North Head, I said to him: “Well, I’ll have to stop being a shell-back to-night, and get into civilisation again.” “I suppose you will,” he said; and then he proceeded to describe civilisation generally in a way that would have healthily shocked many most excellent persons. I thoroughly agreed with him, and, curiously enough, although our experiences had been none of the most pleasant, and I had had anything but a succession of picnics during my stay in New Caledonia, I was already beginning to feel sorry that I had to go back to civilisation and dine in dress-clothes and a hard-boiled shirt—which brings me to my second memory. [Illustration: The Quarantine Station, North Head, Sydney.] For nearly a month we had been living on food that a Kaffir in the Kimberley compounds would turn his nose up at, and for fourteen days on board the _St. Louis_ we had eaten dirt of many French descriptions. Everything was dirty. Not even the insides of the loaves were clean. The galley, where the disguised abominations were cooked, was so foul that a whiff of its atmosphere on passing was enough to spoil the appetite of a starving man. The cook was to match. The steward who waited on us was willing and obliging, but remiss in the matter of washing both himself and his crockery. The chief steward on French ships is called _maître d’hôtel_, and by this title we addressed him. On shore we should have said “here, you,” or something of that sort, but on the _St. Louis_ he was a person of importance, for he had the key of the store-room and was open to judicious bribery. We had worried through our last dirty _déjeûner_ on board, and preparations were being made for getting the anchors up. The captain and the mate had each put on a clean collar, and the chief engineer was wringing his hands and dancing about the forecastle because the donkey-engine had gone wrong and only fizzed feebly when it should have been getting the cable in.