After we had passed the customs and changed trains and gauges at Albury the journey began to take on a new, or, rather, an old interest for me. Twenty years before I had tramped up through the bush from Melbourne to the Murray after taking French leave of the lime-juicer in which I had made my first miserable voyage from Liverpool to Australia. I had halved the fifteen shillings, with which I started, with a penniless “old chum” in exchange for his company and experience, and then turned the other seven and sixpence into about seventy pounds, and, on the strength of my wealth, travelled back to Melbourne first-class. Now I was doing it again, and as the express swung past the little station, which I had reached after an all-night tramp across the ranges, I found it to be a good deal less changed than I was. Indeed, save for a few new houses scattered about the clearing, it was just as it was when I pitched my swag down on a bench before the hotel, put my blackened billy beside it, and ordered my last breakfast in the bush. At Melbourne we put up at Menzies, and one afternoon I took my friend down to Spencer Street to pay a visit to the hotel that I had last stayed in—the Sailors’ Home. Here again nothing was altered. The very cubicle I slept in twenty years before looked as though I had only just turned out of the little blue-and-white counterpaned bed, and outside my yester-self, to coin the only word that seems to fit, was loafing about in beerless and penniless idleness “waiting for a ship.” “There I am as I was,” I said; “how do you like me?” “Not a little bit, Griff,” he replied in the terse speech of his fortuitously native land. “I guess if you were to come like that among the friends you have now you’d look mighty like a dirty deuce in a new deck of cards.” The next morning I went over to Williamstown to have a look at the scene of my old escapade, the only one, by the way, which ever brought me into unpleasant relations with the police, for in those days breaking your indentures was a matter of imprisonment. Happily they did not catch me. I found the old Railway Hotel, known, aforetime to officers and apprentices as the Hen and Chickens, since it was kept by a dear old Scotchwoman assisted by four charming daughters with one or all of whom every apprentice in port was supposed to be in love. It was through the kindly offices of one of them that I had saved my kit and dodged the police.