Our life in Adelaide loading for home was enjoyable. There were many vessels in port also bound home, and there was a certain amount of _camaraderie_ among the various ships’ apprentices, but it seemed to me there was always a certain number of them who walked about thanking their Creator that they were not as other men were. In other words they aspired to take rank as from the ship in which they served, and when it came to a near thing between two ships of nearly equal merit, a skysail, on a fitted flying jib-boom, or a patent pump, or some such item was quite sufficient to establish a superiority which would be insisted upon with all necessary vigour. What it may be to-day I know not, but ship worship was a very strong feeling among young seamen at the time of which I am writing, and it ran high in the crews of such ships as the _Orient_, _Murray_, _Connatto_, _Goolwa_, and others, even including that very respectable old vessel known as _Irene_. As may be imagined in a small port such as Adelaide then was, the younger portions of the ships’ crews were something of a terror to the inhabitants, for if one could not invent some new piece of mischief, another could; and when a party of us went on shore for the evening the proceedings were seldom characterised by dulness. One great pastime of our ship in particular was swimming. We lay in what was then the river basin, and that was close to a creek where there was a fine bathing-place. In the course of time we all became good swimmers, and took an especial pride in diving. This was encouraged by the skipper, who urged us to go higher and higher from the ship’s rigging, until at last some of us could dive from the mainyard. As the time of the year was the Australian summer it was a very pleasant way of spending the evening. The independent spirit manifested by the stevedores and other working-men that had to do with the ship came to one rather as a revelation. There was a quiet assurance about these men that was remarkable; they knew what their importance was in a place where labour was scarce, and being satisfied with the wages they got did their work with a manly independence which needed no driving. I should mention that the stevedores stowing the wool were paid by piecework, and that perhaps may have had something to do with their satisfactory performances. They had all been seamen at some period of their lives, and when hauling on their tackles in the hold, screwing wool, could raise a chanty that would merit unfeigned approval from a nautical critic. Wool-screwing was there an art. There was not the hurry-scurry of the present day, and I suppose it took two months to load that little vessel with wool and copper. When this was done we shipped the able seamen we were short of through desertions, and set out for our homeward trip.