Their minds were diverted from this subject of contemplation by the entrance of a man and woman. These, like themselves, were told to sit down and wait. The man was long, thin, and lugubrious. The woman short, slight, and lackadaisical, though rather pretty. Evidently the agent was a busy man, for he kept them waiting some time. When he at length appeared he almost took the breath away from his visitors, by the rapid and enthusiastic way in which he described the advantages of the great island on the other side of the globe. There was gold--yes, _enormous_ quantities of gold in all directions. There was land of the finest quality to be had for next to nothing; work for all who were blessed with good bone and muscle; a constant demand for labour--skilled or unskilled--at high wages; a climate such as the Olympian gods might revel in, and--in short, if all England had heard the oration delivered by that man, and had believed it, the country would, in less than a month, have been depopulated of its younger men and women, and left to the tender mercies of the old and middle-aged. Our two fishermen were captivated. So were the lugubrious man and his mild little wife. The end of it was that, three weeks later, these four, with many other men and women of all ranks and conditions, found themselves on board the good ship _Lapwing_, ploughing their way through the billows of the broad Atlantic Ocean bound for the sunny isles of the Antipodes. Wheels within wheels--worlds within worlds--seems to be the order of nature everywhere. Someone has written, with more of truth than elegance-- "Big fleas have little fleas upon their legs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas--and so _ad infinitum_." One's native land is to millions of people the world in which their thoughts centre, and by which they are circumscribed. A farmer's homestead is the world to him, and one of the farmer's cheeses contains a mighty world in itself. But the most complete, compact, and exclusive world in existence, perhaps, is a ship at sea--especially an emigrant ship--for here we find an epitome of the great world itself. Here may be seen, in small compass, the operations of love and hate, of wisdom and stupidity, of selfishness and self-sacrifice, of pride, passion, coarseness, urbanity, and all the other virtues and vices which tend to make the world at large--a mysterious compound of heaven and hell. Wherever men and women--not to mention children--are crowded into small space, friction ensues, and the inevitable result is moral electricity, positive and negative--chiefly positive! Influences naturally follow, pleasant and unpleasant--sometimes explosions, which call for the interference of the captain or officer in charge of the deck at the time being.