"Give me their address," said I, "and I will be off after them at once. This is not a time for fencing and feigning indifference; the fellows know, as well as you or I do, what a haul they will prove to the man who is lucky enough to secure them, so I will not run any risk of losing them by pretending otherwise. If I can persuade them to ship, I will sail to-morrow, short-handed though we should be. I can take the starboard watch myself; and, for the rest, we shall just have to keep an extra sharp eye upon the barometer and the weather, and be careful to snug down if need be in good time, until we again reach China, when we shall probably be able to get another man or two." So saying, I took the address from Forbes, and forthwith started in search of the men. I found them at length, after a somewhat tedious quest, in a most disreputable-looking boarding-house, situate in the most disreputable part of the town. And I am bound to admit that my first impression of the men was that their appearance was in perfect accord with their surroundings. They most undoubtedly were, as Forbes had said, as rowdy-looking a set of ruffians as one would care to meet. Tough, sinewy desperadoes, swarthy as mulattoes by long exposure to the fierce southern sun, with long, dense, tangled thatches of hair mingling with a thick, neglected growth of beard and whisker that permitted scarcely a feature, save the nose and eyes, to be seen, clad in the remains of the inevitable flannel shirt, cord trousers, and knee-boots, with belts about their waists, in which each man carried his revolver and a formidable bowie-knife; the whole topped off with a soft, broad-brimmed, battered felt hat dashed on to the head in a fashion eloquently suggestive of the utmost extreme of recklessness,--I think I never saw a party of men who, under ordinary circumstances, I would have been less willing to ship as a crew than these. Yet, when I spoke to them, they answered me respectfully, and there was scarcely more than the merest tinge of that defiant independence of manner that their appearance had prepared me to expect. They told me, as they had told Forbes, that they had been working for something like seven months at the gold-fields, and had met with so little success that they were now almost penniless, a result which they attributed to their lack of experience as miners. One of the party remarked grimly that the life of a miner was even worse than that of a sailor; inasmuch as that, with an equal amount of exposure and harder work, it was no unusual thing for them to be reduced to starvation rations. Seven months' experience of this kind, they said, had satisfied them that they were never intended for gold-miners; and they had accordingly left the fields in a body, and tramped to Sydney, determined to revert to their original occupation of seamen, and agreeing to ship together for home in the first craft that took their fancy.