And so it fell out that when I did actually leave Australia I was too busy at my clerking, and at inventing soporific answers to the mostly irrelevant inquiries of more or less distracted passengers, to catch a glimpse of the land disappearing below the horizon--the land in which I had spent the most formative years of my life--or to spare a thought for any such matter as sea-sickness. MANHOOD--ENGLAND: FIRST PERIOD I Of late years the printers have given us reams and reams of first impressions of such world centres as London and New York. Not to mention the army of unknown globe-trotters and writers, celebrities of every sort and kind have recorded their impressions. I always smile when my eyes fall upon such writings; and, generally, I recall, momentarily at all events, some aspect of my own arrival in England as purser's clerk on board the _Orimba_. When I read, for example, the celebrity's first impressions of New York--a confused blend of bouquets, automobiles, newspaper interviewers, incredibly high buildings, sumptuous luncheons, barbaric lavishness, bad road surfaces, frenetic hospitality, wild expenditure of paper money--I think it would be more interesting perhaps, certainly more instructive, to have the first impressions of the immigrant, who lands with five pounds, and it may be a wife and a child or two. Then there is the immigrant from the same end of the ship who is not allowed to land, who is rejected by the guardians of this Paradise on earth, because he has an insufficient number of shillings, or a weakness in his lungs. The bouquets, automobiles, sumptuous luncheons, and things do not, one may apprehend, figure largely in the first impressions of these last uncelebrated people, though their impressions may embrace quite as much of the reality concerned as do those of the famous; and, it may be, a good deal more. Broadly speaking, and as far as outlines go, I was in the position of one who sees England for the first time. There were, I know, subtle differences; yet, broadly speaking, that was my position. The native-born Australian, approaching the land of his fathers for the first time, comes to it with a mass of cherished lore and associations at least equal in weight and effect to my childhood's knowledge and experience of England. He very often comes also to relatives. I came, not only having no claim upon any single creature in these islands, but having no faintest knowledge of any one among them. I carried two letters of introduction: one from Mr. Foster to a London newspaper editor whom he knew only by correspondence, and the other from Mr. Rawlence to a painter, who just then (though I knew it not) was in Algiers. The purser paid me my five pounds before I left the ship, wished me luck, and vowed, as his habit was in saying good-bye to people, that he was very glad he had met me. And then I got into the train with my luggage, and set out for Fenchurch Street and the conquest of London.