The _Oronta_ was a dull ship for me once she had passed Adelaide; duller even than in the grey days between Tilbury and Naples. Adelaide passed, an Australian-bound liner seems to have reached the end of her outward passage, and yet it is not over. The remainder, for Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane-bound folk, is apt to be a weariness, even as a train journey is, with passengers coming and going and trunks and boxes much in evidence. I had lost my friend, though I had called this my method of retaining her friendship; and rightly, I dare say. To be worthy of her a man should have left in him ten times my vitality, I thought; he should be one who looked forward rather than back; he should bring to their joint wayfaring a far keener zest for life than my years in our modern Grub Street had left me. How vapid was the talk of my remaining fellow-passengers; how slow of understanding, and how preoccupied with petty things they seemed! They discussed their luggage, and questions regarding the proper amounts for stewards' tips. Had not some traveller called Adelaide Australia's city of culture? It seemed a pleasant town. The Mount Lofty country near by was beautiful, I gathered. It might well have been better for me to have left the ship there. My musings were in this sort; somewhat lacking, perhaps, in the zest and cheerfulness which should pertain to a new departure in life. I spent a few days in Sydney, chiefly given to walks through the city and suburbs. There was a certain interest, I found, to be derived from the noting of all the changes which a quarter of a century had wrought in this antipodean Venice. Some of the alterations I noticed were possibly no more than reflections of the changes time had wrought in myself; for these--the modifications which lie between ambitious youth and that sort of damaged middle-age which carries your dyspeptic farther from his youth than ever his three score years and ten take the hale man--had been radical and thorough with me. But, none the less, Sydney's actual changes were sufficiently remarkable. At the spot whereon I made my entry into society (as I thought), in the studio of Mr. Rawlence, the artist, stood now an imposing red building of many storeys, given over, I gathered, to doctors and dentists. The artist, I thought, was probably gathered to his fathers ere this, as my old fellow-lodger, Mr. Smith, most certainly must have been. Mr. Foster, the editor of the _Chronicle_, had died some years previously. The offices and premises of Messrs. J. Canning and Son, my first employers in Sydney, were as though I had left them but yesterday, unchanged in any single respect. But the head of the firm, as I had known him, was no more; and his son, of whom I caught one glimpse on the stairway, had grown elderly, grey, and quite surprisingly stout.