‘HOW much?’

‘Forty-seven pounds, sixteen shillings, and eight pence halfpenny.’

‘Great Scott! you don’t really mean to say that’s all?’

‘Every cent!’ The audit was by no means reassuring. We wanted money badly, no one will ever know how badly, and forty-seven pounds with a few odd shillings and a halfpenny, while in itself a pleasant sum to possess, is by no means an amount sufficient to justify one in setting out on extensive wanderings. Things had not gone well with us in the immediate past, and we were determined to go. As the Long’un put it, ‘It behoved us to shake the dust of Australia from off our feet.’ And though, myself, I don’t know how the act of shaking the dust from off’ one’s feet should be accomplished, it certainly sounded the proper course to pursue, and when one embarks on a new undertaking, it is surely best to begin in the most orthodox manner.

Hitherto, we had been eminently respectable, from which it may be inferred that our method of earning our livelihoods had never been the subject of parliamentary, private, or police inquiry. Whatever else we may have been, we certainly were not new chums; for between us we had experienced almost every phase of colonial life, had been jacks of all trades, from Government officials and stock-brokers, to dramatists, actors, conjurors, ventriloquists, gold miners, and station hands. Being rovers to the backbone, we were, consequently, neither the possessors of untold wealth nor were we bigoted in our ideas. There was a sage once who, for reasons unnecessary to state here, lived in an iron tank on Sydney’s Circular Quay. Between remittances, he was in a measure well content, and inasmuch as he lived from day to day on such broken victuals as he himself discovered, he came gradually to understand many and curious things. From his lips I learnt wisdom.

‘My son!’ he once said, looking up at me from the bunghole entrance to his abode, ‘believe me, to have nothing is to have everything, and to know starvation is to have acquired all the wisdom of the world.’

I had not then sufficient experience to grasp his meaning, but it has become more clear to me since.

With a show of great secrecy, the Long’un and I had been closeted together all the evening. The hotel candle spluttered and hissed preparatory to going out, and our hard earned capital, even to the odd halfpenny, lay on the table winking and blinking at us, as much as to say ‘Come, make up your minds quickly. In for a penny, in for a pound. Go out into the big world again, see real life, and as far as we are able, we’ll help you!’

I looked at the Long’un, and the Long’un looked at me. Evidently the same thoughts were animating us both.

‘Old man, is it agreed, then, that we make tracks and see things?’

‘It is agreed; let us trek.’

Even so was laid the foundation of our extraordinary journey.

Now there are ways and ways of oversea travelling. There are first class passages in Orient liners, and there are working passages on dingy ocean tramps. The former are certainly the more luxurious, but the latter, to my thinking, are, to him who would see and understand, infinitely preferable. There is still another way, an intermediate class, called steerage, where one meets many strange folk. These are the people whose lives make a certain class of books, and with them we decided to throw in our lot.

Our minds once made up, the next business became the finding of a boat likely to contain the phases of character we required, and for some days this appeared impossible. Then, late one sultry afternoon, news reached us of the very vessel we wanted, a foreigner, homeward bound. She was advertised as possessing excellent and cheap steerage accommodation, and, what was still more to our taste, was to sail the following day.

We sought the office instantly, booked our passages for that Clapham Junction of the world. Port Said, and went home to pack.