I recall that strange old sundowner because I cannot help feeling that his old beard, hoarding all the flies, bringing me intense relief beneath the scorching, tropical suns, resembled the vast cities of the world, which are like dirty, old, tangled, smelling beards that collect hungry, aspiring humanity, whilst the happy, musical vagabond, tramps along untormented by flies or men, out in the wide spaces of the world, breathing the transcendent beauty of God’s blue heaven. And now I could half imagine that that old man was like unto God Himself as he tramped across the spaces, his monstrous beard followed by the singing spheres—the fireflies by night—till, with his swag on his back, he disappears for ever from my sight, passing away into the silence of the ragged gum-trees on the sky-line.
So one may perceive that I have had more advantages than most men in this world where men stare fiercely, or kindly, at each other as they express their own opinions, and then depart!
Thus do I—by reviewing the shadowy pageantry of the sympathetic period of my career—apologise to myself for my book.
Gone the mediæval, heroic age of my existence, when chivalry’s wondrous light glistened in the deep eyes and on the tangled, kingly beards of strange, apostolic old men, and on the bronzed faces of hairy-chested sailormen. But the ineffable, eternal glory of romantic beauty still shines in the sad eyes of mysterious, homeless women and girls, men and yearning boys, who are, to me, the lost, wandering children of some far-off Israel of the great, glorious Bible of Youth—the shrivelled, fingered pages of the unforgotten light of other days—the light that warms the world.
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I cast my bread on the waters In dreams of feverish haste, But it came back after many days Buttered with phosphorous paste!
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Impecunious Youth—In Sydney—Once more I go Seaward—In Fiji—Lose my Comrade—I arrive off Tai-o-hae—The Isles of Romance—French Officials and Convicts—I am welcomed by a Pretty Chiefess—The Brown Maids’ Preference for English Sailormen—Nuka Hiva by Night—Ranjo’s Grog Shanty—I sleep beneath the Palms—My First Meeting with Waylao, the Half-caste Girl—The Passing of the Great Mohammed—I feel a bit fascinated by the Half-caste Girl—Planting Nuts for a Living