Well, we got away from our anchorage and were towed up to Sydney. We took two of the finest appetites on the Australian continent up with us. We had that cocktail. We sat down in the dining-room of the Australia at a table covered with the first clean table-cloth we had seen for a month and glittering with polished glass and shining silver. The dinner was as good a one as you will get anywhere between Sydney Harbour and King George’s Sound—and we couldn’t eat it! We fooled about with the courses, trying to believe that we were hungry and having a real treat, but it was no good. We had lost our taste for clean, well-cooked food, and our palates and digestions were hopelessly vitiated. Course after course went away hardly touched. We said many things to each other across the table in decently lowered tones, and ended by satisfying our hunger and thirst with bread and butter and champagne!
After dinner I renewed my acquaintance with the Doctor and the purser of the steam-roller _Alameda_, and they imparted the unwelcome information that the regular liners were not booking any passengers from Sydney lest Melbourne and Adelaide, Albany and Perth might refuse them admittance, or, at any rate, decline to take passage in a ship from a plague port. Moreover, it was possible that Sydney passengers might be quarantined at every port. Personally, I had had all the quarantine I wanted, and so I was not sorry to accept the other alternative which was to go across to Melbourne and Adelaide by train, and thence by a boat to Freemantle. This would give me time to have a glimpse at Western Australia before picking up the Messagerie liner at Albany. Unhappily, as I have said, we ran up against the plague again at Freemantle, and the inevitable delay, combined with the very leisurely gait of the West Australian trains, made it just impossible for me to visit the gold-fields without missing my steamer.
One of the first people to welcome me back to Sydney was my very good friend and fellow-voyager from Honolulu, the Accidental American, and with him and his wife I travelled to Melbourne.
After we had passed the customs and changed trains and gauges at Albury the journey began to take on a new, or, rather, an old interest for me. Twenty years before I had tramped up through the bush from Melbourne to the Murray after taking French leave of the lime-juicer in which I had made my first miserable voyage from Liverpool to Australia. I had halved the fifteen shillings, with which I started, with a penniless “old chum” in exchange for his company and experience, and then turned the other seven and sixpence into about seventy pounds, and, on the strength of my wealth, travelled back to Melbourne first-class.