he passengers for India climb down the
gangway, is a fresh-looking, pink-faced young man of about
one-and-twenty. He has a simple look, and you would think he was too
young and innocent to go round the world by himself.

"I'm right down glad I'm not going to 'do' India," he remarks. "I'm sick
of travelling; I'm just longing to get back."

"To Australia?"

"Yes; I'm a sheep-farmer there. I've worked four years without a break,
so I took a holiday in Europe."

Anything less like one's idea of a sheep-farmer it would be hard to
find! I always pictured them stern bearded men, with brick-red faces and
sinewy limbs. This lad doesn't look as if he had ever been in a strong
sun, and his slender loose-jointed legs and arms do not give the
impression of an open-air life spent mostly in the saddle.

"You have a sheep-farm? Hard life, isn't it?"

"Best life in the world," he answers with enthusiasm. "Always on
horseback, miles of open country, not shut in by beastly houses."

"But there's a lack of water, isn't there?"

"You can always sink a well, that's what they do now. It costs a good
deal, but you can get water almost anywhere within reason."

"Are you far out?"

"No, only about three hundred and forty miles from the town where my
mother lives. I go down to see her at week-ends; we're lucky in being
close to a station, only a fifteen-mile ride."

Three hundred and forty miles! About the distance from London to
Berwick! Good place for week-ends, especially with a fifteen-mile ride
at one end! I suppose our ideas get small from living in a little
country. Pity we can't visit Australia, but we can't manage it this
time. That great island-continent and its sister, New Zealand, are well
worth seeing. Except for the Canadians there are no people nearer akin
to us than the Australasians. The world-famous harbour of Sydney, the
great hills clothed in eucalyptus, hiding in their depths vast caverns
of stalactites, the wide open ranges stretching for leagues inland, all
these things are attractive. In New Zealand, too, we should find
tree-ferns of gigantic size, lovely scenery, and spouting geysers; it is
an England set in a very different climate from ours! Then we might pass
on to those strange South Seas, gemmed by coral islands, and to the
latitudes where the mighty albatross swings overhead like an aeroplane,
only, unlike an aeroplane, he glides in a never-ending plane without
apparent effort or even one flap of his hu