built as your solid men of brave old Deal; but a
long way better in appearance and character than the sponging,
tip-seeking, loafing fraternity of slouching, lazy robbers who on the
parades of Brighton, Hastings, and Eastbourne, and other fashionable
seaside resorts in this country, lean against lamp-posts with "Licensed
Boatman" writ on their hat-bands, and call themselves fishermen, though
they seldom handle a herring or cod that does not come from a
fishmonger's shop. These Australians of British blood are leaner in
face, leaner in limb than the Kentish men, and drink whiskey instead of
coffee or tea at early morn. But see them at work in the face of danger
and death on that bar, when the surf is leaping high and a schooner lies
broadside on and helpless to the sweeping rollers, and you will say that
a more undaunted crew never gripped an oar to rescue a fellow-sailorman
from the hungry sea.

One of them, a grey-haired, deeply-bronzed man of sixty, with his neck
and hands tatooed in strange markings, imprinted thereon by the hands of
the wild natives of Tucopia, in the South Seas, with whom he has lived
forty years before as one of themselves, is mine own particular friend
and crony, for his two sons have been playmates with my brothers and
myself, who were all born in this quaint old-time seaport of the first
colony in Australia; this forgotten remnant of the dread days of the
awful convict system, when the clank of horrible gyves sounded on the
now deserted and grass-grown streets, and the swish of the hateful and
ever active "cat" was heard within the walls of the huge red-brick
prison on the bluff facing the sea. Oh, the old, old memories of those
hideous times! How little they wounded or troubled our boyish minds, as
we, bent on some fishing or hunting venture along the coast, walked
along a road which had been first soddened by tears and then dried by
the panting, anguished breathings of beings fashioned in the image of
their Creator, as they toiled and died under the brutal hands of their
savage task-masters--the civilian officials of that cruel "System"
which, by the irony of fate, the far-seeing, gentle, and tender-hearted
Arthur Phillip, the founder of Australia, was first appointed to
administer.

But away with such memories for the moment. Over the lee side with them
into the Sea of the Past, together with the clank of the fetters and the
hum of the cat and the merciless laws of the time; sink them all