_Ay di mi!_ as the Spanish
ladies say; I am not so sure that any place was ever more distinctly
home to me. Over the rail, across the dancing waters of the harbour,
where the buildings clustered about Circular Quay; as yet, of course,
there could be nothing homely for me about all that. And, as to me, it
never did become very homely; perhaps that is why my recollections of
our first doings there are so vague.

How often, in later years, my heart swelled with vague aspiring
yearnings toward what lay beyond, while my eyes ranged over that same
smiling scene, from the Domain, Lady Macquarie's Chair, and the
purlieus of Circular Quay! (There were no trams there then.) Here one
saw the ships that carried folk to and from--what? To and from Home,
was always my thought; though what home I fancied that distant island
in her grey northern sea had for me, heaven knows! Here one rubbed
shoulders, perchance, with some ruddy-faced, careless fellow in dark
blue clothes, who, but a short couple of months ago, walked London's
streets, and would be there again in the incredibly brief space of six
weeks or so. Dyspepsia itself knows no more fell and spirit-racking
anguish than nostalgia brings; and at times I have fancied the very
air--bland, warm, and kindly seeming--that circulates about the famous
quay must be pervaded and possessed by germs of this curious and
deadly malady. At least, that soft air is breathed each day by many a
victim to the disease; old and young, and of both sexes.

No doubt we must have spent some days in Sydney, my father and myself;
but from the _Ariadne_, and the parting with Nelly Fane and my other
companions, memory carries me direct to the deck of a little
intercolonial steamer, bound north from Sydney, for Brisbane and other
Queensland ports. I see myself in jersey and flannel knickers sitting
beside my father on the edge of a deck skylight, and gazing out across
dazzlingly sunlit waters to the near-by northern coast of New South
Wales. Suddenly, my father laid aside the book which had been resting
on his knee, and raised to his eyes the binoculars he used at sea.

'How extraordinary,' he murmured. And, my gaze naturally following
his, I made out clearly enough, without glasses, a vessel lying high
and dry on the white sand of a fair-sized bay.

My father's keen interest in that derelict ship always seemed to me to
spring into being, as it were, full-grown. There was in it no period
of gradual develop