ment. From the moment his eyes first lighted upon
the tapered spars of the _Livorno_, where she lay basking in her sandy
bed, his interest in her was absorbing. Everything else was forgotten.
In a few minutes he was in eager conversation about the derelict with
the chief officer of our steamer. I remember the exact words and
intonation of the man's answer to my father's first question:

'Well, I couldn't say for that, Mr. Freydon' (In Australia no one ever
forgets your name, or omits to use it in addressing you), 'but I can
tell you the day I first saw her. She was lying there exactly as she
is to-day. I was third mate of the _Toowoomba_ then; my first trip in
her, and that was seven years ago come Queen's Birthday. Seen her
every trip since--just the same. No, she never seems to alter any.
She's high and dry, you see; bedded there on an even keel, same's if
she was afloat. Yes, it is a wonder, as you say, Mr. Freydon; but it's
a lonely place, you see; nothing nearer than--what is it? Werrina, I
think they call it; fifteen mile away; and that's a day's march from
anywhere, too. Oh yes, there might be an odd sundowner camp aboard of
her once in a month o' Sundays; but I doubt it. She isn't in the track
to anywhere, as ye might say. No, I guess it would only be bandicoots,
an' the like o' that you'd find about her; an' birds, maybe. Only
thing I wonder about her is, how she landed there without ever losing
her top-hamper, and why nobody's thought it worth while to pick her
bones a bit cleaner. Must be good stuff in her stays an' that, to have
stood so long, with never a touch o' the tar-brush.'

There was more in the same vein, but this much comes back to me as
though it were yesterday that I heard the words. I see the mate's hard
blue eye, and crisply curling beard; I see the upward tilt of the same
beard as he spat over the rail, and my father's little retreating
movement at his gesture. (My father never lost his sensitiveness about
such things, though I doubt if he ever allowed it to appear to eyes
less familiar with his every movement than my own.) It seems to me
that my father talked of the derelict--we did not know her name then,
and spoke of her simply as 'the ship'--for the rest of the day, and
for days afterwards; and the key to his thoughts was given in one of
his earliest remarks:

'What a home a man might make of that ship--all ready to his hand for
the asking! The sea, trees--there were plenty of trees--sun