new. I needed a stake--not much, just a bit of stake. An easy
thing for an able-bodied man, you'd say. But could I get it? Well, I'm
broke again as I sit here--you'll understand why your suggestion of a
loan rather knocked the smoke out of me--and what I've been through in
trying makes a pitiful comedy.

"There was a syndicate undertook to send me out as managing partner on
its big station in Victoria. They only required a deposit, which I paid;
and when I went round for the receipt that syndicate had vanished into
thin air. I found a place with a wool merchant, who promptly failed.
Twice I booked for Sydney on my own--missed one boat through a train
wreck, and the other was libeled at the dockhead. I tried stowing away,
and got as far as Havre before they threw me off.

"Gamble? I gambled the way another man gets drunk--from exasperated
craving, knowing the folly of it. Longchamp, Enghien, Monte Carlo--you
follow my course? Once and again I made a winning, but never quite
enough; and finally Monte Carlo left me flat. You say you saw me there?
Then you know how flat that was. At Marseilles I had to ship for mere
bread on a friendly tramp going round to Lisbon.

"Now notice how a man is made to look like a monkey on a string. I
didn't even know where that tramp was bound till she anchored in the
Tagus. The same evening I got caught in a monarchist riot on the Rocio,
had the clothes torn off me and landed in a cell. They released me next
morning, with handsome apologies and a coat, not so handsome, which they
said was mine. It wasn't; mine was gone to rags. But in the lining of
the one they gave me I found two Portuguese bills, and something else: a
ticket by the Empreza Nacional steamer sailing for Madeira--within the
hour! I took it. My word! What else was there to do?

"You'll observe I never was in Madeira before--never meant or wanted to
come here; had hardly heard of the isle.

"I landed yesterday; and perhaps you can guess the first thing I did in
a place where horses are so plenty and so cheap. Man, I was crazy to get
a saddle between my knees again--me that was raised in a saddle. So I
hopped aboard the likeliest nag and rode for the open, out the
coast--eastward, it seems. Why again should it be eastward? I can't tell
you; but it was the way that offered, winding along between the
mountains and the sea, where the lava rocks prop the sugar terraces,
black and green in layers, and the blue water below....

"