uldn't make out for the life of us
what she moved by. We thought all steamers had paddles. Then the sailing
boats, flying before the breeze like seagulls, and the waves, if it
was a rough day, rolling and beating and thundering on the beach. I
generally stayed till the stars came out before I went back to the
hotel. Everything was so strange and new to a man who'd seen so
little else except green trees that I was never tired of watching, and
wondering, and thinking what a little bit of a shabby world chaps like
us lived in that never seen anything but a slab hut, maybe, all the year
round, and a bush public on high days and holidays.

Sometimes I used to feel as if we hadn't done such a bad stroke in
cutting loose from all this. But then the horrible feeling would come
back of never being safe, even for a day, of being dragged off and put
in the dock, and maybe shut up for years and years. Sometimes I used
to throw myself down upon the sand and curse the day when I ever did
anything that I had any call to be ashamed of and put myself in the
power of everything bad and evil in all my life through.

Well, one day I was strolling along, thinking about these things, and
wondering whether there was any other country where a man could go and
feel himself safe from being hounded down for the rest of his life,
when I saw a woman walking on the beach ahead of me. I came up with her
before long, and as I passed her she turned her head and I saw she
was one of two girls that we had seen in the landlady's parlour one
afternoon. The landlady was a good, decent Scotch woman, and had taken
a fancy to both of us (particularly to Jim--as usual). She thought--she
was that simple--that we were up-country squatters from some far-back
place, or overseers. Something in the sheep or cattle line everybody
could see that we were. There was no hiding that. But we didn't talk
about ourselves overmuch, for very good reasons. The less people say the
more others will wonder and guess about you. So we began to be looked
upon as bosses of some sort, and to be treated with a lot of respect
that we hadn't been used to much before. So we began to talk a
bit--natural enough--this girl and I. She was a good-looking girl, with
a wonderful fresh clear skin, full of life and spirits, and pretty well
taught. She and her sister had not been a long time in the country;
their father was dead, and they had to live by keeping a very small shop
and by dressmaking.