Now I was doing it again, and as the express swung past the little station, which I had reached after an all-night tramp across the ranges, I found it to be a good deal less changed than I was. Indeed, save for a few new houses scattered about the clearing, it was just as it was when I pitched my swag down on a bench before the hotel, put my blackened billy beside it, and ordered my last breakfast in the bush.
At Melbourne we put up at Menzies, and one afternoon I took my friend down to Spencer Street to pay a visit to the hotel that I had last stayed in—the Sailors’ Home. Here again nothing was altered. The very cubicle I slept in twenty years before looked as though I had only just turned out of the little blue-and-white counterpaned bed, and outside my yester-self, to coin the only word that seems to fit, was loafing about in beerless and penniless idleness “waiting for a ship.”
“There I am as I was,” I said; “how do you like me?”
“Not a little bit, Griff,” he replied in the terse speech of his fortuitously native land. “I guess if you were to come like that among the friends you have now you’d look mighty like a dirty deuce in a new deck of cards.”
The next morning I went over to Williamstown to have a look at the scene of my old escapade, the only one, by the way, which ever brought me into unpleasant relations with the police, for in those days breaking your indentures was a matter of imprisonment. Happily they did not catch me. I found the old Railway Hotel, known, aforetime to officers and apprentices as the Hen and Chickens, since it was kept by a dear old Scotchwoman assisted by four charming daughters with one or all of whom every apprentice in port was supposed to be in love. It was through the kindly offices of one of them that I had saved my kit and dodged the police.
I sat in the little parlour on the same sofa I had sat on that memorable night; opposite was the same old piano on which one or other of our charmers used to accompany our shouting sea-songs, and there beside it was the little cupboard in the wall in which my superfluous wardrobe had been stowed away. Not a thing was altered, I believe the very table-cloth was the same, and the patch of vacant ground opposite, across which I had bolted at the penultimate moment to catch the last train to Melbourne, was still unbuilt on; and there was I, still a wanderer, though of a different sort, wanting only the old faces and the old voices to be able to persuade myself that the twenty changing years had begun with the last night’s dream and ended with the morning’s awaking.