One night I called at the green-room of the theater to see her, sending in my card. I had seated myself on the sofa to wait until she finished her dancing. Suddenly the door flew open, and in rushed something that looked like a great ball of feathers. This ball flew toward me and I was enveloped in a cloud of lace! The bold little dancer had thrown her foot over my head!
My life in Australia, now drawing to a close, as I had made arrangements for leaving there to continue my business operations in Japan, had been very charming and profitable. Everything was novel and strange to me, and it all made a deep and lasting impression upon my mind, which was then eagerly receptive.
I find, in recalling these impressions, that my first idea of Australia still remains the most prominent one left in my memory. Australia was truly the antipodes. Everything seemed to be reversed, a topsy-turvy land. At Botany Bay I was astonished to find the swans were black, thereby demolishing our beautiful ideas about "milk-white" swans. The birds talked, screamed, or brayed, instead of singing, and the trees shed their bark instead of their leaves. The big end of the pears was at the stem, and cherry-stones grew on the outside of the fruit. I was sitting one day in the garden of the governor-general when I thought I felt some one tap me on the shoulder. Then my coat was wrenched off my back, and I turned just in time to see it disappear down the throat of a tame Australian ostrich, called an emu. The bird had taken me for a vegetable.
Sidney Smith describes the kangaroo as an animal with the head of a rabbit, the body of a deer, a tail like a bed-post, and which, when in danger, puts its young into a pocket in its stomach. But the most marvelous of all the queer things of Australia, to my mind, was the animal that laid eggs like a hen, suckled its young like a goat, and was web-footed, like a duck. This was the duckbill, or water-mole, which the Australians called the Patybus.
I also saw in Tasmania, and on Flinder's Island, the race of men that was then considered the most remarkable on the globe, the original Tasmanian savages; and I saw, also, the most curious weapon that man has ever invented, the boomerang. Holmes has described this weapon in one of his humorous verses: