I put it on. The tail came below the bend of my knees. I laughed. The
sky-pilot did not.
Finally he stepped back, cracked a solemn smile, and remarked, "You _do_
look rather odd!"
The intonation of his voice, his solemn almost deprecatory smile, set me
off and I laughed till the tears ran down my face.
"I say, what's so funny?"
"Me! I am!... in your long-tailed coat."
"If I was on the rocks like you I wouldn't see anything to laugh
about."
* * * * *
At the shipping office, the place mentioned in the advertisement, in the
dimly lit, grey-paned room, there sat one lone, pasty-faced,
old-youngish clerk on the traditional clerk's high stool. But he proved
lively beyond his appearance.
"My God! do look who's here!" he exclaimed facetiously, and then,
rapidly, without giving me room for a biting word in return, "no,
there's no use now, my boy ... we took on all the cattlemen we needed by
ten o'clock this morning."
I walked away, disconsolate. I bore on my back my swagman's blanket. In
the blanket I carried a change of shirts the sky-pilot had given me, a
razor, a toothbrush, a Tennyson, and a Westcott and Hort's Greek New
Testament with glossary, that I had stolen from a bookstall in Sydney.
* * * * *
I found out where the dock was, nevertheless, where the men were loafing
about in groups, waiting to be taken out to the _South Sea King_ .
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