boat's bow between two rocks, where there was just beach enough to haul her up safe on our desert island.
We knew, of course, that they would see us from the house, and judging that we were cast away, send for us. Soon we discerned a boat coming to our rescue manned by the groom and the gardener—both fair oarsmen. The wind was a good capful by this time, and it took two hours' hard pulling to land us at the Point Piper jetty. 'Oh, you naughty boys!' I can hear the mild châtelaine saying in simulated wrath as we marched up, extremely glad to be so well out of it; and as they were very glad too, no serious consequences tending to moral improvement ensued.
At the Sydney College half-yearly examination Archbishop Polding was always among the examiners—a gentle, if dignified, old man, whom all of us revered. Our own Bishop and clergy attended on these occasions, but I have a more distinct impression of the Prelate first mentioned than of any other clergyman of the day. St. Mary's Cathedral was building then—it is building now—a monument of the persistent progress of the Church of Rome. What she begins she always ends, rarely relinquishing an undertaking or a stronghold. My reason for mentioning the religious aspect of the question is that, save for the morning and evening prayer and Mr. Cape's regular church-going, our school, though strictly denominational in theory, was virtually national and secular; chiefly, as I said before, because we of the different sects and persuasions agreed to respect each other's religious opinions and beliefs.
Whether this practical Christianity made us the worse churchmen in after-life I leave others to judge. When my father deserted salt water for the land permanently, he did not fix on one of the charming nooks embosomed in sea-woods which lay so temptingly between Hyde Park and the South Head road. Like most sailors, he had had enough of 'the sad sea waves,' whether in play or in earnest, and was relieved to be out of sound of them. Glenrock was, I believe, offered to him at a temptingly low rate, but he preferred to buy a tract of wild land at Newtown, as the suburban hamlet was then called, there to build and improve.
Beginning in good earnest, the walls of a large two-storeyed house soon arose—something between a bungalow and a
