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A. J. Dawson
An Autobiography
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It was on the afternoon of May 2, 1870, the day after my tenth birthday, that we sailed from Gravesend for Sydney, in the full-rigged clipper ship Ariadne, of London, with one hundred and forty-seven other emigrants and eighteen first-class passengers. It was, I suppose, a part of my father's enthusiastically desperate state of mind at this time that we were booked as steerage passengers. We were to lay aside finally all the effete uses of sophisticated life. We were emigrants, bent upon carving a home for ourselves out of the virgin wilderness. Naturally, we were to travel in the steerage. And, indeed, I have good reason to suppose that my father's supply of money must have been pretty low at the time. But we occupied a first-class railway carriage on the journey down to Gravesend; and I know our porter received a bright half-crown for his services to us, for my father's hands were occupied, and the coin was passed to me for bestowal.
Long before the tug left us, we sat down to our first meal on board; perhaps a hundred of us together. A weary poor woman with two babies was on my left, and a partly intoxicated man of the coal-heaving sort (very likely a Cabinet Minister in Australia to-day) on my father's right. This simple soul made the mistake of endeavouring to establish an affectionate friendship with my father, who was sufficiently resentful of the man's mere proximity, and received his would-be genial advances with the most freezing politeness. But the event which precipitated a crisis was the coal-heaver's removal of his knife from his mouth--the dexterity with which his kind can manipulate these lethal weapons, even when partly intoxicated, is little less than miraculous--after the safe discharge there of some succulent morsel from his plate, to plunge it direct into the contents of the butter-dish before my father.
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