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on the night train crossing the frontier to Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. At the border an official in plain clothes came through the train and asked me if I was going, only temporarily, into Canada, to which I replied quite truthfully that I was and he said, "O K", and passed on to the next passenger.
I spent about a week in Vancouver which seemed a very dull and shabby city compared with the American ones. The long main street had many untidy vacant sites between the buildings, and most of the people were anything but elegantly dressed. The main diversion of many of the idlers, myself included, was to go down to the wharves to see big ships berthing after voyages from Japan, Australia and South America.
My first care, on arrival was to write to the American Express Company at San Francisco asking them to send up my big suitcase urgently, and to ship the big Saratoga trunk back to Sydney. Then I hurried off to book a second-class berth in the Union S.S. Company's "Makura" sailing for Sydney near the end of June, by way of Honolulu, Fiji and Auckland.
The big suitcase, which contained my two spare suits, extra shirts and underclothing did not arrive in time. I had to arrange for it to follow me by the next ship, and I was compelled to make the thirty-day voyage to Sydney in the suit I stood up in - fortunately it was a good one - and with the limited number of shirts and smalls in a medium-sized suitcase I had with me on the "Bear". Luckily the "Makura" had a good laundry for the use of the passengers, and so I managed to look neatly dressed with the little clothing I had. This experience taught me, there and then, that most travellers burden themselves with far too much luggage: a lesson I never forgot in all my future voyaging.
After the hard life and strict routine on the "Bear", being a passenger, even second-class, in the stern end of a liner, was most luxurious and relaxing, and I fairly revelled in it. Up in the third-class, occupying the bow section of the ship, were four pleasant young fellows, two of whom were very musical and entertaining: one who played merrily on a banjo-ukelele being