He tried several other places, but no one would even look at the thing.  After vainly tramping about for over two hours, he turned away towards his lodging, feeling very dispirited, and thinking about breakfast.

Turning up a side street called Queen’s Place, so as to make a short cut home, he espied in a dimly-lighted little shop an old man and a boy working at the cobbler trade.  They had honest, intelligent faces, and looked as if they wanted to buy a locomotor ataxy very badly.  He tapped at the door and then entered.

“Would you like to buy this?” he said to the old man.  He did not like to repeat his foolish Latin nonsense, for the old fellow had such a worn, kindly face, and his honest, searching eyes met his in such a way that he felt ashamed to ask him to buy what could only be worthless rubbish to him.

The cobbler looked at the monstrosity wonderingly. “’Tis a rare big bean,” he said, in the trembling quaver of old age, and with a mumbling laugh like that of a pleased child.  “I’ll give you two shillin’s for it.  I suppose you want money badly, or else you wouldn’t be wanderin’ about at ten o’clock at night tryin’ to sell it.  I hope you come by it honest, young man?”

Tom satisfied him on this score, and then the ancient gave him the two shillings.  Bidding him good-night, Tom returned home and went to bed.

(Quite two years after, when Denison returned to Sydney from the South Seas with more money “than was good for his moral welfare,” as his sister-in-law remarked, he sought out the old cobbler gentleman and bought back his locomotor ataxy bean for as many sovereigns as he had been given shillings for it.)

Next morning he was down at the wharves before six o’clock, smoking his pipe contentedly, after breakfasting sumptuously at a coffee-stall for sixpence.  There was a little American barque lying alongside the Circular Quay, and some of the hands were bending on her head-sails.  Tom sat down on the wharf stringer dangling his feet and watching them intently.  Presently the mate appeared on the poop, smoking a cigar.  He looked at Tom critically for a moment or so, and then said—­

“Looking for a ship, young feller?”

The moment Tom heard him speak, he jumped to his feet, for he knew the voice, last heard when the possessor of it was mate of the island trading schooner Sadie Caller, a year before in Samoa.

“Is that you, Bannister?” he cried.

“Reckon ’taint no one else, young feller.  Why, Tom Denison, is it you?  Step right aboard.”

Tom was on the poop in an instant, the mate coming to him with outstretched hand.

“What’s the matter, Tom?  Broke?”

“Stony!”

“Sit down here and tell me all about it.  I heard you had left the Palestine.  Say, sling that dirty old pipe overboard, and take one of these cigars.  The skipper will be on deck presently, and the sight of it would rile him terrible.  He hez his new wife aboard, and she considers pipes ez low-down.”