And there were little villages, with neat stations well placarded with showy advertisements—­mainly of almost too self-righteous brands of “sheepdip.”  If that is the name—­and I think it is.  It is a stuff like tar, and is dabbed on to places where the shearer clips a piece out of the sheep.  It bars out the flies, and has healing properties, and a nip to it which makes the sheep skip like the cattle on a thousand hills.  It is not good to eat.  That is, it is not good to eat except when mixed with railroad coffee.  It improves railroad coffee.  Without it railroad coffee is too vague.  But with it, it is quite assertive and enthusiastic.  By itself, railroad coffee is too passive; but sheep-dip makes it wake up and get down to business.  I wonder where they get railroad coffee?

We saw birds, but not a kangaroo, not an emu, not an ornithorhynchus, not a lecturer, not a native.  Indeed, the land seemed quite destitute of game.  But I have misused the word native.  In Australia it is applied to Australian-born whites only.  I should have said that we saw no Aboriginals—­no “blackfellows.”  And to this day I have never seen one.  In the great museums you will find all the other curiosities, but in the curio of chiefest interest to the stranger all of them are lacking.  We have at home an abundance of museums, and not an American Indian in them.  It is clearly an absurdity, but it never struck me before.

CHAPTER XV.

Truth is stranger than fiction—­to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it. 
—­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t. 
—­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

The air was balmy and delicious, the sunshine radiant; it was a charming excursion.  In the course of it we came to a town whose odd name was famous all over the world a quarter of a century ago—­Wagga-Wagga.  This was because the Tichborne Claimant had kept a butcher-shop there.  It was out of the midst of his humble collection of sausages and tripe that he soared up into the zenith of notoriety and hung there in the wastes of space a time, with the telescopes of all nations leveled at him in unappeasable curiosity—­curiosity as to which of the two long-missing persons he was:  Arthur Orton, the mislaid roustabout of Wapping, or Sir Roger Tichborne, the lost heir of a name and estates as old as English history.  We all know now, but not a dozen people knew then; and the dozen kept the mystery to themselves and allowed the most intricate and fascinating and marvelous real-life romance that has ever been played upon the world’s stage to unfold itself serenely, act by act, in a British court by the long and laborious processes of judicial development.

When we recall the details of that great romance we marvel to see what daring chances truth may freely take in constructing a tale, as compared with the poor little conservative risks permitted to fiction.  The fiction-artist could achieve no success with the materials of this splendid Tichborne romance.