A Tramp's Notebook

Book excerpt: A Tramp's Notebook is a novel by Morley Roberts. Roberts was an English novelist and writer. Excerpt: "When I first went out to the Australian colonies in 1876 in the Hydrabad, a big sailing ship registered as belonging to Bombay, I had a very curious time of it, take it altogether. It was my first real experience of the outside world, and the hundred and two days the Hydrabad took from Liverpool to Melbourne made a very valuable piece of schooling for a greenhorn. I was a steerage passenger, and the steerage of a sailing vessel twenty-five years ago was something to see and smell. Perhaps it is no better now, but then it was certainly very bad. The food was poor, the quarters dirty, the accommodation far too limited to swing even the traditional cat in, and my companions were for the most part Irishmen of the lowest and poorest peasant class. In these days I was quite fresh from home and was rather particular in my tastes. Some of that has been knocked out of me since. A great deal of it was knocked out of me in that passage."