Explore "Coming Across" by Henry Lawson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
We were delayed for an hour or so inside Sydney Heads, taking passengers from the _Oroya_, which had just arrived from England and anchored off Watson's Bay. An Adelaide boat went alongside the ocean liner, while we dropped anchor at a respectable distance. This puzzled some of us until one of the passengers stopped an ancient mariner and inquired. The sailor jerked his thumb upwards, and left. The passengers stared aloft till some of them got the lockjaw in the back of their necks, and then another sailor suggested that we had yards to our masts, while the Adelaide boat had not.
It seemed a pity that the new chums for New Zealand didn't have a chance to see Sydney after coming so far and getting so near. It struck them that way too. They saw Melbourne, which seemed another injustice to the old city. However, nothing matters much nowadays, and they might see Sydney in happier times.