Then the sailing boats, flying before the breeze like seagulls, and the waves, if it was a rough day, rolling and beating and thundering on the beach.

I generally stayed till the stars came out before I went back to the hotel.

Everything was so strange and new to a man who'd seen so little else except green trees that I was never tired of watching, and wondering, and thinking what a little bit of a shabby world chaps like us lived in that never seen anything but a slab hut, maybe, all the year round, and a bush public on high days and holidays.
Sometimes I used to feel as if we hadn't done such a bad stroke in cutting loose from all this.

But then the horrible feeling would come back of never being safe, even for a day, of being dragged off and put in the dock, and maybe shut up for years and years.

Sometimes I used to throw myself down upon the sand and curse the day when I ever did anything that I had any call to be ashamed of and put myself in the power of everything bad and evil in all my life through.
Well, one day I was strolling along, thinking about these things, and wondering whether there was any other country where a man could go and feel himself safe from being hounded down for the rest of his life, when I saw a woman walking on the beach ahead of me.