CHAPTER XV.
Three Hundred Miles in the Train They filled a whole compartment--at least there was one seat vacant, but people seemed shy of taking it after a rapid survey of them all.
The whole seven of them, and only Esther as bodyguard--Esther--in a pink blouse an sailor hat, with a face as bright and mischievous as Pip's own.
The Captain had come to see them off, with Pat to look after the luggage.

He had bought the tickets--two whole ones for Esther and Meg, and four halves for the others.

Baby was not provided with even a half, much to her private indignation--it was an insult to her four years and a half, she considered, to go free like the General.
But the cost of those scraps of pasteboard had made the Captain look unhappy: he only received eighteenpence change out of the ten pounds he had tendered; for Yarrahappini was on the borders of the Never-Never Land.
He spent the eighteenpence on illustrated papers--Scraps, Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday, Comic Cuts, Funny Folks, and the like, evidently having no very exalted opinion of the literary tastes of his family; and he provided Esther with a yellow-back--on which was depicted a lady in a green dress fainting in the arms of a gentleman attired in purple, and Meg with Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog", because he had noticed a certain air of melancholy in her eyes lately.
Then bells clanged and a whistle shrieked, porters flew wildly about, and farewells were said, sadly or gaily as the case might be.
There was a woman crying: in a hopeless little way on the platform, and a girl with sorrowful, loving eyes leaning out of a second-class window towards her; there was a brown-faced squatter, in a tweed cap and slippers, to whom the three-hundred-mile journey was little more of an event than dining; and there was the young man going selecting, and thinking England was little farther, seeing his wife and child were waving a year's good-bye from the platform.

There were sportsmen going two hundred miles after quail and wallaby; and cars full of ladies returning to the wilds after their yearly or half-yearly tilt with society and fashion in Sydney; and there were the eight we are interested in, clustering around the door and two windows, smiling and waving cheerful good-byes to the Captain.
He did not look at all cast down as the train steamed fussily away--indeed, he walked down the platform with almost a jaunty air as if the prospect of two months bachelordom was not without its redeeming points.
It was half-past six in the afternoon when they started, and they would reach Curlewis, which was the nearest railway station to Yarrahappini, about five the next morning.

The expense of sleeping-berths had been out of the question with so many of them; but in the rack with the bags were several rolls of rugs and two or three air-pillows against the weary hours.