Mr. Peter Tourmalin was sitting, or rather lying, in a steamer-chair on the first-class saloon-deck of the P. and O. steamer Boomerang, which had not been many days as yet on the voyage home from Sydney. He had been trying to read; but it was a hot morning, and the curry, of which he had partaken freely at breakfast, had made him feel a little heavy and disinclined for mental exertion just then, particularly as Buckle's History of Civilisation, the first volume of which he had brought