Early as they were, the O’Connors were before them.  It was a day of which no young O’Connor was willing to miss a minute.  What was it to them that the regatta itself did not really begin—save for a few sailing races, which nobody noticed—until one o’clock?  Was there not all the unusual stir and bustle of the town to see?—the gay shops, decked for the occasion with brave displays of fruit and sweets and cakes, to tempt hungry picnickers; the gallant array of boats, glistening with new paint and varnish, and as bright as "elbow-grease" would make them: the crowds arriving from all the countryside by land and water—people they knew, to greet and by whom to be greeted—schoolfellows, curiously unfamiliar in their best clothes—school teachers, even more curiously human and approachable, and not at all suggesting the week-day discipline of desk and ruler?  Not a yard of the esplanade was without its excitements. There were the summer visitors from the houses that were shuttered and gloomy all the winter, and from the tiny cottages under the hummocks across the lagoon, owned by people from Sale and Bairnsdale, who lived a camping existence from Christmas until Easter, with the breakers pounding almost at their back doors.  These considered themselves part and parcel of the place, as indeed they were, and looked with something of disparagement at the folk from Melbourne and Sydney who filled the hotels, and who might never come again, and who, at the best, lived a luxurious and pampered life, and did not know the joys of a picnic existence, with no servants and no worries—every one working in the same way, and every one ready for every kind of fun, from big surf-bathing parties or moonlight swims in the lake, to rushing over the hummocks in a body to lend a hand with the hauling of a shoal of salmon brought in through the breakers.  Then there were other visitors—blacks from the Lake Tyers Mission Station; principally lithe young men keen on taking part in the regatta, with a sprinkling of older men, and a few young women and boys.  They moved here and there among the crowd on noiseless bare feet.