Not the way one gets in the steam-kitchens, but the way my mother used to make it." Then we would get a long description of his mother's recipe for German dumplings. There is no mistake about it, too, we _did_ fast on that ship. In reading over to myself some of these last pages, I am afraid I have given my readers the impression that the people on board, taken as a whole, were a bad lot. If I have done so, it is erroneous. It is true that my first impression of the emigrants was not a good one, and perhaps few among us excelled or were remarkable for anything in particular, but taken as a whole they were honest, hard-working people, and as I became acquainted with them one after another I found that men of whom I had a very low opinion when we first came on board, were in reality entitled to very much higher estimation. We did not know anything about the country to which we were going. We had an idea that we were to begin a new life somewhat freer than in the old world, and, simpleminded as we were--because I was just as bad as anybody--thought that when we came on board ship we could dispense with such formalities as those the old world had taught us. That is, I am sure, the true reason why so many emigrants, when they leave home as well as when they arrive in a colony, behave so foolishly as to make one think that they never had known the decencies of life before. It is the same with the English emigrants, only they are more quickly absorbed into the general population. Still the word "New Chum" has in Australia much the same meaning as the word "fool." I never felt more bitterly ashamed than once, several years after I came to Queensland, when I saw a number of Danish immigrants just arrived. It was in Toowoomba, and I had come down there from up country on some business, when one of the first things I was told was that there were a lot of my countrymen in the depôt waiting for engagements. Toowoomba is about a hundred miles inland, and they had been sent up from Brisbane. Well, I felt quite pleased, and decided at once to go and see them and to speak a kind word to some of them, if I could not do them any other service. But I came away a great deal less pleased than I had gone. There were some long forms outside the building, and on those forms sat as close as they could find room a score or so of men. Each man had wooden clogs on his feet and a long pipe in his mouth. On his knees sat his girl with her arm round his neck, and there they sat smoking and kissing perfectly regardless of ladies and gentlemen who would walk about looking at them and going on again. One I stood glaring at seemed to me the worst. He was a big ugly fellow, dressed in a blue calico blouse, black trousers and wooden clogs. In his hand he had a pipe five feet long, but on his head he had a sugar-bag. These sugar-bags are of straw and about two feet six inches in length. He had tied in the corners to fit his head.