One day while I was getting these signatures, and the men were coming to where I held my levee as fast as they could, the doctor stormed the cabin with two constables behind him and ordered me to give up the document to him. Then the doctor and I talked, I in Danish and he in German, and we had a wordy war. I liked the doctor in my heart, because he was about as brave a man as one could wish to see, and very likely, too, some of the severe discipline on board was not altogether uncalled for; yet he was not going to have it all his own way, and to this day I maintain that whatever else might have been right or wrong, to starve as we starved was scandalous. I write about these things, and I do not know whether my readers may think them of much interest, but all these little incidents seem engraven upon my memory. On board ship there is nothing to think about or to talk about but the same old things. One is cross, perhaps, and everybody talks much about the same thing. "Where are we, I wonder?" "I wonder how many knots we are running?" "I wonder how it will go when we come to Queensland?" "I wonder if any one ever was so hungry as I?" So it goes on, day out and day in, and one has to discuss and answer these questions about five hundred times every day. But now we are nearing Australia, and high time I dare say the reader probably thinks it is; but if my readers are tired out, so were we. Yet there is another of the passengers I must describe, as I intend to mention him again. I will do so in a few words. He was a quiet, gentlemanly man, about thirty years old. He told me he had been a lieutenant in the Danish army, but had been dismissed for insubordination. He managed, without giving offence to anybody, to keep himself completely in the shadow in the ship, and one seemed not to know he was there. I will call him "A." A. understood and spoke English fluently, but nobody knew it. Indeed, when the complaint-fever was on, he denied all knowledge of the language. A young lady was travelling with him--that is, she went as a single girl, but they got married as soon as we came ashore. They had quite a number of things with them to set up house with, and lived for a short time very comfortably on their means; when they went away again I lost sight of them. CHAPTER III. MY ARRIVAL IN QUEENSLAND.