it, so this was their regular camping-place. A more wild and desolate spot than this looked to me, with all these naked savages lying in the yard, and with weapons piled about both outside and inside the house, cannot be conceived. The next day, on our return journey, I parted company with my two fellow-travellers, and went ashore at ---- plantation, where I got a job as carpenter for two pounds ten shillings per week and my board. This was a place which scarcely could be called a plantation yet, as it was only just formed. The owner and his family lived there in a large slab-house, erected on wooden piles ten or twelve feet out of the ground. There were also a few outbuildings, but any real work was not going on, only one man, a bullock driver, being engaged on the premises. My "boss" told me, though, that he expected a hundred Kanakas shortly from the South Sea Islands, and that he wanted me to fit up bunks for them, put together tables, troughs for making bread in, furniture for his own house, and such like. I perceived a few thousand feet of sawn cedar lying about, and there and then I started work to astonish the natives. I never worked with greater perseverance than then. The tools were in a fearful condition, but I soon got them into some shape. Then I rigged up a bench and made a sunshade out in the yard, where the young lady could see me working, and then it began to rain tables, sofas, chairs, and bunks, so much that I am not afraid to say that I quickly became a favourite. I found out here that I was more capable than I myself thought, because I even made a first-rate boat, in which I had the pleasure of rowing about the river with Mr. ----'s daughter, and in which she and her father afterwards travelled to Cardwell. Miss ---- had been with her parents on the Herbert for a year, and shortly after I arrived on the scene she went to a boarding-school in Sydney. On his return journey from Cardwell Mr. ---- brought home a servant girl, who proved to be the German girl I already have mentioned as having seen in Cardwell. I relate this matter not because I took any particular interest in this girl, but because I have by and by to write about what happened to all of us.