‘He is in the right to look ashamed,’ said the doctor. ‘Take it that he has brought great grief and distress upon a respectable family by his mysterious disappearance. I don’t believe for a moment,’ continued he, eyeing me sternly, ‘that he has friends at Hobart Town. It’s just an ordinary runaway case. He may have robbed some kind employer--perhaps defrauded his own father. His clothes are new and good. Where did you get the money to buy these clothes with?’ he asked. I kept my head hung. ‘Lads of your sort,’ he continued, ‘get hold of cheap romancing works--vile, lying fictions--books which represent Jack Sheppard as a greater man than Wellington. Little by little they advance till they end there,’ said he, pointing, as Captain Sutherland had, to the main-hatch. ‘Down there, weighted with irons, branded as criminals, leaving their native country for ever, expelled by the just laws of an outraged community, are many men who have begun as you have begun--nay, who may have started on their downward career with a great deal more of modesty than you have exhibited.’ Captain Barrett let his eye-glass fall, whistled softly and lounged aft to the wheel. All this while the decks had remained comparatively deserted. Just at this moment a boatswain’s mate tuned up his whistle, and a number of seamen came out of the forecastle and went to work in various parts of the ship forward. The doctor continued to lecture me; but I was looking at the strange, grim scene of decks and did not heed him. You would have thought, at sight of the barricades, that the ship was full of wild beasts; that man-eating and ravening creatures took the air in the space inclosed by the savage, iron-studded, bristling fence work. Suddenly, the sentry at the main-hatch stiffened his figure, as though to a sudden call to attention. He guarded a door at the extremity of a short wooden passage, broad enough to allow one person to pass through at a time. A man clothed as a convict stepped through this door. On perceiving him the doctor broke off, and went to the brass poop rail and overhung it, gazing eagerly. A second and a third convict appeared, then a fourth; this man held a fiddle in one hand and a bow in the other.