The days seemed endless.

Everbody bought great bunches of green bananas at the ports in Mexico, where we stopped for passengers.
The old woman was irritable, and one day when she saw the agreeable German doctor pulling bananas from the bunch which she had hung in the sun to ripen, she got up muttering "Carramba," and shaking her fist in his face.

He appeased her wrath by offering her, in the most fluent Spanish, some from his own bunch when they should be ripe.
Such were my surroundings on the old "Newbern." The German doctor was interesting, and I loved to talk with him, on days when I was not seasick, and to read the letters which he had received from his family, who were living on their Rittergut (or landed estates) in Prussia.
He amused me by tales of his life at a wretched little mining village somewhere about fifty miles from Ehrenberg, and I was always wondering how he came to have lived there.
He had the keenest sense of humor, and as I listened to the tales of his adventures and miraculous escapes from death at the hands of these desperate folk, I looked in his large laughing blue eyes and tried to solve the mystery.
For that he was of noble birth and of ancient family there was no doubt.
There were the letters, there was the crest, and here was the offshoot of the family.

I made up my mind that he was a ne'er-do-weel and a rolling stone.

He was elusive, and, beyond his adventures, told me nothing of himself.