The ladies were again enabled to join us on deck and with music, cards, books and conversation the time passed pleasantly enough.
The steerage passengers were to us a never-ending source of amusement and interest, as we watched them working in their various ways and listened to their strange and incomprehensible gibberish.

An old Hindoo one day raffled off a richly-embroidered silk pillow at a shilling a chance, and this, with my usual good luck I won and turned over to Mrs.
Anson for safe keeping.
The Hindoos and Mohammedans on board would eat nothing that they did not cook themselves, even killed a sheep every few days, when it became necessary, and carrying their own supply of saucepans and other cooking utensils.

One of the Hindoos, a merchant of Calcutta, who had been ill from the time that the steamer left Port Adelaide, died when our voyage was about half over.

His body was sewn up in a piece of canvas with a bar of lead at the foot and laid away in his bunk.

It was in vain that we asked when he was to be buried, as we could get no satisfactory answer to our queries, but the next night, when the starlight lay like a silver mantle on the face of the waters, the steamer stopped for a moment, a splash followed, and the body of the Hindoo sank down into the dark waters, and in a few days the episode had been forgotten.