hoals. The child trots round the shore, and
whenever he sees a fish, lets fly an arrow, and misses, and then wades
in after his arrow. It is great fun (I have tried it) for the child, and
I never heard of it doing any harm to the fishes, so what could be more
jolly?

The road to this lean man's house is uphill all the way, and through
forests; the trees are not so much unlike those at home, only here and
there some very queer ones are mixed with them--cocoa-nut palms, and
great trees that are covered with bloom like red hawthorn but not near
so bright; and from them all thick creepers hang down like ropes, and
ugly-looking weeds that they call orchids grow in the forks of the
branches; and on the ground many prickly things are dotted, which they
call pine-apples. I suppose every one has eaten pine-apple drops.

On the way up to the lean man's house you pass a little village, all of
houses like the king's house, so that as you ride by you can see
everybody sitting at dinner, or, if it is night, lying in their beds by
lamplight; because all the people are terribly afraid of ghosts, and
would not lie in the dark for anything. After the village, there is only
one more house, and that is the lean man's. For the people are not very
many, and live all by the sea, and the whole inside of the island is
desert woods and mountains. When the lean man goes into the forest, he
is very much ashamed to own it, but he is always in a terrible fright.
The wood is so great, and empty, and hot, and it is always filled with
curious noises: birds cry like children, and bark like dogs; and he can
hear people laughing and felling trees; and the other day (when he was
far in the woods) he heard a sound like the biggest mill-wheel possible,
going with a kind of dot-and-carry-one movement like a dance. That was
the noise of an earthquake away down below him in the bowels of the
earth; and that is the same thing as to say away up toward you in your
cellar in Kilburn. All these noises make him feel lonely and scared, and
he doesn't quite know what he is scared of. Once when he was just about
to cross a river, a blow struck him on the top of his head, and knocked
him head-foremost down the bank and splash into the water. It was a nut,
I fancy, that had fallen from a tree, by which accident people are
sometimes killed. But at the time he thought it was a Black Boy.

"Aha," say you, "and what is a Black Boy?" Well, there are here a lot of
poor people