the north-east
and steered for the Straits of Sunda, leading into the China Sea--
finally joining the admiral in command of the station at Singapore,
where we cast anchor again in the outer roads one broiling morning in
March, just four months from the date of our leaving home.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE.

"THE HEATHEN CHINEE."

"What a rum place!" cried Larkyns, when the ship was safely moored and
Captain Farmer had gone off in his gig to pay his respects to the
admiral, whose flagship lay hard by, all of us then having time to look
round and survey the strange and picturesque surroundings--
semi-European, semi-Oriental, all tropical--of Singapore harbour, the
capital of the Straits Settlements and great port of the Eastern
Archipelago, amid which we now found ourselves. "I'm blowed if it
doesn't look like the pantomime of `Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves' at
Drury Lane!"

"That's not at all a bad simile, youngster," observed the commander, who
was just coming down from the poop, after seeing everything snug and
that the awnings had been spread over the decks, with windsails rigged
up leading through the hatchways to introduce what air there was to the
heated atmosphere below. "Only, instead of forty, I should think there
were forty thousand thieves amongst that crowd of Asiatics, with their
serpent's eyes and slimy bodies! It looks like a water picnic, does it
not?"

It was certainly a wonderful and varied scene that we gazed at over the
hammock rail, the glaring sun overhead, the vividly blue sea stretching
up to the white beach in front of the busy-looking town and the verdant
hills beyond, with white villas nestling amid the green, like Madeira,
and big, gru-gru palms and agaves, with other odd, broad-foliaged plants
to tell that we were in more outlandish latitudes; while, skimming over
the glassy blue water, that turned to an emerald green in its depths and
was so transparent that the sandy bottom could be seen, with various
molluscs crawling about amongst the algas, were hundreds of boats of
every description--from the trim-built man-o'-war's cutter down to the
slipper-like sampan and aboriginal coracle of as queer construction as
the catamaran of the Coromandel coast or the war canoe of the Sandwich
Islands.

Other even queerer craft lay at anchor like ourselves, only further up
the harbour, chief amongst them being Chinese junks of every size, from
the huge, travelling tea-chest from Woosung or Amoy o