I have
met several travellers who have been amongst then and they all join in
saying that they are a quiet superior race of people, with whom you may
be perfectly safe, and who are pleased to be looked upon as friends."

"But I thought, uncle," I said, "that they were very dangerous, and that
those krises they wore were poisoned?"

"Travellers' tales, my boy. The kris is the Malay's national weapon
that everyone wears. Why, Nat, it is not so very long since every
English gentleman wore a sword, and we were not considered savages."

We had rather a long and tiresome voyage, for the prahu, though light
and large, did not prove a very good sea-boat. When the wind was fair,
and its great sail spread, we went along swiftly, and we were seldom for
long out of sight of land, coasting, as we did, by the many islands
scattered about the equator; but it was through seas intersected by
endless cross currents and eddies, which seemed to seize upon the great
prahu when the wind died down, and often took us so far out of our
course one day, that sometimes it took the whole of the next to recover
what we had lost.

So far, in spite of the novelty of many of the sights we had seen, I had
met with nothing like that which I had pictured in my boyish dreams of
wondrous foreign lands. The sea was very lovely, so was the sky at
sunrise and sunset; but where we had touched upon land it was at ports
swarming with shipping and sailors of all nations. I wanted to see
beautiful islands, great forests and mountains, the home of strange
beasts and birds of rare plumage, and to such a place as this it seemed
as if we should never come.

I said so to Uncle Dick one day as we sat together during a calm, trying
to catch a few fish to make a change in our food.

"Wait a bit, Nat," he said smiling.

"Yes, uncle, but shall we see wonderful lands such as I should like?"

"You'll see no wonderful lands with giants' castles, and dwarfs and
fairies in, Nat," he replied smiling; "but before long I have no doubt
that I shall be able to show you beauties of nature glorious enough to
satisfy the most greedy imagination."

"Oh! of course I did not expect to see any of the nonsense we read of in
books, uncle," I said; "only we have been away from home now three
months, and we have not got a single specimen as yet, and I want to
begin."

"Patience, my boy, patience," he said. "I am coming all this distance
so as to get to quite new ground. So fa