"Ay--a good deal."

"Have you ever travelled in the interior of the larger islands?" asked
Nigel, in the hope of drawing from him some account of his experiences
with wild beasts or wild men--he did not care which, so long as they
were wild!

"Yes, in all of them," returned the hermit, curtly, for he was not fond
of talking about himself.

"I suppose the larger islands are densely wooded?" continued Nigel
interrogatively.

"They are, very."

"But the wood is not of much value, I fancy, in the way of trade,"
pursued our hero, adopting another line of attack which proved
successful, for Van der Kemp turned his eyes on him with a look of
surprise that almost forced him to laugh.

"Not of much value in the way of trade!" he repeated--"forgive me, if I
express surprise that you seem to know so little about us--but, after
all, the world is large, and one cannot become deeply versed in
everything."

Having uttered this truism, the hermit resumed his meerschaum and
continued to gaze thoughtfully at the embers of the fire. He remained so
long silent that Nigel began to despair, but thought he would try him
once again on the same lines.

"I suppose," he said in a careless way, "that none of the islands are
big enough to contain many of the larger wild animals."

"My friend," returned Van der Kemp, with a smile of urbanity, as he
refilled his pipe, "it is evident that you do not know much about our
archipelago. Borneo, to the woods and wild animals of which I hope ere
long to introduce you, is so large that if you were to put your British
islands, including Ireland, down on it they would be engulphed and
surrounded by a sea of forests. New Guinea is, perhaps, larger than
Borneo. Sumatra is only a little smaller. France is not so large as
some of our islands. Java, Luzon, and Celebes are each about equal in
size to Ireland. Eighteen more islands are, on the average, as large as
Jamaica, more than a hundred are as large as the Isle of Wight, and the
smaller isles and islets are innumerable. In short, our archipelago is
comparable with any of the primary divisions of the globe, being full
4000 miles in length from east to west and about 1,300 in breadth from
north to south, and would in extent more than cover the whole of
Europe."

It was evident to Nigel that he had at length succeeded in opening the
floodgates. The hermit paused for a few moments and puffed at the
meerschaum, while Moses glared at his master with abs