at?" "You know how to talk; long tongue;" was my reply;
upon which Imbat, forgetting his anger, burst into a roar of laughter,
and saying, "and I know how to make you fat," began stuffing me with
frogs, barde, and by-yu nuts. The rest of the party arrived just before
nightfall, and, searching the hut, found a paper of tea, and an old tin
pot in which they cooked some, and then eating frogs, etc., for their
supper, we all laid down to sleep, and in the silence of the night I
rendered fervent thanks to my Maker who had again brought us so near the
haven where we would be."

OPINIONS OF THE MEN REGARDING THE FATE OF OUR OTHER PARTY.

April 21.

It had rained all night but we had been a little sheltered by the hut;
though from the state of anxiety we were in sleep did not visit our eyes.
This was the first time since I had been out that I had slept so near the
men as to be able to overhear their conversation; but the rain forced us
all to seek the shelter of the same little hut, and I thus gathered the
different stories that they narrated to one another. Their speculations
and conjectures naturally ran upon our absent comrades; some imagined
that they were within a day or two's march of us, but another party held
firmly to the opinion that we should never see them more.

SUPERSTITIONS OF MY MEN.

They could give no apparently satisfactory reason for holding this
opinion, and, as there was evidently some deep mystery connected with it,
I kept on pressing my servant Coles in order to induce him to tell me
whence it arose. At last it came out that Mr. Walker had had a dream,
when we were on the shores of Shark Bay and before we had commenced our
return home, that some dreadful misfortune had befallen us and that Mr.
Smith, Thomas Ruston, and he himself, were endeavouring to make the Isle
of France in a boat, when Mr. Smith died, and the remaining two had eaten
his body. Mr. Walker had, with the utmost imprudence, related this dream
to some of the men, and they, with that superstition which is so common
amongst sailors and Englishmen of the lower orders, had attached a great
degree of importance to it; many circumstances which had hitherto been
unexplained to me now flashed upon my mind; poor Mr. Smith had been very
ill at the time Mr. Walker had related this inauspicious dream, and at
that period an extraordinary degree of despondency had crept over him, so
much so that some of the men imagined he had become deranged. When