ook
about for others. Happily, now that I was known in the region, I had
less trouble, especially as I held out the prospect of a visit to
Noumea. With six boys of my own and a few other men, I started on
another journey.

I had always suspected the existence of a race of pygmies in the
islands, and had often asked the natives if they had ever seen
"small fellow men." Generally they stared at me without a sign of
intelligence, or else began to tell fairy-tales of dwarfs they had
seen in the bush, of little men with tails and goat's feet (probably
derived from what they had heard of the devil from missionaries),
all beings of whose existence they were perfectly convinced, whom
they often see in the daytime and feel at night, so that it is very
hard to separate truth from imagination.

I had heard stories of a colony of tailed men near Mele, and that, near
Wora, north of Talamacco, tailed men lived in trees; that they were
very shy and had long, straight hair. The natives pretended they had
nearly caught one once. All this sounded interesting and improbable,
and I was not anxious to start on a mere wild-goose chase. More exact
information, however, was forthcoming. One of my servants told me that
near a waterfall I could see shining out of a deep ravine far inland,
there lived "small fellow men."

It was an exceptionally stormy morning when we started, so that
Mr. F. advised me to postpone my departure; but in the New Hebrides it
is no use to take notice of the weather, and that day it was so bad
that it could not get any worse, which was some consolation. Soon we
were completely soaked, but we kept on along the coast to some huts,
where we were to meet our guide. Presently he arrived, followed by a
crowd of children, as they seemed to me, who joined our party. While
climbing inland toward the high mountains, I asked the guide if he
knew anything about the little people; he told me that one of them
was walking behind me. I looked more closely at the man in question,
and saw that whereas I had taken him for a half-grown youth, he was
really a man of about forty, and all the others who had come with him
turned out to be full-grown but small individuals. Of course I was
delighted with this discovery, and should have liked to begin measuring
and photographing at once, had not the torrents of rain prevented.

I may mention here that I found traces later on of this diminutive race
in some other islands, but rarely in such