e root of a tree before they attack it
with their stone tomahawks. However, there was no use in trying to hurry
the ancient mariner. He was bound to talk while his cigar lasted,
thereby providing his hearer with plenty of what is called "copy" in the
profession of letters.

The beach-comber was a big man, loose (in physique only of course),
broad, and black-bearded, his face about the colour of a gun-stock. We
called him by the nickname he bore {304} (he bore it very
good-naturedly), because he had spent the years of his youth among the
countless little islands of the South Seas, especially among those which
lie at "the back of beyond," that is, on the far side of the broad
shoulder of Queensland. In these regions the white man takes his life
and whatever native property he can annex in his hand, caring no more for
the Aborigines' Protection Society than for the Kyrle Company for
diffusing stamped-leather hangings and Moorish lustre plates among the
poor of the East-End. The common beach-comber is usually an outcast from
that civilization of which, in the islands, he is the only pioneer.
Sometimes he deals in rum, sometimes in land, most frequently in "black-
birds"--that is, in coolies, as it is now usual to call slaves. Not, of
course, that all coolies are slaves. My friend the beach-comber treated
his dusky labourers with distinguished consideration, fed them well,
housed them well, taught them the game of cricket, and dismissed them,
when the term of their engagement was up, to their island homes. He was,
in fact, a planter, with a taste for observing wild life in out-of-the-
way places.

"Yes, I have been in some near things," he went on, when the trunk of his
cigar was fairly ignited. "Do you see these two front teeth?"

The beach-comber opened wide a cavernous mouth. The late Mr. Macadam,
who invented the system of making roads called by his name, allowed no
stone to be laid on the way which the stone-breaker could not put in his
mouth. The beach-comber could almost have inserted a milestone.

I did not see "these two front teeth," because, like the Spanish Fleet,
they were not in sight. But I understood my friend to be drawing my
attention to their absence.

"I see the place where they have been," I answered.

"Well, _that_ was a near go," said the beach-comber. "I was running for
my life before a pack of screeching naked beggars in the Admiralty
Islands. I had emptied my revolver, and my car