s like this. Thompson and I, and some other chaps, started
in a boat, with provisions, just prospecting about the islands. So we
went in and out among the straits--horrid places, clear water full of
sharks, and nothing but mangroves on every side. One of these sounds is
just like another. Once I was coming home in a coasting steamer, and got
them to set me down on a point that I believed was within half-a-mile of
my place. Well, I was landed, and I began walking homewards, when I
found I was on the wrong track, miles and miles of mangrove swamp, cut up
with a dozen straits of salt water, lay between me and the station. The
first stretch of water I came to, gad! I didn't like it. I kept
prospecting for sharks very close before I swam it, with my clothes on my
head. I was in awful luck all the way, though,--not one of them had a
snap at me."

"But about the taboo pig? Revenons a nos cochons!"

"I'm coming to that. Well, we landed at an island we had never been on
before, where there was a village of Coast natives. A crowd of beehive-
shaped huts, you know, the wall about three feet high, and all the rest
roof, wattle, and clay, and moss, built as neat as a bird's-nest outside,
not very sweet inside. So we landed and got out the grub, and marched up
to the village. Not a soul to be seen; not a black in the place. Their
gear was all cleaned out too; there wasn't a net, nor a spear, nor a mat,
nor a bowl (they're great beggars for making pipkins), not a blessed
fetich stone even, in the whole place. You never saw anything so
forsaken. But just in the middle of the row of huts, you might call it a
street if you liked, there lay, as happy as if he was by the fireside
among the children in Galway, a great big fat beast of a hog. Well, we
couldn't make out what had become of the people. Thought we had
frightened them away, only then they'd have taken the hog. Suddenly, out
of some corner, comes a black fellow making signs of peace. He held up
his hands to show he had no weapon in them, and then he held up his feet
ditto."

"Why on earth did he hold up his feet?"

"To show he wasn't trailing a spear between his toes; that is a common
dodge of theirs. We made signs to him to come up, and up he came,
speaking a kind of pigeon English. It seems he was an interpreter by
trade, paying a visit to his native village; so we tried to get out of
him what it was all about. Just what we might have expected. A kid