, greatly excited; and as he drew near they all rose
up from the grass where they had been sitting or lying to stare at
him, filled with wonder at the sight of that small boy alone in the
desert. There were about twenty men and women, and several children;
the men were very big and tall, and were dressed only in robes made
of the skins of some wild animal; they had broad, flat faces, and
dark copper-coloured skins, and their long black hair hung down
loose on their backs.

These strange, rude-looking people were savages, and are supposed to
be cruel and wicked, and to take pleasure in torturing and killing
any lost or stray person that falls into their hands; but indeed it
is not so, as you shall shortly find. Poor ignorant little Martin,
who had never read a book in his life, having always refused to
learn his letters, knew nothing about savages, and feared them no
more than he had feared old Jacob, or the small spotted snake, the
very sight of which had made grown-up people scream and run away. So
he marched boldly up and stared at them, and they in turn stared at
him out of their great, dark, savage eyes.

[Illustration: ]

They had just been eating their supper of deer's flesh, roasted on
the coals, and after a time one of the savages, as an experiment,
took up a bone of meat and offered it to him. Being very hungry he
gladly took it, and began gnawing the meat off the bone.

When he had satisfied his hunger, he began to look round him, still
stared at by the others. Then one of the women, who had a
good-humoured face, caught him up, and seating him on her knees,
tried to talk to him.

"Melu-melumia quiltahou papa shani cha silmata," she spoke, gazing
very earnestly into his face.

They had all been talking among themselves while he was eating; but
he did not know that savages had a language of their own different
from ours, and so thought that they had only been amusing themselves
with a kind of nonsense talk, which meant nothing. Now when the
woman addressed this funny kind of talk to him, he answered her in
her own way, as he imagined, readily enough: "Hey diddle-diddle, the
cat's in the fiddle, fe fo fi fum, chumpty-chumpty-chum, with bings
on her ringers, and tells on her boes."

They all listened with grave attention, as if he had said something
very important. Then the woman continued: "Huanatopa ana ana
quiltahou."

To which Martin answered, "Theophilus Thistle, the thistle-sifter,
sifted a sieve