and was always in the sea,
and was a very great ship, and concluded with, "Perhaps that is your
country?" Finding that I could not or would not tell them anything about
"Jong," there came more regrets that I would not tell them the real name
of my country; and then a long string of compliments, to the effect that
I was a much better sort of a person than the Bugis and Chinese, who
sometimes came to trade with them, for I gave them things for nothing,
and did not try to cheat them. How long would I stop? was the next
earnest inquiry. Would I stay two or three months? They would get me
plenty of birds and animals, and I might soon finish all the goods I had
brought, and then, said the old spokesman, "Don't go away, but send for
more things from Dobbo, and stay here a year or two." And then again the
old story, "Do tell us the name of your country. We know the Bugis men,
and the Macassar men, and the Java men, and the China men; only you,
we don't know from what country you come. Ung-lung! it can't be; I know
that is not the name of your country." Seeing no end to this long talk,
I said I was tired, and wanted to go to sleep; so after begging--one a
little bit of dry fish for his supper, and another a little salt to eat
with his sago--they went off very quietly, and I went outside and took
a stroll round the house by moonlight, thinking of the simple people
and the strange productions of Aru, and then turned in under my mosquito
curtain; to sleep with a sense of perfect security in the midst of these
good-natured savages.

We now had seven or eight days of hot and dry weather, which reduced the
little river to a succession of shallow pools connected by the smallest
possible thread of trickling water. If there were a dry season like that
of Macassar, the Aru Islands would be uninhabitable, as there is no part
of them much above a hundred feet high; and the whole being a mass of
porous coralline rock, allows the surface water rapidly to escape.
The only dry season they have is for a month or two about September
or October, and there is then an excessive scarcity of water, so that
sometimes hundreds of birds and other animals die of drought. The
natives then remove to houses near the sources of the small streams,
where, in the shady depths of the forest, a small quantity of water
still remains. Even then many of them have to go miles for their water,
which they keep in large bamboos and use very sparingly. They assure
me tha