rom a cruel death after every one
had lost its tail. Why is it that pigs of different breeds always bite
off each other's tails? I claimed fifty cents per tail, and was awarded
$3.50 damages, to be paid by the community generally. The community
refused to pay. His Honour then notified by the town crier that I was
at liberty to shoot any pig that broke into the station grounds. I put
a cartridge into a Snider rifle and told my servants to call me if they
heard a grunt in the night.

Three days after this, as I was discussing theology and baked fowl one
night with the local teacher in his own house, a boy burst in and said
that there was a strange pig in my garden devouring my crop of French
beans. In two minutes I was back in my house, snatched up the Snider,
and ran to the garden wall. There was the brute, a great black-and
white beast, the biggest native pig I ever saw. His back was turned, but
hearing my steps he 'went about' and faced me. 'Twas a bright moonlight
night, and the bullet plugged him fair between the eyes. Over he rolled
without a kick. Then I heard a shriek or laughter, and saw half a dozen
girls scuttling away among the coco-palms. A horrible suspicion nearly
made me faint. Jumping over the wall I examined the defunct, and could
scarce forbear to shed a tear.

'Twas mine own prized black Australian boar, daubed over with splashes
of coral lime whitewash. And the whitewash came from a tub full of it,
with which the natives had that morning been whitening the walls of the
newly-built village church. The one-eyed old scoundrel of a deacon told
me next day it was a judgment on me.

MAURICE KINANE

Eastward, from the coast of New Guinea, there lies a large island
called, on the maps, New Britain, the native name of which is Berara. It
is nearly three hundred miles in length and, in parts, almost sixty in
width, and excepting the north-eastern portion, now settled by
German colonists, is inhabited by a race of dangerous and treacherous
cannibals, who are continually at war among themselves, for there are
many hundred tribes living on the coast as well as in the interior.
Although there have been white people living on the north-east coast
for over thirty years--for there were adventurous American and English
traders living in this wild island long before the natives ever saw a
German--not one of them knew then, or knows now, much of the strange
black tribes who dwell in the interior of the centre a