an extent, that at one time I intended to abide there.  I was at the one called in the chart ‘Saddle Hill,’ the smallest of them, I think:  and seldom have I had such sensations of peace as I lay a whole burning day in a rising vale, deeply-shaded in palm and tropical ranknesses, watching thence the Speranza at anchor:  for there was a little offing here at the shore whence the valley arose, and I could see one of its long peaks lined with cocoanut-trees, and all cloud burned out of the sky except the flimsiest lawn-figments, and the sea as absolutely calm as a lake roughened with breezes, yet making a considerable noise in its breaking on the shore, as I have noticed in these sorts of places:  I do not know why.  These poor Andaman people seem to have been quite savage, for I met a number of them in roaming the island, nearly skeletons, yet with limbs and vertebrae still, in general, cohering, and in some cases dry-skinned and mummified relics of flesh, and never anywhere a sign of clothes:  a very singular thing, considering their nearness to high old civilisations all about them.  They looked small and black, or almost; and I never found a man without finding on or near him a spear and other weapons:  so that they were eager folk, and the wayward dark earth was in them, too, as she should be in her children.  They had in many cases some reddish discoloration, which may have been the traces of betel-nut stains:  for betel-nuts abound there.  And I was so pleased with these people, that I took on board with the gig one of their little tree-canoes:  which was my foolishness:  for gig and canoe were only three nights later washed from the decks into the middle of the sea.

* * * * *

I passed down the Straits of Malacca, and in that short distance between the Andaman Islands, and the S.W. corner of Borneo I was thrice so mauled, that at times it seemed quite out of the question that anything built by man could escape such unfettered cataclysms, and I resigned myself, but with bitter reproaches, to perish darkly.  The effect of the third upon me, when it was over, was the unloosening afresh of all my evil passion:  for I said:  ’Since they mean to slay me, death shall find me rebellious’; and for weeks I could not sight some specially happy village, or umbrageous spread of woodland, that I did not stop the ship, and land the materials for their destruction; so that nearly all those spicy lands about the north of Australia will bear the traces of my hand for many a year:  for more and more my voyage became dawdling and zigzaged, as the merest whim directed it, or the movement of the pointer on the chart; and I thought of eating the lotus of surcease and nepenthe in some enchanted nook of this bowering summer, where from my hut-door I could see through the pearl-hues of opium the sea-lagoon slaver lazily upon the old coral atol, and the cocoanut-tree would droop like slumber, and the bread-fruit tree would