at least would have authentic brands.  With an apparently studied array of cicatrices, each 3 inches long and half an inch wide, on her arms and shoulders, Mickie marked Jinny for his own.  The couple have one girl—­Mickie prefers to use the word “daw-tah”—­and his child had been but lately received into the bosom of the family, after several years’ exile among the whites.  It is somewhat of a trouble that “Minnie” had almost forgotten her native tongue, and that her parents have to yabber to her in English.  According to them it will be a year before Minnie regains lingual facility.  In the meantime great pains are being taken with her education, and her accomplishments promise to be varied, though entirely unornamental.  She will in time be able to recognise at a glance the particular kind of decayed timber in which the delicious white grub resides, will know that the nut of the cycad has to be immersed in a running stream before it is “good fella,” and how to grind the kernel into flour, and how to mould the dough into a German sausage-shaped damper; she will be able to walk about the reef, picking up blacklip oysters and clams, without lacerating the soles of her feet, and to make a dilly-bag, and, finally, to enjoy a smoke.

Mickie appreciates a joke.  When Jinny complained that the scrub caught her brand new pipe and had broken it short off, Mickie with an extravagant grimace softly urged her to go along Townsville and buy another.

He is also superstitious.  After dark he will not move a yard from his camp without a flaring torch of paper bark, a fiery aspersorium for the scaring of the “debil-debil.”  His opinions on the supernatural are unsatisfactory.  He does not know what the “debil-debil” is like, or what form the ill-will of that mystic being would take—­nothing but “that fella sit down alonga scrub,” and that he has “long fella needle alonga hand”; and so he carries and waves about his paper bark torch to scare this viewless and dreaded enemy.

Mickie’s views as to the future are not quite explicit.  “Suppose me go bung, me go alonga sky.  Bi’mby jump up ’nother fella.”  He is not at all certain whether the transformation would be into a white man or not; in fact he appears absolutely indifferent.  Another time he will say—­“Suppose me go bung.  Good-bye, finish; no come back.  Plenty fella alonga Palm Island go bung.  He no come back.”  Daylight disperses all his fears.  In point of fact he has nothing to fear.  His foes are dead, and there is no poisonous snake or offensive animal on the Palms.  Once he sprang suddenly and excitedly into the air as we tramped through the long grass on the edge of the sweetly-smelling jungle, with the exclamation, “Little fella snake!” Being reminded that he had boldly asserted that there was no bad snakes on the island, Mickie replied—­“That fella no bad.  Only make foot big.”  He never missed a chance of securing a hatful of grubs, which, together with the chrysalides and the full-grown