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would stay away from my flower-garden.” In reply to which the captain, burning with indignation, shouted from the center of the island, where he stood, “Ahoy, there, on Prison Island! You Hare, don’t you know that rum and roast pig are not a sailor’s heaven?” Hare said afterward that one might have heard the captain’s roar across to Java.

The lawless establishment was soon broken up by the women deserting Prison Island and putting themselves under Ross’s protection. Hare then went to Batavia, where he met his death.

My first impression upon landing was that the crime of infanticide had not reached the islands of Keeling Cocos. “The children have all come to welcome you,” explained Mr. Ross, as they mustered at the jetty by hundreds, of all ages and sizes. The people of this country were all rather shy, but, young or old, they never passed one or saw one passing their door without a salutation. In their musical voices they would say, “Are you walking?” (“Jalan, jalan?”) “Will you come along?” one would answer.

For a long time after I arrived the children regarded the “one-man ship” with suspicion and fear. A native man had been blown away to sea many years before, and they hinted to one another that he might have been changed from black to white, and returned in the sloop. For some time every movement I made was closely watched. They were particularly interested in what I ate. One day, after I had been “boot-topping” the sloop with a composition of coal-tar and other stuff, and while I was taking my dinner, with the luxury of blackberry jam, I heard a commotion, and then a yell and a stampede, as the children ran away yelling: “The captain is eating coal-tar! The captain is eating coal-tar!” But they soon found out that this same “coal-tar” was very good to eat, and that I had brought a quantity of it. One day when I was spreading a sea-biscuit thick with it for a wide-awake youngster, I heard them whisper, “Chut-chut!” meaning that a shark had bitten my hand, which