But when I last met him, he was wearing a long, somewhat shabby top-hat, and a frock-coat without any sleeves to it. Nothing else earthly, except his long black bare legs and his black bare arms.
He was quite chatty, too, and asked kindly after "de Breetish King ob Englan'."
"I quite civilise now, all same," he said, and had I any rum?
Well, so far so good, and a map is a handy contrivance, but, alas! a map tells you nothing of the magnificence of New Guinean forests, woods, and wilds, of the heights of its ranges of mountains that are everywhere, nor the solitary grandeur of its scenery, whether in inland glens or mirrored in the deep bosom of its lonely lochs and bays.
The home these latter are of the strangest-looking fishes in the sea, and millions of birds of the ocean, whose nesting places are on the rocks, above the rocks, or in the woods themselves. Some of these sea-gulfs, I feel sure, are haunted. I've taken a little boat and rowed me all alone for miles up darksome inlets, o'erhung with wild woods thickening green, but so drearily silent in the sunshine, that when I have lain on my oars, as sailors say, not a sound could I hear except the drip, drip, from the blades.
Yet sometimes a wild, unearthly scream would come out of the forest, so wailing, so agonizing, that I have felt sure some terrible tragedy had just been enacted within its darkest shades.
* * * * *
It was among such scenery as this that the gallant broadswords of the Breezy lived and laboured, surveying, charting, and learning the tricks and manners of the vast varieties of natives we find in these islands, but all the while keeping a good look out for British interests.
The old days of kidnapping were then about over. If there was now any such thing, it was on a smaller scale, just as smuggling is still carried on around our little island at home here.
But Captain Breezy and his officers, did not forget that nearly every-man-Jack in the ship was supposed to be studying to become a pilot of these maritime regions.