A naturalist, by what Andrew Harben told me, is a man that goes around looking for things that happen by nature. The more natural they are the better pleased is he. And some day if he looks far enough he's liable to fetch up against something that just naturally makes a meal off him and he goes looking no farther.
Anyway this is what I gathered from Andrew Harben. He's all right now and when last I saw him he was pounding chain cables by the Cape Town breakwater—such being the most denatured employment he could find. But he used to be a naturalist himself and interested in most curious facts like bugs and poison plants and wild animals, until once they brought him so close to an unnatural finish that they cured him for all time to come....
"Keep away from it," says Andrew Harben, giving me advice while he chipped the rust flakes lovingly into my eyes. "Whenever you have a feeling that you'd like to be a great scientific investigator and discover what's none of your business," he says, "go and pry into a keg of dynamite with a chisel. It's quicker and more homelike. But leave the strange places and the strange secrets of the earth to university professors and magazine writers, they being poor devils and mostly so scrawny that nothing would bite them anyway. You mightn't believe I once went around sampling rocks and fleabites and tribal customs and things in all kinds of queer corners. I did, 'he says,' but I do not any more. And yet I made one remarkable scientific discovery before I quit. It is a valuable fact in nature and I will hand it to you for what it's worth, free gratis."
Which he did, and I'm doing the same.
It was while his ambition was young and strong that Andrew Harben took a job from the Batavia Government to watch a screw-pile light by the Borneo shore of Macassar. His tastes running as they did, you got to admit his judgment, no other place around the earth having quite so much nature laid on it to the square inch. Mud and mangroves and sloughs and swamps make a cozy home that suits a lot of queer inhabitants, mostly of a kind you and me would be highly wishful to avoid. But Andrew Harben he opened up his specimen cases and set out his little pickle bottles full of alcohol and was happy, laughing quite humorous to himself at the idea of getting paid thirty guilders a month for such a privilege.
The lantern at Andrew Harben's light must have been brought out by the first Dutch navigator. A great iron scaffolding in the middle of his shack held a tub of oil. Then there were eight flat wicks that led up through a perforated sheet of iron from the oil tub, each cropping out overhead by an old-fashioned thumbscrew feed. And around the wicks was built the eight-sided glass cupola. Yes, it was a kind of overgrown street lamp of a light, but mighty important in those waters just the same.
The keeper's business was to have the oil tub always full and to climb around and give the thumb-screws a twist every hour of the night. So long as he kept his wicks trimmed and burning nobody cared what else he did on the side. The skipper of the lighthouse tender that landed Andrew Harben made this clear.
"Z' last mans what lived here got eats by z' crocodile," he said. "All but z' feets of one, which we buried. Zat wass awright, only zey let z' lights go out and zere wass wrecks. Oh, such wrecks because of zese dam currents. Now, please, if you got mad, be so good to stay anyways by z' lights until we bring anozzer mans, if it is all z' same to you."
"Don't worry about me," said Andrew Harben, who was a big, hearty chap. "I shan't go mad, no fear. The poor fools probably hadn't enough brains to keep from rattling loose. You see, I'm a scientist, I shall explore the wonders of natural history. My work here in Borneo shall make me famous and, who knows, may make my fortune as well. There was Philson, who found how the nipa palm can be made to yield pure maple sirup at a cost of one cent per gallon, and Biggins, who learned that the distilled juice of the female mustard spider is a specific for the pip—both humble investigators like myself. No. I'll have enough to keep me busy, never fret."
"Yes," remarked the skipper, a most intelligent halfcaste, Andrew Harben told me, being educated at the Agricultural School at Buitenzorg, "yes, I zink maybe you will. So you are a natural 'istory? In zat case a crocodile may not like your flavior, you zink? Perhaps you are right. I will stop back in a month to see if zis iss z' truth?"