n Majuro a Marshall Island boy
who spoke excellent English; this he had learned in the German firm in
Jaluit, yet did not speak one word of German. I heard from a gendarme
who had taught school in Rapa-iti that while the children had the utmost
difficulty or reluctance to learn French, they picked up English on the
wayside, and as if by accident. On one of the most out-of-the-way atolls
in the Carolines, my friend Mr. Benjamin Hird was amazed to find the
lads playing cricket on the beach and talking English; and it was in
English that the crew of the _Janet Nicoll_, a set of black boys from
different Melanesian islands, communicated with other natives throughout
the cruise, transmitted orders, and sometimes jested together on the
fore-hatch. But what struck me perhaps most of all was a word I heard on
the verandah of the Tribunal at Noumea. A case had just been heard--a
trial for infanticide against an ape-like native woman; and the audience
were smoking cigarettes as they awaited the verdict. An anxious, amiable
French lady, not far from tears, was eager for acquittal, and declared
she would engage the prisoner to be her children's nurse. The bystanders
exclaimed at the proposal; the woman was a savage, said they, and spoke
no language. "_Mais vous savez_," objected the fair sentimentalist;
"_ils apprennent si vite l'anglais_!"

But to be able to speak to people is not all. And in the first stage of
my relations with natives I was helped by two things. To begin with, I
was the showman of the _Casco_. She, her fine lines, tall spars, and
snowy decks, the crimson fittings of the saloon, and the white, the
gilt, and the repeating mirrors of the tiny cabin, brought us a hundred
visitors. The men fathomed out her dimensions with their arms, as their
fathers fathomed out the ships of Cook; the women declared the cabins
more lovely than a church; bouncing Junos were never weary of sitting in
the chairs and contemplating in the glass their own bland images; and I
have seen one lady strip up her dress, and, with cries of wonder and
delight, rub herself bare-breeched upon the velvet cushions.

Biscuit, jam, and syrup was the entertainment; and, as in European
parlours, the photograph album went the round. This sober gallery, their
everyday costumes and physiognomies, had been transformed, in three
weeks' sailing, into things wonderful and rich and foreign; alien faces,
barbaric dresses, they were now beheld and fingered, in the