name of Austin. It was after
reading a book about the Red Indians that he thought it more prudent to
create this place of strength. As the Red Indians are in North America,
and this fort seems to me a very useless kind of building, I anxiously
hope that the two may never be brought together. When Austin is not
engaged in building forts, nor on his lessons, which are just as
annoying to him as other children's lessons are to them, he walks
sometimes in the Bush, and if anybody is with him, talks all the time.
When he is alone I don't think he says anything, and I dare say he feels
very lonely and frightened, just as the Samoan does, at the queer noises
and the endless lines of the trees.

He finds the strangest kinds of seeds, some of them bright-coloured like
lollipops, or really like precious stones; some of them in odd cases
like tobacco-pouches. He finds and collects all kinds of little shells,
with which the whole ground is scattered, and that, though they are the
shells of land creatures like our snails, are of nearly as many shapes
and colours as the shells on our sea-beaches. In the streams that come
running down out of our mountains, all as clear and bright as
mirror-glass, he sees eels and little bright fish that sometimes jump
together out of the surface of the brook in a spray of silver, and
fresh-water prawns which lie close under the stones, looking up at him
through the water with eyes the colour of a jewel. He sees all kinds of
beautiful birds, some of them blue and white, and some of them coloured
like our pigeons at home; and these last, the little girls in the cellar
may like to know, live almost entirely on wild nutmegs as they fall ripe
off the trees. Another little bird he may sometimes see, as the lean man
saw him only this morning: a little fellow not so big as a man's hand,
exquisitely neat, of a pretty bronzy black like ladies' shoes, who
sticks up behind him (much as a peacock does) his little tail, shaped
and fluted like a scallop-shell.

Here there are a lot of curious and interesting things that Austin sees
all round him every day; and when I was a child at home in the old
country I used to play and pretend to myself that I saw things of the
same kind--that the rooms were full of orange and nutmeg trees, and the
cold town gardens outside the windows were alive with parrots and with
lions. What do the little girls in the cellar think that Austin does? He
makes believe just the other way; he