tones. "I trust that we shall
meet again. You have done me good service by shortening my voyage
considerably.--Farewell."

"I say, Moses," shouted one of the seamen, as he looked down on the tiny
canoe while they were pushing off.

"Hallo?"

"Keep your heart up, for--we'll try to 'do to oders all around de t'ing
what's good an' true!'"

"Das de way, boy--'an' oders, 'turning tit for tat, will do de same to
you!'"

He yelled rather than sang this at the top of his tuneful voice, and
waved his hand as the sharp craft shot away over the sea.

Fortunately the sea was calm, for it was growing dark when they reached
the shores of Borneo and entered the mouth of a small stream, up which
they proceeded to paddle. The banks of the stream were clothed with
mangrove trees. We have said the banks, but in truth the mouth of that
river had no distinguishable banks at all, for it is the nature of the
mangrove to grow in the water--using its roots as legs with which, as it
were, to wade away from shore. When darkness fell suddenly on the
landscape, as it is prone to do in tropical regions, the gnarled roots
of those mangroves assumed the appearance of twining snakes in Nigel's
eyes. Possessing a strongly imaginative mind he could with difficulty
resist the belief that he saw them moving slimily about in the black
water, and, in the dim mysterious light, tree stems and other objects
assumed the appearance of hideous living forms, so that he was enabled
to indulge the uncomfortable fancy that they were traversing some
terrestrial Styx into one of Dante's regions of horror.

In some respects this was not altogether a fancy, for they were
unwittingly drawing near to a band of human beings whose purposes, if
fully carried out, would render the earth little better than a hell to
many of their countrymen.

It is pretty well known that there is a class of men in Borneo called
Head Hunters. These men hold the extraordinary and gruesome opinion that
a youth has not attained to respectable manhood until he has taken the
life of some human being.

There are two distinct classes of Dyaks--those who inhabit the hills and
those who dwell on the sea-coast. It is the latter who recruit the ranks
of the pirates of those eastern seas, and it was to the camp of a band
of such villains that our adventurers were, as already said, unwittingly
drawing near.

They came upon them at a bend of the dark river beyond which point the
mangroves gave pl