the New Year, or some great occasion. The children play
marbles all along the street; and though they are generally very jolly,
yet they get awfully cross over their marbles, and cry and fight like
boys and girls at home. Another amusement in country places is to shoot
fish with a bow and arrow. All round the beach there is bright shallow
water where fishes can be seen darting or lying in shoals. The child
trots round the shore, and wherever he sees a fish, lets fly an arrow
and misses, and then wades in after his arrow. It is great fun (I have
tried it) for the child, and I never heard of it doing any harm to the
fishes: so what could be more jolly? The road up to this lean man's
house is uphill all the way and through forests; the forests are of
great trees, not so much unlike the trees at home, only here and there
are some very queer ones mixed with them, cocoa-nut palms, and great
forest trees that are covered with blossom like red hawthorn, but not
near so bright; and from all the trees thick creepers hang down like
ropes, and nasty-looking weeds that they call orchids grow in the forks
of the branches; and on the ground many prickly things are dotted which
they call pine-apples: I suppose every one has eaten pineapple drops.

On the way up to the lean man's house you pass a little village, all of
houses like the king's house, so that as you ride through you can see
everybody sitting at dinner, or if it be night, lying in their beds by
lamplight; for all these people are terribly afraid of ghosts, and would
not lie in the dark for any favour. After the village, there is only one
more house, and that is the lean man's. For the people are not very
many, and live all by the sea, and the whole inside of the island is
desert woods and mountains. When the lean man goes into this forest, he
is very much ashamed to say it, but he is always in a terrible fright.
The wood is so great and empty and hot, and it is always filled with
curious noises; birds cry like children and bark like dogs, and he can
hear people laughing and felling trees; and the other day (when he was
far in the woods) he heard a great sound like the biggest mill-wheel
possible going with a kind of dot-and-carry-one movement like a dance.
That was the noise of an earthquake away down below him in the bowels of
the earth, and that is the same thing as to say away up towards you in
your cellar in Kilburn. All these noises make him feel lonely and
scared, and