ldly on shore, and advanced with extended hands
towards the savages. They understood him, and now seemed to have
banished their fears, and to have no treacherous intentions.

His first object gained, he endeavoured to make them understand that he
was looking for one of his own countrymen. By signs he showed how a
vessel had been wrecked, and that two of the people had swam on shore,
and how he was looking for them; but they shook their heads, and he felt
certain that this was not the island where Jack was to be found. While
he was speaking several of the people brought down cocoa-nuts,
plantains, taro, and other roots and fruits in baskets, as a proof of
their friendly feelings, and showing, also, that they knew what the
wants of white men were. How different, however, would have been the
conclusion of the intercourse with these people, if the schooner's crew
had fired on the first alarm, and the blood of the poor savages been
shed?

The _Good Hope_ laid at anchor for two days, when, the gale abating, she
again sailed. There was still a good deal of sea, but as Captain Blount
found that he could lay his course, he was unwilling to delay any
longer, and, like most sailors, he believed that his craft could do
anything. He ought before to have been called captain, though it must
be owned that he was rather a young one, and captain of a somewhat small
craft. He and his companions regretted that they had not brought an
interpreter with them, that they might communicate without difficulty
with the natives.

"We might have obtained some information from the poor savages we last
visited about other islands lying to the westward," observed the
captain; "I suspect, too, that they would have had to tell us, that some
former visitors had taken them unawares and killed some of them, and so
they had thought all white men were enemies, and had determined to kill
the next they could get in their power."

"Yes, indeed," said Elton, "how different these are from the inhabitants
of the first island we visited; I have been thinking that I should like
to tell some of their missionaries of these poor people, and get them to
send one of their number to instruct them."

"What, do you think that you could hope to make Christians out of such
naked savages as those are?" exclaimed Hugh Owen, who had not turned his
mind to the subject.

"Of course; those well-behaved, well-clothed people we saw, were quite
as wild and ignorant as the