Our Captain Was Daily Superintending The Completion Of His Two Small Praus.

All day long native boats were coming with fish, cocoa-nuts, parrots and lories, earthen pans, sirip leaf, wooden

Bowls, and trays, &c. &e., which every one of the fifty inhabitants of our prau seemed to be buying on his own account, till all available and most unavailable space of our vessel was occupied with these miscellaneous articles: for every man on board a prau considers himself at liberty to trade, and to carry with him whatever he can afford to buy.

Money is unknown and valueless here - knives, cloth, and arrack forming the only medium of exchange, with tobacco for small coin. Every transaction is the subject of a special bargain, and the cause of much talking. It is absolutely necessary to offer very little, as the natives are never satisfied till you add a little more. They are then far better pleased than if you had given them twice the amount at first and refused to increase it.

I, too, was doing a little business, having persuaded some of the natives to collect insects for me; and when they really found that I gave them most fragrant tobacco for worthless black and green beetles, I soon had scores of visitors, men, women, and children, bringing bamboos full of creeping things, which, alas! too frequently had eaten each other into fragments during the tedium of a day's confinement. Of one grand new beetle, glittering with ruby and emerald tints, I got a large quantity, having first detected one of its wing-cases ornamenting the outside of a native's tobacco pouch.

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