home-existence, he had been indirectly the cause of
recalling her mind to Frank.

"Come!" she said, angrily, to her companion.
"What do we care about the man or his ship?
Come away."

"By all means,' said Captain Wragge. "As
long as we don't find friends of the Bygraves,
what do we care about anybody."

They walked on, southwards, for ten minutes
or more—then turned and walked back again to
meet Noel Vanstone and Mrs. Lecount.

UP AND DOWN IN THE GREAT SUN
GARDEN.

GLORIOUS with flowers, a great unexplored
garden lies in calm seas under the burning sun.
Except Australia, which is so large as to be
called a continent, Borneo, lying north of it
directly under the equator, and most tropical
among tropical lands in the same Pacific seas,
is the largest island in the world. It is more
than three times as large as Great Britain, and
it is by more than three thousand times less
known. The greater part of the island south of
the equator and on the eastern coast is
considered subject to the Dutch, whose settlements
are comprised in three provinces. On the
northern coast between the sea and a range of
Anga-Anga mountains, is Borneo Proper, with
the town of Brunei, or Borneo, having the island
of Labuan by the head of its bay—an island
ceded to this country, in which are coal mines
worked for the use of steamers in those Eastern
seas. At the other, or western end of Borneo
Proper, still on the northern coast of the great
island, is Sir James Brooke's province of Saráwak,
ceded to this country in 1843.

There was much need of a real traveller in
this great island, that lay dimly seen by Europe
glowing under the bright tropical sun, and we
are very glad, then, now to get a real traveller's
book about Borneo from Mr. Spenser St. John,*
who, resident officially at the principal city of
the island, journeyed towards the south, and
in that direction advanced farther than any
Malay or European who had been before him.
First, he ranged among the tribes planted about
Sir James Brooke's territory of Saráwak. Next,
he ascended twice to the shoulders and head
of the great mountain of Borneo, Kina-Balu,
thirteen or fourteen thousand feet high. Lastly,
he penetrated deep to the south and south-
east of his place of residence, Brunei, the royal
city where, as ancient voyagers say, the sultans
were wont to hold court, with immense body-
guards and displays of barbaric splendour. For
ten years, as he lay in the bay, he had looked
up to the hills rising and rising southward,
innumerable and mysterious, and wondered
what manner of region lay beyond them.
Neither Malay nor European could solve the
mystery; the river Limbang, the outlet from
that undiscovered interior, had only been
navigated within sight of the sea, where it poured
out its waters, which told no secret, from
the profundity of forest and the labyrinth of
mountains. It was long, however, before he
could visit this Cloud-land, so he began with the
places and people nearer at hand. He would
look at the fauns and satyrs of the garden; the
Sea-Dyaks, for example, so called from their
familiarity with salt water, though many of them
dwell far inland.

* Life in the Forests of the Far East, published
by Smith, Elder, and Co.

These are the warlike people accustomed to
take heads, as the Red Indians take scalps,
and addicted to plunder. They live in huts
between five and six hundred feet long—
commodious, clean, and airy. But they have their
difficulties. Now and then a village will dwindle
away under the influence of an epidemic, and
everywhere the snakes are a coiling nuisance,
eating pigs and dogs without ceremony, swallowing
deer—horns and all—and even supping
on late human loiterers in the woods. Until
recently, worse than the snakes were the pirates
—Dyak or Malay. Mr. St. John met with one of
these buccaneers, who, left by his companions
on the banks of a river, swam off to a floating
island on its way seawards, and became a
pilgrim of the waves and winds, his green ship,
palm-masted, supplying him with fruit until a
vessel picked him up.

There is a spicy breath of Eastern fairyland in
the thought of these sailing islets spreading
their foliage to the summer breeze, with a noisy,
well-provisioned crew of birds and monkeys.
Nothing, we suppose, exactly hits the fancy of
an alligator, unless it be the leg of a Dyak, and
the alligators see most of these floating islets.
Alligators in Borneo are sometimes twenty-five
feet long. Cats and monkeys are used as the
baits for catching them, and in their deep
stomachs ominous deposits of jacket-buttons, or the
indigestible pigtails of Chinamen, may now and
then be found. The great ourang-outang, too, as
a distant connexion of Sir Oran Haut-ton, is
reputed dangerous. But this is a libel, and
Mr. St. John could never bring himself to shoot
at creatures so very much like the people he
had sometimes met. The noble savage is not,
on the whole, more remarkable for the amenity
of his habits here than elsewhere. Thus, the
Millenans, a tribe of Dyak origin, say of
themselves, that when they build a huge house on
posts, they dig a deep hole to receive the
first pile, which is hung suspended over it. A
young girl is then put down, the lashings are
cut, the enormous timber descends, and the
blood of the crushed victim propitiates the evil
spirits. Mr. St. John, however, never saw
anything bigger than a chicken immolated in this
manner.

But it is still doubtful whether human sacrifices
do not take place at the burials of respectable
men. The Kanowits, another variety of the same
race, when a chief dies, are supposed to put
his property in a canoe and send it adrift on a
stream. But they swindle their dead by keeping
the valuables and putting off the ghost with trash.
Another strange custom was long hereditary on