Pieces torn from the edges of this table sank readily, showing that it had been raised by pressure, and not by its buoyancy.' True, though strange: but stranger still did it seem to us, when we did at last what the Negroes asked us, and dipped our hands into the liquid pitch, to find that it did not soil the fingers.

The old proverb, that one cannot touch pitch without being defiled, happily does not stand true here, or the place would be intolerably loathsome.

It can be scraped up, moulded into any shape you will; wound in a string (as was done by one of the midshipmen) round a stick, and carried off: but nothing is left on the hand save clean gray mud and water.

It may be kneaded for an hour before the mud be sufficiently driven out of it to make it sticky.

This very abundance of earthy matter it is which, while it keeps the pitch from soiling, makes it far less valuable than it would be were it pure.
It is easy to understand whence this earthy matter (twenty or thirty per cent) comes.