Jim and I used to wonder, by the hour, what he'd been in the old country.

He'd been all over the world--in the Islands and New Zealand; in America, and among Malays and other strange people that we'd hardly ever heard of.

Such stories as he'd tell us, too, about slaves and wild chiefs that he'd lived with and gone out to fight with against their enemy.

'People think a great deal of a dead man now and then in this innocent country,' he said once when the grog was uppermost; 'why, I've seen fifty men killed before breakfast, and in cold blood, too, chopped up alive, or next thing to it; and a drove of slaves--men, women, and children--as big nearly as our mob, handed over to a slave-dealer, and driven off in chains just as you'd start a lot of station cattle.

They didn't like it, going off their run either, poor devils.