t;2 SPOLIA ZEVLANICA. 



boat buries its bows deep in the high sandbank which forms the 

 shore, and comes with a sudden thud so violently to a stand that 

 the expectant crew, each man already loaded with his basket or 

 netted pack of oysters, is almost hurled into the narrow openings 

 in the high wattle fence which surrounds the Government 

 "kottus," the sheds where the oysters are first deposited and 

 divided. 



Inside this fence is the huge wattle-walled and palm-thatched 

 warehouse, where the division of the oysters between the divers 

 and the Government is carried out. It is a vast rectangular 

 building divided by rough posts and rails into long straight 

 avenues of square pens, each pen numbered and provided with 

 its Government clerks and counters. 



The crew of each boat in some way gets itself, or is got by the 

 officials, into a separate pen and there dumps down its oysters. 

 Then the oysters are divided between the divers and the Govern- 

 ment, in the respective proportion of one-third and two-thirds, 

 by a process of quite admirable simplicity and ingenuity. The 

 divers themselves, and unassisted, separate their own oysters into 

 three heaps, roughly, but as accurately as possible under the 

 circumstances. Then the Government clerk in charge of that 

 particular pen, entirely at his own discretion, assigns one of these 

 heaps to the divers, and this is forthwith bagged or basketed 

 and carried off by them through the exit on the landward side 

 from the enclosure. The actual process of exit is a little trying, 

 for within this narrow opening in the wattle enclosure a small 

 posse of Government officials with occasionally a few police stand 

 on guard to keep order and to exercise a sort of rough search for 

 illicitly concealed pearls. It is a rough and noisy but very 

 good-humoured crowd ; and in the course of this proceeding not 

 a few pearls are in some mysterious way discovered and confis- 

 cated. If the departing crew is too obstreperous they are detained 

 for such time as is necessary to deprive them of all their oysters. 

 That this last proceeding is nothing more than rough justice is, 

 I think, shown by the fact that the divers recognize it as such, and 

 seldom or never complain once they have lost their oysters. 



But even when a company of divers has successfully passed 

 through the kottus and escaped through the narrow wicket gate on 

 the landward side of that — for an hour or two each day — seething 

 mass of humanity and oysters, their troubles of the day are not over, 

 for they are at once swallowed up in a surging crowd of natives 

 eager to buy from them their oysters by the dozen or the half-dozen, 

 or even by twos and ones. The prices then given for each indivi- 

 dual oyster or handful of oysters are comparatively enormous, 



