76 CERA2L [chap. XXV. 



to St. Petersburg, and to other parts of Europe, including 

 a few weeks in London, and had then come out to the 

 East, where he had been for some years trading and 

 speculating in the various islands. He now spoke Dutch, 

 French, Malay, and Javanese, all equally well ; English 

 with a very slight accent, but with perfect fluency, and a 

 most complete knowledge of idiom, in which I often tried 

 to puzzle him in vain. German and Italian were also 

 quite familiar to hiin, and his acquaintance with European 

 languages included Modern Greek, Turkish, Eussian, and 

 colloquial Hebrew and Latin. As a test of his power, I 

 may mention that he had made a voyage to the out-of-the- || 

 way island of Salibaboo, and had stayed there trading a 

 few weeks. As I was collecting vocabularies, he told me 

 he thought he could remember some words, and dictated 

 a considerable number. Some time after I met with a 

 short list of words taken down in those islands, and in 

 every case they agreed with those he had given me. He 

 used to sing a Hebrew drinking-song, which he bad learned 

 from some Jews with whom he had once travelled, and 

 astonished by joining in their conversation, and had a 

 never-ending fund of tale and anecdote about the people 

 he had met and the places he had visited. 



In most of the villages of this part of Ceram are schools 

 and native schoolmasters, and the inhabitants have been 

 long converted to Christianity. In the larger villages 



