100 "MANY ISLES AND STRANGE PLACES" 



of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens, who had been 

 invited to join us at Rangoon. We had with us 

 a tent and a servant, a jolly-boat and two lascars, 

 and a venerable native botanical collector. We pitched 

 our tent in a clearing on the top of a little hill 

 at the north end of the island, having beneath us 

 on our landward side a pleasant pool of fresh water 

 fringed with long grass and water-gentian, and covered 

 with red lotus, and on our other three sides the far- 

 resounding sea. 



There is on this island a herd of wild cattle — 

 the feral descendants of domestic cattle that were 

 brought to Table Island, close by, for the service 

 of the lighthouse — and these we looked to for beef ; 

 but in vain, so that we had to fall back on Crosse 

 and Blackwell, pasturers of the people. From the 

 pool, however, we got some oceanic teal, and from 

 its sedgy banks an occasional snipe. Hardly was our 

 tent pitched, than there came up out of the jungle, 

 to guard it, a very ancient and weather-beaten pariah 

 dog of the female sex. She had probably been left, 

 like Robinson Crusoe, by some people who once upon 

 a time took a lease of the island and made an 

 unhappy attempt to settle on it. Pariah dogs, as a 

 rule, have an instinctive dislike of Europeans ; but 

 this poor creature was so glad to see men again, that 

 she cared not whether they were brown or white. 



Our week on the Great Coco is one of my 



