resistant qualities to that of a basking alligator. Daru is not healthy, and not unhealthy. There is some malaria there, but nothing like so much as one might expect from the surroundings. Indeed, all over the western and gulf districts Papua gives the lie to quite a number of theories of hygiene. Bevan, the explorer of the eighties, long ago noticed with astonishment the excellent health and fine physique of the delta tribes, who live literally in a sea of rotting swamp, where, by all the laws of ordinary hygienic science, they ought merely to die.

It is the surroundings of Daru that lend the little town any interest it possesses. In the first place, it is situated on an islet at the mouth of the Fly, and the Fly is one of the largest and most important rivers in the world. Like every other Papuan river, it is known only for a certain distance. In this case the sphere of the explorer extends over 500 miles, but no one knows where the stream rises, and the upper reaches, though navigable to steamers of a good size, are very seldom visited.

There is no white settlement along the Fly. Land there is in plenty, lying a very little way back from the river, and not apparently used by the natives, except in certain districts, where the great extent and regularity of the Papuan banana groves has excited the admiration of all the travellers-they are not many who have visited the great river. Sugar country is found along the Fly inferior to none in the world. There is open grass country a few miles

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beyond the banks in many districts. The river provides a matchless water-way for the conveyance of produce to market, and the lower part of the estuary is within a day's steam of Australia. Still, for all that no one expects to see the Fly country settled yet. It is too far away.

There are no white people at all in the huge Western Division, save two Government officials and half a dozen traders and missionaries. The country has an ill reputation, scarcely correct as regards health, but as regards the natives something truer. You are not in the comfortable plantation country, with its mail steamers and its known and mapped divisions, and its useful, tractable natives, when you get into the Wild West. This is Papua very much in the rough, as yet.

you can

No one can doubt, all the same, that this mighty river will be a highway of traffic some day. We did not visit it in the Merrie England. We did not even see it, though we were lying in its estuary a night and a day--for the estuary is over eighty miles wide, and you are quite out of sight of the shore, anchored in the midst of this great river mouth. But infer the nearness of the Fly when you look at the yellow flood of fresh water on which the steamer is floating, and you are not surprised to hear, amazing though it seems, that the Fly River pours forth every twenty-four hours into the Gulf of Papua enough water to give every man, woman, and child in the world an allowance of sixty gallons twice over, sixty

gallons being the accepted standard in places where water is plentiful.

From Daru and the West we ran over to Thursday Island-only eighteen hours, even at the seven-knot pace of the leisurely Merrie England-and found ourselves once more in Australian territory.

If

you wish to find Thursday Island on the map, you must follow the huge peninsula of North Queensland with your eye right to the end, and mark down a tiny speck lying close to the edge, among the big islands of Torres Straits-Mulgrave, Banks, Prince of Wales, and Horn. Thursday lies close to Prince of Wales' Island, and is almost dwarfed out of sight by its neighbour, but it is much the more important place, all the same. All the big islands are almost uninhabited; little Thursday, however, has a town and a barracks and a fort and quite a number of calling steamers. It is the centre of the great pearling industry of North Queensland, and keeps a goodsized fleet of pearlers constantly at work.

The place looked like nothing in the world so much as a small, bright, painted view inside a glass paperweight when we came up to it in the full morning light. The clear air cast a crystalline sparkle over the green central hill, and the red and white town climbing up its slopes, and the fiery blue sky and flat blue sea. Thin black masts of sloops and schooners stood out like sharp pen-strokes against the hill and the town in rows as thick as rushes. The fleet was laid up in the harbour, for there was a strike on