the faculty of narrating these adventures with wonderful eloquence,
working up his descriptive sketches with such intuitive perception of the
picturesque points that the whole was thrown forward with a positively
illusive effect, like matters of your own visual experience. In fact,
they were so admirably done that I could never more than half believe
them, because the genuine affairs of life are not apt to transact
themselves so artistically. Many of his scenes were laid in the East,
and among those seldom-visited archipelagoes of the Indian Ocean, so that
there was an Oriental fragrance breathing through his talk and an odor of
the Spice Islands still lingering in his garments. He had much to say of
the delightful qualities of the Malay pirates, who, indeed, carry on a
predatory warfare against the ships of all civilized nations, and cut
every Christian throat among their prisoners; but (except for deeds of
that character, which are the rule and habit of their life, and matter of
religion and conscience with them) they are a gentle-natured people, of
primitive innocence and integrity.

But his best story was about a race of men (if men they were) who seemed
so fully to realize Swift's wicked fable of the Yahoos, that my friend
was much exercised with psychological speculations whether or no they had
any souls. They dwelt in the wilds of Ceylon, like other savage beasts,
hairy, and spotted with tufts of fur, filthy, shameless, weaponless
(though warlike in their individual bent), tool-less, houseless,
language-less, except for a few guttural sounds, hideously dissonant,
whereby they held some rudest kind of communication among themselves.
They lacked both memory and foresight, and were wholly destitute of
government, social institutions, or law or rulership of any description,
except the immediate tyranny of the strongest; radically untamable,
moreover, save that the people of the country managed to subject a few of
the less ferocious and stupid ones to outdoor servitude among their other