As it would have been madness attempting to cross the bar before daylight, we hauled the boat up on the beach, and made ourselves comfortable for the night.  About one o’clock, the trooper who was on watch,awakened us with the news that there was a light out at sea.  We thought at first it could only be some blacks in their canoes, spearing fish by torchlight, but it gradually drew nearer and nearer, until at last we could distinguish the distant sound of voices, and the faint rattle of the iron cable as it flew out through the hawse-hole.

“Some coasting craft, I suppose,” said Dunmore.

“Most probably, but we shall find out in the morning;” and we were soon again in the land of dreams.

Before daylight we had finished breakfast, and by the time the sun rose, were in the whale-boat, pulling towards the new arrival.  She was a dirty, weather-beaten, nondescript-looking little craft, half fore and aft schooner, half dandy-rigged cutter, and the look-out on board was evidently not very vigilant, for we had almost arrived alongside, before a black head showed over the gunwale, and, frightened at seeing a boat-load of armed men in such an unexpected spot, poured out a flood of shrieking jargon that would have aroused the Seven Sleepers, and which speedily awoke from their slumbers the remainder of the crew.  There seemed to be only two white men, one of whom introduced himself as the captain, and asked us, in French, to come on board.  The vessel was the ‘Gabrielle d’Estonville’, of New Caledonia, commanded by Captain Jean Labonne, and had put into Rockingham Bay for water, during a ‘beche-de-mer’ expedition.  Anything to equal the filth of the fair ‘Gabrielle’, I never saw.  Her crew consisted of another Frenchman besides the captain, and of seven or eight Kanakas, two of whom had their wives on board.  As perhaps this extraordinary trade is but little known to the reader who has not resided in China, I will briefly narrate how it is carried out.

From the neighbourhood of Torres Straits to about the Tropic of Capricorn, extends, at a distance of fifty to a hundred miles from the shore, an enormous bed of coral, named the Barrier Reef.  There, untold millions of minute insects are still noiselessly pursuing their toil, and raising fresh structures from the depths of the ocean.  Neither is this jagged belt —­ though deadly to the rash mariner —­ without its uses.  In the first place, a clear channel is always found between it and the mainland, in which no sea of any formidable dimensions can ever rise, and now that modern surveys have accurately indicated where danger is to be found, this quiet channel is of the greatest use to the vessels frequenting that portion of the ocean, for they avoid the whole swell of the broad Pacific, which now thunders against and breaks harmlessly on the huge coral wall, instead of wasting its fury on the coast itself.  In the second place on the Barrier Reef is found