Their speech was shrill and quick, perfectly unintelligible to our friend Miago, who seemed greatly in fear of them: they seemed astonished to find one apparently of their own clime, complexion, and degree in company with the white strangers, who must have seemed to them a different race of beings; nor was their wonder at all abated when Miago threw open his shirt, and showed them his breast curiously scarred after their fashion--for this custom of cutting stripes upon the body, as other savages tattoo it, by way of ornament, seems universally to prevail throughout Australia--as a convincing evidence that he, though now the associate of the white man, belonged to the same country as themselves. When Miago had, in some degree, recovered from his alarm--and their want of all weapons no doubt tended to reassure him more than anything else, he very sagaciously addressed them in English; shaking hands and saying, "How do you do?" and then began to imitate their various actions, and mimic their language, and so perfectly did he succeed that one of our party could not be persuaded but that he really understood them; though for this suspicion I am convinced there was in truth no foundation. In general appearance this tribe differed but little from those we had previously seen. They wore their hair straight, and tied behind in a rude semblance of the modern queue; their beards were long, and two or three among them were daubed with a kind of black ochre. All of them had lost one of the front teeth, and several one finger joint;* in this particular they differed from the natives seen in Roebuck Bay, amongst whom the practice of this mutilation did not prevail. They were, I think, travelling to the southward, at the time they fell in with us, for they had no females among the party, by whom they are usually at other times accompanied. The circumstance of their being unarmed may seem to militate against the supposition that they were travelling, but it is to be borne in mind that these people universally consider the absence of offensive weapons as the surest test of peaceful intentions, and would therefore, if they desired to maintain a friendly footing with the newcomers, most probably deposit their arms in some place of concealment before they made themselves visible. (*Footnote. A similar custom was noticed by Captain Cook at the Sandwich Islands, where it was regarded as a propitiatory sacrifice to the Eatooa, to avert his anger; and not to express, as the same mutilation does in the Friendly Islands, grief for the loss of a friend.) NATIVE SMOKES. The coast seems pretty thickly populated between Roebuck and Beagle Bays; as the smoke from native fires was constantly to be seen, but in all cases these signs of human existence were confined to the neighbourhood of the sea. The fishing proved unsuccessful, so we were fain to content ourselves without the promised addition to our evening meal. We found the tide rise here 18 feet.