On the beach, which I had to walls along every morning to reach the forest, these creatures swarmed by thousands.

Every dead shell, from the largest to the most minute, was appropriated by them.

They formed small social parties of ten or twenty around bits of stick or seaweed, but dispersed hurriedly at the sound of approaching footsteps.

After a windy night, that nasty-looking Chinese delicacy the sea-slug was sometimes thrown up on the beach, which was at such times thickly strewn with some of the most beautiful shells that adorn our cabinets, along with fragments and masses of coral and strange sponges, of which I picked up more than twenty different sorts.

In many cases sponge and coral are so much alike that it is only on touching them that they can be distinguished.
Quantities of seaweed, too, are thrown up; but strange as it may seem, these are far less beautiful and less varied than may be found on any favourable part of our own coasts.
The natives here, even those who seem to be of pare Papuan race, were much more reserved and taciturn than those of Ke.