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Kotzebue gives it S. lat. 44 degrees 50 minutes and W. long. 138 degrees 47 minutes. During the ensuing days were discovered the desert island of Romantzoff, so named in honour of the promoter of the expedition; Spiridoff Island, with a lagoon in the centre; the Island Oura of the Pomautou group, the Vliegen chain of islets, and the no less extended group of the Kruzenstern Islands.

In a couple of hours we found ourselves with a full creel of eels and oura, and I a trifle dismayed at facing the march home. Raiere relieved Tahitua of the burden, and a song shortened the way. I gave them the ditty of the New-Zealand Maori, who metaphorically toasted his enemy: O, the saltiness of my mouth In drinking the liquid brains of Nuku Whence welled up his wrath!

He poised his smallest lance and thrust it with a very quick, but exact, motion, so that almost every time he impaled a shrimp upon its prongs. The oura was instantly withdrawn, and Tahitua received it in his bag. All but he then began in earnest the quest of the bonnes bouches.

We separated a hundred feet or so, and treading slowly the pebbled or bouldered and often slippery floor of the river, keeping to the shallow places, we lighted the rippling waters with our torches, and sought to spear the agile and fearful prey. The oura lances were five feet long, not thicker than a fat finger, and fitted with three slender prongs of iron nails filed upon the basalt rock.

For the inhabitants of "the Land of the Gods" to take any notice of such creatures by adopting a few of their trifling mechanical inventions is an act of gracious condescension. To quote but one official utterance out of a hundred, Baron Oura, minister of agriculture and commerce, writes thus in February of last year:

The hostile bodies came face to face a few paces apart; the queen's party greatest in number, but in disorder, the czar's party drawn up with military skill. A moment, a word, might precipitate a bloody conflict. Suddenly a man in the ranks cried out, "Oura! Long live the empress!"