THE " CANNIBAL CHIEF."

Press, Volume LV, Issue 10215, 10 December 1898, Page 3

THE " CANNIBAL CHIEF."

Melbourne Leadeb. The wondrous adventures of Louis de Rougemont whom tao proprietor of the Wide World has acknowledged to be identical with Henry Grieu. late of Sydney, form the chief attraction of the October

number of the magazine, a copy of which has been ■ fcrrwarded to us by Gordon and Gotch, the -.ieibourne agents. The rival Oi Daniel Defoe describes his first.attendance at a cannibal cookery lesson and the subsequent banquet, and narrates how he and his faithful black spouse swam ten miles to land after their boat had been smashed,jby a whale, beingable to/see the natives putting out from the shore the whole distance. This was, 1 no doubt/-partly dueto the. extraordinary eyesight possessed by the'"Can--niboi* Chief,'\but more especially to the local suspension of the law which governs the earth'B curvature, and confines the optical range of a man hi the water to.its,surface half a, mile around him. However, equally extraordinary things happened. The : whale followed" "Bbugemont". and Yamba ashore, and becoming stranded, a_owed'hun . an opportunity of taking its dimensions: * It j was 150 feet long—a new species apparently, for 90 feet is the cetacean limit allowed by , prosaic zoologists. A new variety of worn bat was also discovered by "Rougemont." ' The variety known to Australiansitts a burrowing quadruped, hut the "Rougemont" variety haunts coast islands in countless thousands, and flies—rfor he saw them "rise in clouds every, evening." While wombat hunting he encountered an alligator, vaulted over its head, landted astride the scaly back, stuck a tomahawk into its head, and being unable to extract it, blinded the great saurian with*his stilleto, .while Yamba prevented it turned its head to bite him by stuffing paddles down its throat. Starting with Zamba for Caps) York, from Cambridge Gulf, the "Cannibal Chief' struck a waterless, red sand desert, 'where he managed to keep alive for. some tame by sucking the heavy dews from the blade of his tomahawk in the mornings. When on the point of death from thirst a dream voice instructed him to cut a tree, with the result that a stream of water flowed from it, and he was saved. The narrative comes to a temporary stoppage at this stage; .but an editorial note - states that ''Rougemont" is busy "working up his material for the learned' societies, and tracing his relatives in Lausanne and Paris." It is further. announced that he will probably lecture in tlie chief towns of England, and that John Tussaud is modelling the "marvellous man".for the Maryle-bone-road waxworks.