Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Marianne North, James Tissot and John Everett Millais. Five early stories of men posted where the empire runs out: a Dutch trader married into a Malay family and despised by both sides, a colonial agent alone at a river station, a Breton farm where the peasants deal with a fool. Conrad's first collection, written while he was still deciding whether he was a sailor who wrote or a writer who had sailed. The lagoon and the outpost are already his. Fifty-eight plates of river views, Borneo gardens and campfire scenes by painters including Marianne North and Edmund Marriner Gill carry the outpost world of the stories in paint.