not more than
half that distance from the inside lagoon beach. The storm had destroyed
quite a number of young, half-fledged birds, whose bodies were lying on
the ground, and busily engaged in devouring one of them was a very large
sea eel, as thick as the calf of a man's leg. Before I could manage to
secure a stick with which to kill the repulsive-looking creature, it
made off through the undergrowth at a rapid pace in the direction of the
lagoon, and when we emerged out into the open in pursuit, ten minutes
later, we were just in time to see it wriggling down the hard, sloping
beach into the water. Instinct evidently made it seek the nearest water,
for none of these large sea eels are ever found in Peru Lagoon.

Many of the rivers and lakes of the islands of the Western Pacific are
tenanted by eels of great size, which are never, or very seldom, as far
as I could learn, interfered with by the natives, and I have never seen
the people of either the Admiralty Islands, New Ireland, or New Britain
touch an eel as food. The Maories, however, as is well known, are
inordinately fond of eels, which, with putrid shark, constitute one of
their staple articles of diet.

In the few mountainous islands of the vast Caroline Archipelago, in
the North-western Pacific, eels are very plentiful, not only in the
numberless small streams which debouch into the shallow waters enclosed
by the barrier reefs, but also far up on the mountainsides,
occupying little rocky pools of perhaps no larger dimensions than an
ordinary-sized toilet basin, or swimming up and down rivulets hardly
more than two feet across. The natives of Ponape, the largest island
of the Caroline Group, and of Kusaie (Strong's Island), its eastern
outlier, regard the fresh-water eel with shuddering aversion, and should
a man accidentally touch one with his foot when crossing a stream he
will utter an exclamation of horror and fear. In the heathen days--down
to 1845-50--the eel (toan) was an object of worship, and constantly
propitiated by sacrifices of food, on account of its malevolent powers;
personal contact was rigidly avoided; to touch one, even by the merest
accident, was to bring down the most dreadful calamities on the offender
and his family--bodily deformities, starvation and poverty, and death;
and although the natives of Strong's Island are now both civilised and
Christianised, and a training college of the Boston Board of Missions
has long been established at