were sea-fans, purple and yellow, that spread
themselves up from the curious bits of coral-rock on the bottom, and
there were ever so many other things that grew like bushes and vines,
and of all sorts of colors. Among all these you could see the fishes
swimming about, as if they were in a great aquarium. Some of these
fishes were very large, with handsome black bands across their backs,
but the prettiest were some little fellows, no bigger than sardines,
that swam in among the branches of the sea-feathers and fans. They were
colored bright blue, and yellow and red; some of them with two or three
colors apiece. Rectus called them "humming-fishes." They did remind me
of humming-birds, although they didn't hum.

When I came here before, I was with a party of ladies and gentlemen. We
went in a large sail-boat, and took several divers with us, to go down
and bring up to us the curious things that we would select, as we looked
through the water-glass. There wasn't anything peculiar about these
divers. They wore linen breeches for diving dresses, and were the same
kind of fellows as those who dived for pennies at the town.

Now, what I wanted to do, was to go to the coral-reef and dive down and
get something for myself. It would be worth while to take home a sea-fan
or something of that kind, and say you brought it up from the bottom of
the sea yourself. Any one could get things that the divers had brought
up. To be sure, the sea wasn't very deep here, but it had a bottom, all
the same. I was not so good a swimmer as these darkeys, who ducked and
dived as if they had been born in the water, but I could swim better
than most fellows, and was particularly good at diving. So I determined,
if I could get a chance, to go down after some of those things on the
coral-reef.

I couldn't try this, before, because there were too many people along,
but Rectus, who thought the idea was splendid, although he didn't intend
to dive himself, agreed to hire a sail-boat with me, and go off to the
reef, with only the darkey captain.

We started as early as we could get off, on the morning after we had
been at Fort Charlotte. The captain of the yacht--they give themselves
and their sail-boats big titles here--was a tall colored man, named
Chris, and he took two big darkey boys with him, although we told him we
didn't want any divers. But I suppose he thought we might change our
minds. I didn't tell him _I_ was going to dive. He might not have