ed the
hitherto veracious one, with unabated good humour, "though perhaps one
might more truthfully say they were walking less to gain an appetite
than to find the means wherewith to satisfy it." He then described
these piscatorial pedestrians as small, dark fish with little bead-like
eyes in the top of their heads, and a blunt nose--he called it a nose,
I am not guilty. Moreover, their ventral fins were largely developed,
and by this means the fish hopped, or rather, hitched along the sand,
after the manner of seals.

It was a preposterous tale, and nothing would do but that the
cable-ship Munchausen should take a party ashore where all might
witness the fish of Tukuran taking a constitutional on the beach, after
the manner of the oysters in "The Walrus and the Carpenter." Nothing
daunted, the officer agreed to the proposition, and so confident was
he that even Mrs. Munchausen became less apologetically sure of his
infallibility. But on our arrival at the beach, not a fish was to
be seen, and loud was the laughter at both Munchausens, and numerous
the jokes at their expense.

However, the tide going out a little later discovered on the wet sand
a multitude of small walking-fish, and thus spared a reputation, and
at the same time saved to science a story that else might have been
laughed out of existence. Text-books tell of India's walking-fish,
but I have been able to find nothing as to the walking-fish of the
Philippines. In Luzon, during the rainy season, it is no uncommon
sight to see natives casting their nets in the overflowed rice-fields,
though perhaps but a few days before the ground there had been caked
hard and dry from the sun. In this latter instance, it is more than
probable that the fish do not walk back and forth, but bury themselves
in the ground at the beginning of the hot season, remaining there
until the first rains call them out in great numbers.

The Signal Corps found the trench at Tukuran a difficult problem
in that it had to be dug down a very steep hill leading from the
stone-enclosed fort to the beach, but by evening of the first day
this was accomplished, and the shore end laid and buoyed. The next
morning we left Tukuran, seeking better soundings than we had at first
obtained, but finding the water nearly as deep in one place as another,
it was decided to leave at sunrise on the following day and lay the
cable as best we could.

All went well until late in the afternoon, when communicat