e remainder.

I need not here attempt to describe the wondrous beauties of a South Sea
coral reef at low tide--they have been fully and ably written about by
many distinguished travellers--but the barrier reef of Strong's Island
is so different in its formation from those of most other islands in the
Pacific, that I must, as relative illustration to this account of the
fishing by _oap_ mention its peculiarity.

Instead of the small clefts, chasms, and pools which so frequently
occur on the barrier reefs of the mountainous islands of Polynesia and
Melanesia, and which at low tide are untenanted except by the smallest
varieties of rock-fish, here were a series of deep, almost circular,
miniature lakes, set in a solid wall of coral rock with an overlapping
edge, which made the depth appear greater than it was, especially when
one stood on the edge and looked down to the bottom, four to six fathoms
below.

In all of these deep pools were great numbers or fish of many varieties,
size, and colour; some swimming to and fro or resting upon the sandy
bottom, others moving upwards and then downwards in the clear water with
lazy sweep of tail and fin. One variety of the leather-jacket tribe
was very plentiful, and their great size was excelled only by their
remarkable ugliness; their ground colour was a sombre black, traversed
by three broad bands of dull yellow. Some of the largest of these fish
weighed quite up to 20 lbs., and were valued by the natives for their
delicacy of flavour. They would always take a hook, but the Strong's
Islanders seldom attempted to capture them in this manner, for their
enormous, hard, sharp, and human-like teeth played havoc with an
ordinary fish-hook, which, if smaller than a salmon-hook, they would
snap in pieces, and as their mouths are very small (in fact the
leather-jacket's mouth is ridiculous when compared to its bulk), larger
and stronger hooks could not be used.

Another and smaller variety were of a brilliant light blue, with vivid
scarlet-tipped fins and tail, a perfectly defined circle of the same
colour round the eyes, and protruding teeth of a dull red. These we
especially detested for their villainous habit of calmly swimming up to
a pendant line, and nipping it in twain, apparently out of sheer humour.
Well have the Samoans named the leather-jacket _Isu'umu Moana_--the
sea-rat.

In one or two of the deeper pools were red, bream-shaped fish that I had
in vain tried to catch with