ng and floundering, two or three of the handsome red fish I have
described, with a great leather-jacket, came up, and, lying on their
sides, flapped helplessly on the surface. Other kinds, of the mullet
species, came with them, trying to swim upright, but always falling
over on their sides, and yet endeavouring to lift their heads above the
water, as if gasping for air. Then more big leather-jackets, some of
which shot up from below as if they had been fired from a mortar, and,
running head-on to the rocky wall of the pool, allowed themselves to
be lifted out without a struggle. It was most exciting and intensely
interesting to witness.

Presently up came a half-grown hawkbill turtle, his poor head erect
and swaying from side to side; a boy leapt in and, seizing it by its
flippers, pushed it up to some women, who quickly carried the creature
to a small pool near by, where it was placed to recover from the effects
of the _oap_ and then be taken ashore to the village turtle-dock to
grow and fatten for killing. (The "turtle-dock," I must explain, was a
walled-in enclosure--partly natural, partly artificial--situated in a
shallow part of the lagoon, wherein the Leasse people confined those
turtle that they could not at once eat; sometimes as many as thirty were
thus imprisoned and fed daily.)

Out of this one pool--which I think was not more than fifteen yards
across--we obtained many hundredweights of fish and three turtle. All
fish which were too small to be eaten were thrown into other pools to
recover from the effects of the _oap_. The very smallest, however, did
not recover, and were left to float on the surface and become the prey
of large fish when the incoming tide again covered the reef.

I must here relate an incident that now occurred, and which will serve
to illustrate the resourcefulness and surgical knowledge of a race of
people who, had they met them, Darwin, Huxley and Frank Buckland would
have delighted in and made known to the world. I shall describe it as
briefly and as clearly as possible.

I had brought with me a knife--a heavy, broad-backed, keen-edged weapon,
which the Chinese carpenter of our wrecked ship had fashioned out for
me from a flat twelve-inch file of Sheffield steel, and Kusis had, later
on, made me a wooden sheath for it. In my excitement at seeing a large
fish rise to the surface I used it as a spear, and then, the fish
secured, had thrown the knife carelessly down. It fell edge upwar