ful, and as she entered the lagoon
through the passage in the barrier I was struck by her lines, slender,
swelling, and feminine. She passed within a few hundred feet of me,
and I saw that she was the Marara, the Flying-Fish.

I did not know it then, but I was to go on that little vessel to the
blazing atolls of the Dangerous Archipelago, and to see stranger and
more fascinating sights than I had dreamed of on the Noa-Noa during
my passage to Tahiti.

I dragged my canoe to the edge of the quai des Subsistances,
so-called because of the naval depot. The craft was dubbed out of a
breadfruit-tree trunk, and had an outrigger of purau wood, a natural
crooked arm, with a small limb laced to it. The canoe was steady enough
in such smooth water, and I paddled off to Motu Uta. That islet is a
rock of coral upon which soil had been placed unknown years before,
and which produced fruits and flowers in abundance under the hand of
the caretaker. Motu Uta is about as large as a city building lot, and
the coral hummock shelves sharply to a considerable depth. Under this
declining reef were the rarest shapes and colors of fish. They swam
up and down, and in and out of their blue and pink and ivory-colored
homes, slowly and majestically, or darting hither and thither, angered
at the intrusion of my canoe in their domain, courting and rubbing
fins, repelling invaders. The little ones avoiding dexterously the
appetites of their big friends, and these moving pompously, but warily,
seeking what they might devour.

A collector of corals would find many sorts there. They are wonderful,
these stony plants, graceful, strange, bizarre. The Tahitian, who
has a score of names for the winds, and who classifies fish not only
by their names, but changes these names according to size and age,
makes only a few lumps of the coral. It is to'a, and when round is
to'a ati, to'a apu; when branching, uruhi, uruana; when in a bank,
to'a aau; when above the surface of the water, to'a raa. A submerged
mass is to'a faa ruru, and the coral on which the waves break, to'a
auau. However, the native knows well that one species of coral, the
ahifa, is corrosive, irritating the skin when touched, and another,
which is poisoned by the hara plants, is termed to'a harahia.

Coral makes good lime for whitening walls, and is cut into blocks for
building. Many churches in Tahiti were built of coral blocks. The puny
fortifications erected by the French in the war with the