ef many mornings in a little canoe that
Tiura, the eldest son of the chief, loaned me. I carried from the
house a paddle and three harpoons of different sizes. The canoe had
an outrigger and was very small, so that it moved fast through the
usually still lagoon, propelled by the broad-bladed paddle. In the
bottom of it might be an inch of water, for occasionally I shipped a
tiny wave, but wetness was no bother in this delicious climate; a pareu
was easily removed if vexatious and a cocoanut-shell was an ample bale.

Low tide was at sunrise, and warmed with my fruit and coffee, and
the happy ia ora na, Maru! of the family, I paddled to the reef with
never-failing expectation of new wonders. The marine life of the
Tahiti reef is richer than anywhere in these seas, as the soil of
the island is more bountiful.

At that state of the tide the surf barely broke upon the reef, and,
almost uncovered, its treasures were exposed for a little while as
if especially for me. The reef itself was a marvel of contrivance by
the blind animals which had died to raise it. If I had been brought
to it hooded, and known nothing of such phenomena, I would have sworn
it was an old concrete levee. The top was about fifty feet wide, as
level as a floor, pitted with innumerable holes, the hiding-places of
millions of living forms which fed on one another, and were continually
replenished by the rolling billows. The wall of the reef opposed to
the sea was a rough slope from the summit to the bottom, buttressed
against the attacks of storms, and defended by chevaux-de-frise
such as the Americans sank in the Hudson River in 1777. I ventured
cautiously over the edge. A student of ancient tactics would have
found there all the old defenses in coral--caltrops, and abatis,
molded in dark-gray coral, battered and shot-marked. It was a dream
of a sunken city wall of old Syracuse, and conjured up a vision of
the hoary Archimedes upon it before the inundation, directing the
destruction, by his burning-glass, of the enemy's ships. The side
of the reef toward the land was as sheer as an engineer could make
it with a plumb-line. The coral animals had as accurate a measure of
the vertical as of defense against the ocean.

Over this levee rolled or slid a dozen kinds of shellfish spying
out refuges against the breakers and their brother enemies in the
troughs and holes of the coral floor. With my small spears I pried
out dozens of them, Mao, starfish, clams, o