derful sea garden, where lobsters, crabs, sea-urchins,
turbos, starfish, and hundreds of other sentient beings lived, I saw
a thousand true scaled fish, most of them highly colored, and many
so curiously marked, fashioned, and equipped with eccentric members
that I was startled into biblical phrases. In the market they were
strange enough, dead and on the marble slabs, or in green leaves, but
in the lagoon they were a kaleidoscope of complexions and shapes. They
were the lovely elves to complement the fantastic shellfish, yellow,
striped with violet; bright turquoise, with a gold collar; gold,
with broad bands of black terminating in winglike fins; scarlet,
with cobalt polka-dots; silver, with a rosy flush; glossy green,
dazzling crimson, black velvet, solid red.

They darted and flashed in and out of the caves in the coral, caressed
the sea-anemones, idled about the shells, avoided by dexterous
twistings and turnings a thousand collisions, and continued ever the
primary endeavor, the search for those particular bits of food their
appetites craved.

The effect upon me of all this splendor and grace of water life, as I
bent over the surface of the lagoon or walked with lunette among the
beds of coral, was, after the oft-repeated periods of bewilderment at
the gorgeousness and whimsicality of the universe, a deep rejoicing for
its prodigality of design and purpose, and a merry sorrow for those
who would inflict dogma and orthodoxy on a practical and heterodox
world. I leaned on the side of the canoe or on my spears and laughed
at the fools of cities, and at myself, who had been a fool among them
for most of my life. Just how this train of reasoning ran I cannot say,
but it moved inexorably at the contemplation of the sublime radiancy
of the vivarium of the Mataiea lagoon. It always appeared a symbol of
the cosmic energy which poured the bounty of rain upon the sea as upon
the thirsty earth, and which is beyond good and evil as we reckon them.

When I became myself the hunter for fish, and stood upon the hummocks
of coral in water up to my waist or neck, lunette in one hand
and spears in another, I saw a different aspect of the garden. I,
naked among the coral and the plants, must have looked to them like
a frightful demon, white and without scales, a horrible devil-fish,
my arms and legs glabrous tentacles, and the lunette and spears adding
to my hideousness and foul menace. I know that was the impression I
made on the