s swarm there, and chiefly round the
passages, to feast upon this plenty, and you would suppose that man had
only to prepare his angle. Alas! it is not so. Of these painted fish
that came in hordes about the entering _Casco_, some bore poisonous
spines, and others were poisonous if eaten. The stranger must refrain,
or take his chance of painful and dangerous sickness. The native, on his
own isle, is a safe guide; transplant him to the next, and he is as
helpless as yourself. For it is a question both of time and place. A
fish caught in a lagoon may be deadly; the same fish caught the same day
at sea, and only a few hundred yards without the passage, will be
wholesome eating: in a neighbouring isle perhaps the case will be
reversed; and perhaps a fortnight later you shall be able to eat of them
indifferently from within and from without. According to the natives,
these bewildering vicissitudes are ruled by the movement of the heavenly
bodies. The beautiful planet Venus plays a great part in all island
tales and customs; and among other functions, some of them more awful,
she regulates the season of good fish. With Venus in one phase, as we
had her, certain fish were poisonous in the lagoon: with Venus in
another, the same fish was harmless and a valued article of diet. White
men explain these changes by the phases of the coral.

It adds a last touch of horror to the thought of this precarious annular
gangway in the sea, that even what there is of it is not of honest rock,
but organic, part alive, part putrescent; even the clean sea and the
bright fish about it poisoned, the most stubborn boulder burrowed in by
worms, the lightest dust venomous as an apothecary's drugs.

FOOTNOTE:

[5] Arorai is in the Gilberts, Funafuti in the Ellice Islands.--Ed.

CHAPTER III

A HOUSE TO LET IN A LOW ISLAND

Never populous, it was yet by a chapter of accidents that I found the
island so deserted that no sound of human life diversified the hours;
that we walked in the trim public garden of a town, among closed houses,
without even a lodging-bill in a window to prove some tenancy in the
back quarters; and, when we visited the Government bungalow, that Mr.
Donat, acting Vice-Resident, greeted us alone, and entertained us with
cocoa-nut punches in the Sessions Hall and seat of judgment of that
widespread archipelago, our glasses standing arrayed with summonses and
census returns. The unpopularity of the late Vice-Resident