OUR ISLANDS 167 



a lacy edge of surf. Gardner and Osborn, to the 

 north and west, were Httle dark heaps speckled with 

 faint green, and a toy Arcturus lay between them. 

 Rounding the furthest point of Hood was a moving 

 dot, — the launch returning from a visit to the al- 

 batross rookery. And everywhere stretched the 

 empty miles of blue plain, the summer sea, ruffled 

 by a lusty trade-wind that fanned our hot faces with 

 sweet air. 



The sweeping view held us so long that we did 

 not for some minutes see what lay below. At our 

 feet was a sheer drop of a hundred feet or more ; a 

 long jetty, a narrow rampart of rock, perhaps 

 thirty feet high, projected from the island for some 

 distance, and turned at a neat accurate right-angle 

 to parallel the line of the cliff where we stood, so 

 that we looked down upon a perfectly protected 

 harbor, enclosed on three sides. It hardly seemed 

 possible that man had had no hand in the shaping of 

 this precise alignment, that might have been a min- 

 iature of some such famous port as Alexandria, 

 where the populace sauntered on the mole and 

 watched ships come and go. In this case the gos- 

 sipping crowd was composed of boobies, jostling 

 each other along the narrow wall-top or standing 

 stiffly like sentinels silhouetted against the sea. 



They had no ships to watch, but there was activ- 

 ity enough, of a kind that was as visible to them as 

 it was to us from our loftier perch. At the surface 

 floated an enormous school of the beautiful white- 

 striped angelfish, Holocanthus passer, their black 

 bodies, splashed with orange, red and purple, 



