Gushing.] ^^t) [Xov. 6, 



of the sea, and diving down in a great semi-circle, beat the waves with 

 their wings as though in play, until, as they closed in rapidly toward the 

 reefs, the sound made by them and the now wildly leaping lish was as 

 that of an approaching storm. Thus thousands of the smaller fish were 

 driven in beyond reach of the sharks and porpoises over the shoals and 

 into the bayous formed by the succession of reefs, and there cormorants 

 and pelicans alike made short work of securing their evening meals. 

 The cormorants flew off singly or in swift irregular companies, but the 

 pelicans marched more deliberately awaj'', in orderly and single aereal 

 files, so to say, behind heavy-winged, gray-headed old leaders, evenly, 

 just over the line of the waves, to their tree-built island homes. 



I have dwelt on this singular behavior of the birds because, in con- 

 nection with the observations of the day, and with the picture formed 

 by the concentric reefs, the lagoon they encircled, the old half-ruined pile- 

 houses standing above them out there in the midst of the waters, and 

 the distant dark-green islands — which I now knew had been the homes 

 of sea-dwelling men centuries before — disappearing beyond in the dusk, 

 it all suggested to me in a vivid and impressive manner how the ancient 

 builders of the key I had only this afternoon reconnoitred had probably 

 l)egun their citadel of the sea and why there, so far away from the shore, 

 they had elected to make so laboriously their homes ; why they had 

 from the beginning kept free within their reef-raised sea-walls of shell, 

 the central half-natural lagoons or lake-courts, where the first few of 

 their stilted houses had doubtless been planted, and why ever, as their 

 hand-made island extended, they had kept it surrounded Avith the many 

 channeled enclosures, Tlie key had been, so to say, the rookery, the chan- 

 nels and lesser enclosures the fish-drives and fish-pools of these human 

 pelicans ! Like the pelicans, like even the modern fishermen, they had 

 at first merely resorted to low outlying reefs in these shallow seas as 

 fishing grounds, but ere long had built stations there, little shelters, 

 probably, on narrow platforms held up by clumsy piles, but similar 

 somewhat to the huts that stood here before me. The shells of the mol- 

 lusks they had gathered for food had naturally been cast down beside 

 these lengthy platforms, until they formed long ridges that broke the 

 force of the waves when storms swept by. Thus, I fancied, these first 

 builders of the keys had been taught liow to construct with special pur- 

 pose sea-walls of gathered shells, how to extend the arms of the reefs, 

 and to make other and better bayous or fish-pounds within them by form- 

 ing successive enclosures, ever keeping free channels throughout for the 

 driving in of the fish and the passage of their canoes. And when the in- 

 nermost of the enclosures became choked by drift and other debris thej' 

 had filled them with shell stutf and mud from the surrounding sea, and 

 so of some had made drainage-basins to catch rain for diinking water, 

 and of others, in time, little garden plats or fields. 



Thus it was that the erstwhile stations had become better and better 

 fitted as places of longer abode ; and yet others of the enclosures or 



