The Days of a Man 1907 



may attain five or six more. Clinging to him were 

 half a dozen black remoras, or shark-pilots, curious 

 fishes of the open sea which ride free, holding on to 

 large neighbors by a sucker on the back of the head. 

 The shark's triangular, saw-edged teeth went as sou- 

 venirs to the ladies. In his stomach I found an ice- 

 cold wall-eye which we promptly again threw over- 

 board, but recovered once more, though no longer 

 frozen, from the stomach of another shark which took 

 the hook before the ship at last got under way. 



Making Crossing the line, Millhauser staged an amateur 

 circus of which I was ringmaster, dressed in the cap- 

 tain's blue coat over white pajamas. I posed also as 

 Ajax, the strong man, airily lifting huge dumb-bells 

 made of watermelons covered with metallic paper. 

 "Bosco," messenger boy of the gods, rushed about 

 with shark-fins for wings. 



Suva, Passing among the Fiji Islands, the Moana stopped 



f r a day at Suva, the capital, on picturesque Viti 

 Levu. There, aided by the courteous Dr. Bolton G. 

 Corney, British army surgeon, I made a considerable 

 collection from the reef. Since the publication of the 

 "Fishes of Samoa" I had almost begun to question 

 whether the beautiful plates in that report of ours 

 were not too highly colored, but a view of the deni- 

 zens of the reef now reassured me. Indeed, no artist 

 has pigments bright enough truly to represent the 

 blues, greens, scarlets, crimsons, and yellows of those 

 exquisite creatures. 



Viti Levu and its sisters, Levuka, Kandavu, and 

 the rest, are quite as picturesque as the islands of 

 Samoa. Towering in the eastern, scarcely explored 

 interior of Viti Levu, isolated peaks of amazing sharp- 

 ness met the eye. The arable settled area is beautiful 



202 



