IV 



Norfolk Island 69 



thirty or forty years ago, rush out in red hosts from 

 the deserted cells (what awful irons were lying in 

 those cells when I saw them last !) and almost tear 

 the clothes off your back in their eagerness for 

 another taste of human blood. On another, rabbits 



in some of the higher animal races. They are rather shy, these calling- 

 crabs. At one moment the brown mud seems sprinkled thickly with 

 red tulip blossoms, to some extent vocal, for they keep up a strange 

 clicking concert amongst themselves, and then in an instant, as the 

 vibration of a heavy footstep shakes the ground, the whole parterre 

 vanishes, and nothing is seen but a belated Periophthahmis who has 

 been unable to make up his mind in time, working his pectorals like 

 the paddles of an old-fashioned steamboat to gain the refuge afforded 

 him by his crustacean friend. Not that he always stops there ; some- 

 times, in an ecstasy of terror, he bolts into the front door and out of the 

 back, and, becoming delirious, rushes up one side of the aerial roots of 

 the nearest mangrove and down the other, squattering eventually into 

 the protective security of the dirty water out of which he originally 

 came. Curious things are these "cursorial fishes" — Ilickson's 

 Periophihalmiis, for instance, of which he gives such an excellent 

 figure in his Ceiebean book : the fish who permits himself the extra- 

 ordinary liberty of breathing with the tail he keeps carefully in the 

 water, whilst he reposes all the rest of himself out of it on a rock, 

 assuming, in fact, all the airs of a seal — and who has, moreover, 

 literally thought his eyes almost out of his head in projecting his brain 

 into possible futurities. 



' One wonders whether these fishlets have reached their highest 

 point of development, and whether they will ascend into the regions 

 of Batrachians and lizards, or even into those higher realms of birddom, 

 when they will have lungs and wings and bills, and lay improved eggs 

 with a coating of carbonate of lime on them. Rubbish ? Possibly so ; 

 but the thing has been done before, and possibly may be again, if 

 things go on long enough. This sharing of lodging between the 

 Gelasimus and his fishy friend always struck me as interesting, as are, 

 indeed, all these associations of different animals under one roof. 

 We all know those very queer clubbings of the prairie dog, — poor 

 maker and proper owner of the house, — the rattlesnake, and the 

 inevitable pair of owls who stand winking and blinking at the door 



