THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDS, 
181 
race of men have gone forth who have bound India, and Canada, and 
Australia in a common allegiance ? 
" Grave mother of majestic works, 
From her isle-altar gazing down. 
Who, god-like, grasps the triple forks. 
And, king-like, wears the crown." 
Fairest among islands are those of the South Pacific, — those clusters 
of Eden-isles "lying in dark-purple spheres of sea," which the enter- 
prise of a Cook, a Carteret, a Wallis, a Bougainville revealed to the 
enraptured West. It is impossible to exaggerate the charm of the 
wooded slopes that rise gently from the water's edge into a translucent 
atmosphere; of the shadowy vales, with their profusion of tropical 
vegetation; of the groves of the cocoa-nut and bread-fruit trees, with 
their varied and shining foliage ; of the white-gleaming coral-reefs, 
which the ocean spray besprinkles with flashing diamonds. Their 
leafy shades, however, are comparatively silent.* The rich songsters 
of Europe and America are there unknown, and it is chiefly the wild 
sea-birds which resort to their surf-beaten shores. 
The gannet and the frigate-bird, the tern and the mew, — these are 
the birds of the Pacific archipelagoes. The gannet, we may note, is a 
famous fisher. Soaring high up in the air, he marks his prey beneath 
him, and, closing his wings, drops downwards with a tremendous 
" header ; " and after a semicircular dive of five or six yards, emerges 
with a goodly fish lodged safely in his throat. The frigate-bird is not 
so much a fisher himself, as a depredator on the spoils of other fishers. 
With his grand sweeping wings he pursues the smaller terns, — not to 
eat them, but to eat what they have captured. A traveller describes 
the plaintive shrieks of the tern when he is being chased — indicative 
of his agony at the prospect of having to surrender his own hard- 
earned dinner, or the supper he is carrying to his famished nestlings 
— as heart-rending. He records a curious incident which he one day 
saw. A frigate-bird was hard pressing a small tern, and would soon 
have taken possession of the result of his day's fishing, when a larger 
* The only singing-bird on Eimeo, tor instance, is a kingflslier. Flis song is sometliing like that of 
the thrush. 
