Wild Life in Southern Seas. 
30 
maga, and the lazily swelling rollers as they 
rise to the lip of the reef have scarce strength 
enough to wash over its flat, weedy ledges 
into the lagoon beyond. For since early morn 
the wind had died away; and the brown¬ 
skinned people of the little reef-girt island, 
when they rose from their slumbers and looked 
out upon the dew-soaked trees, and heard the 
moan of the distant breakers away on Tia Kau, 
said to one another that the day would be calm 
and hot till the sun was high and the wind came. 
And, as your true South Sea Islander dreads the 
blistering rays of the torrid sun as much as he 
does the stinging cold, each man lay down again 
upon his mat and smoked his pipe or cigarette, 
and waited for the wind to come. 
Along the silent and deserted beach long lines 
of coco-palms, which slope seaward to the trades, 
hang their drooping, languid plumes high above 
the shallow margin of the lagoon, which swishes 
and laps in gentle wavelets along the yellow 
sand. A shoal of pale grey mullet swim close 
inshore, for out beyond in the deepening green 
flit the quick shadows of the ever-preying frigate 
birds that watch the waters from above. 
’Tis roasting hot indeed. As the mist begins 
