Wild Life in Southern Seas. 
368 
net and a three-pronged spear. Some stoop to 
pick up shellfish ; others gather round the 
edges of shallow pools amid the coral rock, and, 
joining their nets together, sweep it for the 
silvery-scaled kanae and atuli —the sprats and 
herrings of the South Seas; and then, with 
a deft movement of their bronze-hued right 
arms over their left shoulders, drop the gleam¬ 
ing fish into the baskets on their backs. 
• • • • • 
Away beyond the sound of the voices of the 
children who are sometimes shouting, some¬ 
times droning their lessons to the native teacher 
and his wife, lie the great taro swamps, and 
thither walk in groups of twos and threes the 
older women. They go to labour in the 
watery fields, and take their way along one of 
the many shaded paths that lead forestward to 
the scene of their toil. Unlike the women who 
sing and laugh as they fish waist-deep amid the 
hissing, bubbling surf, these walk on in silence 
over the leaf-strewn track till they reach the 
shadeless swamps wherein the broad green leaves 
of the taro plants hang drooping in the tropic sun. 
There, as they sit to talk and smoke awhile, 
they hear the tap, tap, tap of the tappa mallets 
