with his line tangled round his feet or arms. But on such a morning as
this one might fall overboard and come to no harm, for the sea is
smooth, and the kelp sways but gently to the soft rise and fall of the
water, and seldom in these cold days of June does Jack Shark cruise in
under the lee of the rocks. It is in November, hot, sweltering November,
when the clinking sand of the shining beach is burning to the booted
foot, and the countless myriads of terrified sea salmon come swarming in
over the bar on their way to spawn in the river beyond, that he and his
fellows and the bony-snouted saw-fish rush to and fro in the shallow
waters, driving their prey before them, and gorging as they drive, till
the clear waters of the bar are turned into a bloodied froth. At such a
time as this it might be bad to fall overboard, though some of the local
youths give but little more heed to the tigers of the sea than they do
to the accompanying drove of harmless porpoises, which join in the
onslaught on the hapless salmon.

A mile eastward from the shore there rises stark and clear a great
dome-shaped rock, the haunt and resting-place of thousands of
snow-white gulls and brown-plumaged boobies. The breeding-place of the
former is within rifle-shot--over there on that long stretch of
banked-up sand on the north side of the bar, where, amid the shelter of
the coarse, tufted grass the delicate, graceful creatures will sit three
months hence on their fragile white and purple-splashed eggs. The
boobies are but visitors, for their breeding-places are on the bleak,
savage islands far to the south, amid the snows and storms of black
Antarctic seas. But here they dwell together, in unison with the gulls,
and were the wind not westerly you could hear their shrill cries and
hoarse croaking as they wheel and eddy and circle above the lonely rock,
on the highest pinnacle of which a great fish-eagle, with neck thrown
back upon his shoulders and eyes fixed eastward to the sun, stands