by the movement of the heavenly bodies. The beautiful planet Venus
plays a great part in all island tales and customs; and among other
functions, some of them more awful, she regulates the season of
good fish. With Venus in one phase, as we had her, certain fish
were poisonous in the lagoon: with Venus in another, the same fish
was harmless and a valued article of diet. White men explain these
changes by the phases of the coral.

It adds a last touch of horror to the thought of this precarious
annular gangway in the sea, that even what there is of it is not of
honest rock, but organic, part alive, part putrescent; even the
clean sea and the bright fish about it poisoned, the most stubborn
boulder burrowed in by worms, the lightest dust venomous as an
apothecary's drugs.



CHAPTER III--A HOUSE TO LET IN A LOW ISLAND



Never populous, it was yet by a chapter of accidents that I found
the island so deserted that no sound of human life diversified the
hours; that we walked in that trim public garden of a town, among
closed houses, without even a lodging-bill in a window to prove
some tenancy in the back quarters; and, when we visited the
Government bungalow, that Mr. Donat, acting Vice-Resident, greeted
us alone, and entertained us with cocoa-nut punches in the Sessions
Hall and seat of judgment of that widespread archipelago, our
glasses standing arrayed with summonses and census returns. The