Our night, as often happens in the Tropics, was not altogether undisturbed; for, shortly after I had become unconscious of the chorus of toads and cicadas, my hammock came down by the head.  Then I was woke by a sudden bark close outside, exactly like that of a clicketting fox; but as the dogs did not reply or give chase, I presumed it to be the cry of a bird, possibly a little owl.  Next there rushed down the mountain a storm of wind and rain, which made the coco-leaves flap and creak, and rattle against the gable of the house; and set every door and window banging, till they were caught and brought to reason.  And between the howls of the wind I became aware of a strange noise from seaward—­a booming, or rather humming most like that which a locomotive sometimes makes when blowing off steam.  It was faint and distant, but deep and strong enough to set one guessing its cause.  The sea beating into caves seemed, at first, the simplest answer.  But the water was so still on our side of the island, that I could barely hear the lap of the ripple on the shingle twenty yards off; and the nearest surf was a mile or two away, over a mountain a thousand feet high.  So puzzling vainly, I fell asleep, to awake, in the gray dawn, to the prettiest idyllic picture, through the half-open door, of two kids dancing on a stone at the foot of a coconut tree, with a background of sea and dark rocks.

As we went to bathe we heard again, in perfect calm, the same mysterious booming sound, and were assured by those who ought to have known, that it came from under the water, and was most probably made by none other than the famous musical or drum fish; of whom one had heard, and hardly believed, much in past years.

Mr. Joseph, author of the History of Trinidad from which I have so often quoted, reports that the first time he heard this singular fish was on board a schooner, at anchor off Chaguaramas.

’Immediately under the vessel I heard a deep and not unpleasant sound, similar to those one might imagine to proceed from a thousand AEolian harps; this ceased, and deep twanging notes succeeded; these gradually swelled into an uninterrupted stream of singular sounds like the booming of a number of Chinese gongs under the water; to these succeeded notes that had a faint resemblance to a wild chorus of a hundred human voices singing out of tune in deep bass.’

‘In White’s Voyage to Cochin China,’ adds Mr. Joseph, ’there is as good a description of this, or a similar submarine concert, as mere words can convey:  this the voyager heard in the Eastern seas.  He was told the singers were a flat kind of fish; he, however, did not see them.’

‘Might not this fish,’ he asks, ’or one resembling it in vocal qualities, have given rise to the fable of the Sirens?’