So it was on this morning, but with added delights and beauties; as instead of striking straight across the lagoon to our rendezvous we had to skirt the beaches of a chain of thickly wooded islets, which gave forth a sweet smell, mingled with the odours of nono blossoms; for during the night rain had fallen after a long month of dry weather, and Nature was breathing with joy.  High overhead there floated some snow-white tropic birds—­those gentle, ethereal creatures which, to the toil-spent seaman who watches their mysterious poise in illimitable space, seem to denote the greater Mystery and Rest that lieth beyond all things; and lower down, and sweeping swiftly to and fro with steady, outspread wing and long, forked tail, the fierce-eyed, savage frigate birds scanned the surface of the water in search of prey, and then finding it not, rose without apparent motion to the cloudless canopy of blue and became as but tiny black specks—­and then, swish! and the tiny black specks which but a minute ago were high in heaven are flashing by your cheeks with a weird, whistling sound like winged spectres.  You look for them.  They are gone.  Already they are a thousand feet overhead.  Five of them.  And all five are as motionless as if they, with their wide, outspread wings, had never moved from their present position for a thousand years.

“Chip, chip,” and “chunk, chunk,” go our paddles as we now head eastward towards the rising sun in whose resplendent rays the tufted palms of the two islets stand clearly out, silhouetted against the sea rim beyond.  Now and again we hear, as from a long, long distance, the echoes of the voices of the people in the canoes ahead; a soft white mist began to gather over and then ascend from the water, and as we drew near the islets the occasional thunder of the serf on Motuluga Reef we heard awhile ago changed into a monotonous droning hum.

“Aue!” said Mareko the tautai, with a laugh, as he ceased paddling and laid his paddle athwartships, “’tis like to be a hot day and calm.  So much the better for our fishing, for the water will be very clear.  Boy, give me a coconut to drink.”

“Take some whisky with it, Mareko,” I said, taking a flask out of my basket.

“Isa!  Shame upon you!  How can you say such a thing to me, a minister!” And then he added, with a reproachful look, “and my children here, too.”  He would have winked, but he dared not do so, for one of his boys had turned his face aft and was facing him.  I, however, made him a hurried gesture which he quite understood.  Good old Mareko!  He was an honest, generous-hearted, broad-minded fellow, but terribly afraid of his tyrannical deacons, who objected to him smoking even in the seclusion of his own curatage, and otherwise bullied and worried him into behaving exactly as they thought he should.

By the time we reached the islets the atuli catching had begun, and more than a hundred natives were encircling a considerable area of water with finely-meshed nets and driving the fish shoreward upon a small sandy beach, where they were scooped up in gleaming masses of shining blue and silver by a number of women and children, who tumbled over and pushed each other aside amidst much laughter and merriment.