centre of the universe, but the people’s reputation for hospitality.  It had been my suggestion to the teacher that he and I, who were unable to accompany the others, should try what we could do nearer home.  The night was brilliantly starlight, and the sea as smooth as glass—­so smooth that there was not even the faintest swell upon the reef.  The trade wind was at rest, and not the faintest breath of air moved the foliage of the coco palms lining the white strip of beach.  Now and then a splash or a sudden commotion in the water around us would denote that some hapless flying-fish had taken an aerial flight from a pursuing pala, or that a shark had seized a turtle in his cruel jaws.  Lighting our pipes, we lowered our lines together according to island etiquette, and touched bottom at thirty fathoms; then hauled in a fathom or two of line to avoid fouling the coral.  In a few minutes my companion hooked an utu, a sluggish fish, somewhat like a salmon in appearance, with shining silvery scales and a broad flat head.  As he was hauling in, and I was looking over the side of the canoe to watch it coming up, I felt a sharp, heavy tug at my own line, and, before I could check it, thirty or forty yards of line whizzed through my fingers with lightning speed.

“Lahe’u!” shouted the teacher, hurriedly making his own line fast, and whipping up his paddle.  “Don’t give out any more line or he will run under the reef, and we shall lose him.”

I knew by the vibration and hum of the line as soon as I had it well in hand that there was a heavy and powerful fish at the end.  Ioane, disregarding the utu as being of no importance in comparison to a lahe’u, was plunging his paddle rapidly into the water, and endeavouring to back the canoe seaward into deeper water, but, in spite of his efforts and my own, we were being taken quickly inshore.  For some two or three minutes the canoe was dragged steadily landward, and I knew that once the lahe’u succeeded in getting underneath the overhanging ledge of reef, there would be but little chance of our taking him except by diving, and diving on a moonless night under a reef, and freeing a fish from jagged branches of coral, is not a pleasant task, although an Ellice Islander does not much mind it.  Finding that I could not possibly turn the fish, I asked Ioane what I should do.  He told me to let go a few fathoms of line, brace my knee against the thwart, and then trust to the sudden jerk to cant the fish’s head one way or the other.  I did as I was told.  Out flew the line, and then came a shock that made the canoe fairly jump, lifted the outrigger clear out of the water, and all but capsized her.  But the ruse was successful, for, with a furious shake, lahe’u changed his course, and started off at a tremendous rate, parallel with the reef, and then gradually headed seaward.

“Let him go,” said Ioane, who was carefully watching the tautened-out line, and steering at the same time. “’Tis a strong fish, but he is man tonu (truly hooked), and will now tire.  But give him no more line, and haul up to him.”