often one will raise his snaky head apparently out of solid rock and regard you steadily for a moment.  Then he disappears.  You advance cautiously to the spot and find a hole no larger than the circumference of an afternoon tea cup, communicating with the water beneath.  Lower a baited hook with a strong wire snooding, and “Yellowskin” will open wide his jaws and swallow it without your feeling the slightest movement of the line.  But you must be quick and strong of hand then, or you will never drag him forth, for slippery as he is he can coil his length around a projecting bit of rock and defy you for perhaps five or ten minutes; and then when you do succeed in tearing him away and pull him out with the hook buried deep in his loose, pendulous, wrinkled and corduroyed throat, he instantly resolves himself into a quivering Gordian knot, winding the line in and about his coils and knotting it into such knots that can never be unravelled.

Here and there you will see lying buried deep in the growing coral, or covered with black masses of congewoi such things as iron and copper bolts, or heavy pieces of squared timber, the relics of the many wrecks that have occurred on the bar—­some recent, some in years long gone by.  Out there, lying wedged in between the weed and kelp-covered boulders, only visible at low water, are two of the guns of the ill-fated Wanderer, a ship, like her owner, famous in the history of the colony.  She was the property of a Mr. Benjamin Boyd, a man of flocks and herds and wealth, who founded a town and a great whaling station on the shores of Twofold Bay, where he employed some hundreds of men, bond and free.  He was of an adventurous and restless disposition, and after making several voyages to the South Seas, was cruelly cut off and murdered by the cannibal natives of Guadalcanar in the Solomon Islands, in the “fifties.”  The captain, after beating off the savages, who, having killed poor Boyd on shore, made a determined attempt to capture the ship, set sail for Australia, and in endeavouring to cross in over the bar went ashore and became a total wreck.  Here is a description written by Judge McFarland of the Wanderer as she was in those days when Boyd dreamed a dream of founding a Republic in the South Sea Islands with his wild crew of Polynesians and a few white fellow adventurers:—­

“She was of 240 tons burthen; very fleet, and had a flush deck; and her cabins were fitted up with every possible attention to convenience, and with great elegance; and had she been intended as a war craft, she could scarcely have been more powerfully armed, for she carried four brass deck-guns—­two six-pounders and two four-pounders—­mounted on carriages resembling dolphins, four two-pounder rail guns—­two on each side—­and one brass twelve-pounder traversing gun (which had seen service at Waterloo)—­in all thirteen serviceable guns.  Besides these, there were two small, highly-ornamented guns used for firing signals, which were said to have been obtained from the wreck of the Royal George at Spithead.  There were also provided ample stores of round shot and grape for the guns, and a due proportion of small arms, boarding pikes, tomahawks, &c.”