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We see merchants, country justices, and artisans go cheek by jowl with the best gentry in valour and military knowledge: they perform honourable actions, both in public engagements and private quarrels; they fight duels, they defend towns in our present wars; a prince stifles his special recommendation, renown, in this crowd; let him shine bright in humanity, truth, loyalty, temperance, and especially injustice; marks rare, unknown, and exiled; 'tis by no other means but by the sole goodwill of the people that he can do his business; and no other qualities can attract their goodwill like those, as being of the greatest utility to them: "Nil est tam populare, quam bonitas."

This goodness, he saith, is necessary to every human action, and hindereth not an action to be indifferent. The other he calleth bonitas specialis, causans, et propter quam. This goodness he calleth legal, and saith that it maketh an action necessary; in which respect indifferent actions are not good, but those only which God in his law hath commanded, and which are remunerable with eternal life.

It is always a wonder to me that such dainty meat does not build dainty tissue in the bodies of the devourers. Perhaps the dolphins and bonitas are coarser-fibred because of the high speed at which they drive their bodies in order to catch their prey. But then again, the flying-fish drive their bodies at high speed, too.

A three-inch steel hook, on the end of a stout line, with a piece of white rag for bait, was all that was necessary to catch bonitas weighing from ten to twenty-five pounds. Bonitas feed on flying-fish, wherefore they are unaccustomed to nibbling at the hook. They strike as gamely as the gamest fish in the sea, and their first run is something that no man who has ever caught them will forget.

Twice a shark came near us, but the brute was too large to give us a chance of catching it. It was far more likely to have caught us had we made the attempt. We shouted to drive it off. At last, smaller fish of some sort approached albicores or bonitas. It was extraordinary with what eager looks we eyed the creatures.

At night the wake was phosphorescent fire, where the medusa slime resented our passing bulk, while far down could be observed the unceasing flight of comets, with long, undulating, nebulous tails caused by the passage of the bonitas through the resentful medusa slime.

Who was he that he should not be similarly treated in a few more months? Well, he would fool the mob. He would be away, in the South Seas, building his grass house, trading for pearls and copra, jumping reefs in frail outriggers, catching sharks and bonitas, hunting wild goats among the cliffs of the valley that lay next to the valley of Taiohae.

The whole of Texas is evidently of recent formation, all the saline prairies east of the Rio Grande being even now covered with shells of all the species common to the Gulf of Mexico, mixed up with skeletons of sharks, and now and then with petrified turtle, dolphin, rock fish, and bonitas.

These sorrowful promenades with his melancholy companion would commonly end a tiresome day at Batifol's school. Amedee was now in the "seventh," and knew already that the phrase, "the will of God," could not be turned into Latin by 'bonitas divina', and that the word 'cornu' was not declinable.

On the other hand, the mackerel family, including the tunnies, the bonitas, the dories, the horse-mackerels, &c., which form not more than one sixteenth of our own fish fauna, but which are known to increase their proportion in hot climates, appear in wonderful variety of form and colour, and constitute not less than one fifth of the whole of the species of Ceylon fish.