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It's just a little dot and nothin' more, dad fetch my buttons if it is. "But to go back to the grupers and the devil's hole; I have been there myself and seen it, Doctor," sais I, "but there is other fish besides these in it; there is the parrot-fish, and they are like the feminine gender too; if the grupers are fond of being tickled, parrots are fond of hearing their own voices.
The observer who contributes this fact to science is able to report the case of a parrot-fish, on the same premises, so exactly like a large brown and purple cockatoo that, seeing such a cockatoo later on dry land, it was with a sense of something like cruelty in its exile from its native waters.
Among them were two or three parrot-fish rich carmine, striped with bands of bright yellow, boneless fins, and long protruding teeth in the upper jaw showing out from the thick, fleshy lips; and one afulu a species of deep-water sand mullet with purple scales and yellow fins. Whilst awaiting the rest of the canoes I drew the teacher into our hut and pressed him to take some whisky.
But those same fish that I gazed at in amazement in the tanks of the museums are spread out here on tables for my buying. Impossible fish they are, pale blue; brilliant yellow; black as charcoal; sloe, with orange stripes; scarlet, spotted, and barred in rainbow tints. The parrot-fish are especially splendid in spangling radiancy, their tails and a spine in their mouths giving them their name.
Dazzling fish dart through the crystal depths. A shoal of scarlet and green parrot-fish pursue a tribe striped with blue and orange. Gold-fish flash like meteors between uplifted spears of blood-red coral, and the glittering scales of myriads, splashed with ruby, or flecked with amethyst, reflect the colours of the gorgeously-frilled and rosetted anemones in parterres between red coral crags.
Certainly the angel-fish is not so well named as the parrot-fish; it might better be called the ghostfish, it is so like a moonbeam in the pools it haunts, and of such a convertible quality with the iridescent vegetable growths about it.
'Glad to see you, Man Friday! says I, for I had naturally settled he was to be called Man Friday if ever he was hatched, as soon as ever I found the egg in the canoe had developed. I was a bit anxious about his feed, so I gave him a lump of raw parrot-fish at once. He took it, and opened his beak for more.
Now, as it befell, just then that very big fellow, seeing a parrot-fish come out of a cleft of the coral, made at him from below, as did two or three more; the poor fish finding no other escape, leaped clean into the air, and almost aboard the boat; while just where he had come out of the water, three or four great brown shagreened noses clashed together within two yards of Jack as he sat, each showing its horrible rows of saw teeth, and then sank sulkily down again, to watch for a fresh bait.
Then, when maybe they have caught schnapper, red bream and parrot-fish, they drift among the turtle, and the sport begins. In sight of the game the sucker which has been adhering to the bottom of the canoe is tugged off and thrown in its direction.
I drifted straight towards it until I was about half a mile from shore, not more, and then the current took a turn, and I had to paddle as hard as I could with my hands and bits of the AEpyornis shell to make the place. However, I got there. It was just a common atoll about four miles round, with a few trees growing and a spring in one place, and the lagoon full of parrot-fish.
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