The _wak-wak_ has a mouth like a subway entrance and I was told that so great was his appetite for human flesh that when, as occasionally happened, some unfortunate swimmer had been eaten by a shark, a _wak-wak_ was sure to come rushing up and bolt shark, man and all. Consequently I did most of my swimming in the lagoon. Speaking of the lagoon reminds me of an absurd bit of information I picked up from Kippy that made me feel as flat as a pressed fern. We were wandering along the shore one morning and she suddenly pointed to the Kawa and said laughingly. "Why Tippi-litti (Triplett) bring Tree-with-Wings over _Hoopoi_ (cocoanuts)?" "Why not swim?" she asked. "Look see. Big hole." I looked and saw. A whole section of the atoll near where we were standing was movable! Kippy jumped up and down on it and it rocked like a raft. At the edges I saw that it was lashed to the near-by trees with vines! Cheap? You could have bought me for a bad clam. As I thought of the days we had sweated over those damned cocoanuts, of Triplett's peril, of the danger to the yawl, while our very families looked on and laughed, thinking it was a game, and we might have slipped out the movable lock-gate and simply eased through--well, for the first time in my married life I was mad. Kippy was all tenderness in an instant. "Face-of-Moon, no rain," she begged, "Daughter of Pearl and Coral eat clouds." She chinned my ear passionately, and I was disarmed in an instant. I hated to tell Triplett--it seemed to dim his glory, but I needn't have worried. "Good business," he exclaimed. "We can get her out inter the open an' have some sailin' parties. I'd like to catch one of them _wak-waks_." That was the sort Triplett was. He'd done his trick and there was an end of it. The next day he had William Henry Thomas busy re-rigging the Kawa. William Henry Thomas, by the way, insisted on living on board in happy but unholy wedlock, and Whinney, Swank and I felt that it was better so. Somehow we considered him the village scandal. During these peaceful days I wrote a great deal, posting up my diary as far as we had gone and jotting down a lot of valuable material. Swank had got his impediments off the boat and began daubing furiously, landscapes, seascapes, monotypes, ideographs, everything. Most of them were hideously funny, but he did one thing,--inspired by love, I suppose--a portrait of his wife that was a hummer. She was a lovely little thing with a lovely name, Lupoba-Tilaana, "Mist-on-the-Mountain." "Swank," I said, "that's a ten-strike. The mountain is a little out of focus but the mist is immense!" He squirted me with yellow ochre. Whinney was in his element. Ornithology, botany, ethulology, he took them all on single-handed. "Listen to that," he said to me one night as we were strolling back from a friendly game of _Kahooti_ with Baahaabaa and some of our friends.