The sea-fowl had not yet begun to stir in their nests, when we pushed out into the lagoon, and commenced pulling homeward--as we had now almost come to regard it--holding a course midway between the reef and the shore. A few moments' exercise at the oars sufficed to dispel our drowsiness, and to reconcile us somewhat to the early start, which we had so reluctantly taken. The faint grey light revealed the sleeping landscape, invested with the delicious freshness and repose of the earliest dawn in summer. The shores of the island, with their dense masses of verdure, were so perfectly mirrored in the lagoon, that the peculiar characteristics of the different kinds of foliage could be distinguished in their reflections. The drooping plumes of the palms, the lance-shaped pandanus leaves, and the delicate, filmy foliage of the casuarina, were all accurately imaged there; the inverted shore below, with its fringe of trees and shrubbery, looking scarcely less substantial and real, than its counterpart above. But as the light increased, these reflections lost their softness, and the clearness of their outlines. The gradually brightening dawn, cast new and rapidly changing lights and shades upon the waters and the shores; and the latter, which, as we moved onward, we beheld every moment from a new point of view, charmed the eye with a perpetual variety. In some places they were abrupt and bold; in others smoothly rounded, or gently sloping. Now we were opposite a jutting promontory, which, crowned with verdure, and overgrown with pendulous and creeping plants, pushed out over the narrow alluvial belt of shore, to the water's edge; now shooting past it, we caught a sudden and transient glimpse of some cool valley, opening down to the lagoon, and stretching away inland through vistas of fine trees.