I have always loved fishing since I was old enough to hold a rod and cast out into the surf at home, and now, as I look back on the months spent with my uncle in the South Seas, I know that my happiest memories of Iriatai are of the long hours in a canoe with Marama in the lagoon or on the open sea beyond the reef. It was fishing in unspoiled waters--fishing to dream about in after years. Our primitive tackle, much of which was fashioned by our own hands, did not detract from the charm of the sport, and the background--the land, the sea, the sky--was hauntingly and strangely beautiful. Some of those nights were unforgettable--calm nights when we lay off the reef from sunset till dawn began to brighten in the east. In all that solitude our lantern was the only light, the only sign of man. Iriatai lay like a shadow on the sea, stretching off vaguely to the south, and the heavens above us were powdered with stars of a brilliance I had never known before. The native boy was a better astronomer than I; he had names for many of the constellations, and strange old stories to tell of them. Castor and Pollux, the Twins, sinking on the horizon to the west, he called _Pipiri-Ma_--a boy and a girl, he told me, who had lived in very ancient times and who, because of their unkind parents, had fled away to the skies. The Southern Cross was _Tatauro_; the Scorpion was a great fishhook, flung into the sky after a god had used it to pull up the islands of the Paumotus; the Pleiades, visible in the east an hour before the dawn, he called _Matarii_--the Little Eyes, and told me a pretty story of their origin. Much of our fishing was done at night, when we fished offshore for the great bottom-feeders of the South Pacific: the deep-water albicore, the castor-oil fish, and the _manga_--a long black creature shaped like an enormous pickerel, with goggle-eyes and rows of formidable teeth.