The phonograph men and our party did not believe in sharks; so we would venture out some distance, leaving the Englishmen and the Germans standing like sandpipers where the water was hardly up to their ankles, and keeping an anxious lookout for us and themselves. Had the sharks attempted to attack us from the land, they would have afforded excellent protection. When they all yelled at once and ran back up the beach into the bushes, we knew that they thought we had been in long enough, and we came out, and made as much noise as we could while doing so. But there would be invariably one man left behind--one man who had walked out farther than the others, and who, owing to the roar of the surf, could not hear our shrieks of terror. It was exciting to watch him from the beach diving and splashing happily by himself, and shaking the water out of his ears and hair, blissfully unconscious of the deserted waste of waters about him and of the sharp, black fin that shot like a torpedo from wave to wave. We would watch him as he turned to speak to the man who the moment before had been splashing and diving on his right, and, missing him, turn to the other side, and then whirl about and see us all dancing frantically up and down in a row along the beach, beckoning and screaming and waving our arms. We could observe even at that distance his damp hair rising on his head and his eyes starting out of their sockets as he dug his toes into the sand and pushed back the water with his arms, and worked his head and shoulders and every muscle in his whole body as though he were fighting his way through a mob of men. The water seemed very opaque at such times, and the current appeared to have turned seaward, and the distance from shore looked as though it were increasing at every step. When night came to Corinto we would sit out on the wharf in front of the hotel and watch the fish darting through the phosphorescent waters and marking their passage with a trail of fire, or we would heave a log into it and see the sparks fly just as though we had thrown it upon a smouldering fire. One night one of the men was obliging enough to go into it for our benefit, and swam under water, sweeping great circles with his arms and legs. He was outlined as clearly in the inky depths below as though he wore a suit of spangles. Sometimes a shark or some other big fish drove a shoal of little fish towards the shore, and they would turn the whole surface of the water into half-circles of light as they took leap after leap for safety. Later in the evening we would go back to the veranda and listen to our friends the phonograph impresarios play duets on the banjo and guitar, and in return for the songs of the natives they had picked up in their wanderings we would sing to them those popular measures which had arisen into notice since they had left civilization.