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of many-coloured fishes were sporting, a myriad pale-flowers of coral
diversified the floor.
Herrick stood transported. In the gratified lust of his eye, he forgot
the past and the present; forgot that he was menaced by a prison on the
one hand and starvation on the other; forgot that he was come to that
island, desperately foraging, clutching at expedients. A drove of
fishes, painted like the rainbow and billed like parrots, hovered up in
the shadow of the schooner, and passed clear of it, and glinted in the
submarine sun. They were beautiful, like birds, and their silent passage
impressed him like a strain of song.
Meanwhile, to the eye of Davis in the cross-trees, the lagoon continued
to expand its empty waters, and the long succession of the shore-side
trees to be paid out like fishing line off a reel. And still there was
no mark of habitation. The schooner, immediately on entering, had been
kept away to the nor'ard where the water seemed to be the most deep; and
she was now skimming past the tall grove of trees, which stood on that
side of the channel and denied further view. Of the whole of the low
shores of the island, only this bight remained to be revealed. And
suddenly the curtain was raised; they began to open out a haven, snugly
elbowed there, and beheld, with an astonishment beyond words, the roofs
of men.
The appearance, thus 'instantaneously disclosed' to those on the deck of
the Farallone, was not that of a city, rather of a substantial country
farm with its attendant hamlet: a long line of sheds and store-houses;
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