ONE strange feature of this sea life of the tropics is the regular recurrence of migratory swarms of fish of very small size that return in huge numbers year after year with such absolute regularity that the natives calculate on the event on a certain date in each year and even within an hour or two of the day, says a writer in Lippincott's Magazine. One such swarm of fish forms the occasion of an annual holiday and feast at Samoa. The fish is not unlike the whitebait for which the English Thames has so long been celebrated and each year it arrives in Samoa on the same day in the month of October, remains for a day, or at the most two days and then disappears entirely until the same day the following year. Why it comes, or whence, no curious naturalist has yet discovered, nor has anybody traced its onward course when it leaves the Samoan group, but the fact is unquestionable that suddenly, without notice, the still waters of the lagoon which surround each island within the fringing reef become alive with millions of fishes, passing through them for a single day and night and then disappearing for a year as though they had never come.

A visit to Samoa enabled me to see this strange phenomenon for myself and to witness the native feast by which it is celebrated year by year. I had been in Samoa for a month and in that month I had enjoyed almost a surfeit of beauty. I had coasted the shores of its islands, I had bathed in the warm, still waters of its lagoons, fringed to seaward by the white reef, on which the ocean broke in golden spray, and to landward by the silver beach of coral sand, flecked with the tremulous shadows of the swaying palms. I had climbed with my native guide the abrupt hills, covered with dense forests of tropical luxuriance, through the arcades of which I caught glimpses of the flash and luster of the ocean's myriad smiles, and again we had plunged into deep valleys among the hills, where little headlong streams murmur under the shade of the widespreading bread-fruit trees and wave the broad leaves of the great water lilies of the Pacific coast islands. This visit of the fishes came as a climax of wonders.