Gilberts, into an agreeable sweetmeat, such as a man may trifle
with at the end of a long dinner; for a substantial meal I have no
use for it. The rest of the food-supply, in a destitute atoll such
as Fakarava, can be summed up in the favourite jest of the
archipelago--cocoa-nut beefsteak. Cocoa-nut green, cocoa-nut ripe,
cocoa-nut germinated; cocoa-nut to eat and cocoa-nut to drink;
cocoa-nut raw and cooked, cocoa-nut hot and cold--such is the bill
of fare. And some of the entrees are no doubt delicious. The
germinated nut, cooked in the shell and eaten with a spoon, forms a
good pudding; cocoa-nut milk--the expressed juice of a ripe nut,
not the water of a green one--goes well in coffee, and is a
valuable adjunct in cookery through the South Seas; and cocoa-nut
salad, if you be a millionaire, and can afford to eat the value of
a field of corn for your dessert, is a dish to be remembered with
affection. But when all is done there is a sameness, and the
Israelites of the low islands murmur at their manna.

The reader may think I have forgot the sea. The two beaches do
certainly abound in life, and they are strangely different. In the
lagoon the water shallows slowly on a bottom of the fine slimy
sand, dotted with clumps of growing coral. Then comes a strip of
tidal beach on which the ripples lap. In the coral clumps the
great holy-water clam (Tridacna) grows plentifully; a little deeper
lie the beds of the pearl-oyster and sail the resplendent fish that
charmed us at our entrance; and these are all more or less
vigorously coloured. But the other shells are white like lime, or
faintly tinted with a little pink, the palest possible display;
many of them dead besides, and badly rolled. On the ocean side, on
the mounds of the steep beach, over all the width of the reef right
out to where the surf is bursting, in every cranny, under every