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The very poverty of their island homes mere sandbanks covered with coconut and pandanus palms only drives them to the sea for their food; for the Ellice Islanders, unlike their more fortunate prototypes who dwell in the forest-clad, mountainous, and fertile islands of Samoa, Tahiti, Raratonga, &c., live almost exclusively upon coconuts, the drupes of the pandanus palm, and fish.
It is, however, delusive, being constituted of woody drupes in close clusters collected into a globular head, with meagre yellow pulp at the base of each group, the pulp having an aromatic and unsatisfactory flavour.
The pine grosbeak will come in numbers upon your porch, to get the black drupes of the honeysuckle or the woodbine, or within reach of your windows to get the berries of the mountain-ash, but they know you not; they look at you as innocently and unconcernedly as at a bear or moose in their native north, and your house is no more to them than a ledge of rocks.
Drupe was stricken with apoplexy. He had finished eating his luncheon, which was served in the apartment, and had lighted a cigar, when he fell over. There were no children, and the Drupes kept no servant, but depended on the housekeeper to send them a maid when they required one, so that Mrs. Drupe found herself alone with her prostrate husband. The distracted wife did not know what to do.
The lining of the ovary at the same time extends, and hardens into the stony case which encloses the kernel, which kernel is the young seed enlarged and perfected. All fruits of this formation are called drupes, as those of the apple and pear form are called pomes, and those of the bramble, and some other tribes, berries.
The withered berries of the bittersweet, the cat-brier, and the sumac, like the drupes of the early fall, are scattered far and wide by the birds. All these speak not of death, but of an eager, expectant life. The snow is winter's great gift to states like Iowa. He is unwise who complains of the tender, protecting, nourishing, fructifying mantle of immaculate white.
Their occupations included preparing rice with heavy blows of the pestle in wooden mortars, to perfect decortication; cleansing and winnowing maize, and all the manipulations necessary to draw from it a granulous substance which serves to compose that potage called "mtyelle" in the country; the harvesting of the sorgho, a kind of large millet, the ripening of which had just been solemnly celebrated at this time; the extraction of that fragrant oil from the "mpafon" drupes, kinds of olives, the essence of which forms a perfume sought for by the natives; spinning of the cotton, the fibers of which are twisted by means of a spindle a foot and a half long, to which the spinners impart a rapid rotation; the fabrication of bark stuffs with the mallet; the extraction from the tapioca roots, and the preparation of the earth for the different products of the country, cassava, flour that they make from the manioc beans, of which the pods, fifteen inches long, named "mositsanes," grow on trees twenty feet high; arachides intended to make oil, perennial peas of a bright blue, known under the name of "tchilobes," the flowers of which relieve the slightly insipid taste of the milk of sorgho; native coffee, sugar canes, the juice of which is reduced to a syrup; onions, Indian pears, sesamum, cucumbers, the seeds of which are roasted like chestnuts; the preparation of fermented drinks, the "malofori," made with bananas, the "pombe" and other liquors; the care of the domestic animals, of those cows that only allow themselves to be milked in the presence of their little one or of a stuffed calf; of those heifers of small race, with short horns, some of which have a hump; of those goats which, in the country where their flesh serves for food, are an important object of exchange, one might say current money like the slave; finally, the feeding of the birds, swine, sheep, oxen, and so forth.
Drupe's way; that would have disturbed the stylish repose of her bearing even more than misplaced cordiality. She always returned the salutations of Miss Wakefield, but in a tone so neutral, cool, and cucumberish that she hoped the girl would feel rebuked and learn a little more diffidence, or at least learn that the Drupes did not care for her acquaintance.
Then at sundown to plunge into the tepid sea, to frolic and splash therein, while the red light in the west began to pale and the pink and silver surface of the ocean faded to grey; then to a vigorous soaping and scrubbing in the shady creek, where the orange-tinted drupes of pandanus-palms give to the cool water a balsamic savour; then, clad in clean cotton, to the evening meal with a prodigious appetite; and to bed at nine o'clock to sleep murmurlessly for eight hours tell me if thus you are not fitted for another day's toil in the sublimating sunshine!
The three boats were steered by the Messrs Peter Huysmans, Charles de Buis and Thomas Devine, who were accompanied by their wives, children and numerous female relatives, all of the latter being clad in their holiday attire of new mats, and with their hair excessively anointed with scented coco-nut oil, scarlet hibiscus flowers behind their ears, and necklaces of sweet-smelling pieces of pandanus drupes.
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