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'We must water the ship first, my lads, said Captain Williams, 'and then we'll spend the rest of the day among the coco-nut trees, and fill our boats with them. Just then as the bronze-faced captain was ascending to the poop from his cabin; a small barefooted boy came aft, and, touching his hat, said, 'Av ye plaze, sor, won't ye let me go in the boat, sor?
In Yap, one of the Caroline Islands, should a girl be overtaken by her first menstruation on the public road, she may not sit down on the earth, but must beg for a coco-nut shell to put under her.
The name "coco" is also applied to another quite distinct fruit, the coco-de-mer, or "sea-coco," somewhat resembling a coco-nut in its pod, but weighing about 28 lbs., and likewise growing on a lofty tree; its habitat is the Seychelles Islands.
And as they passed, the plantains and taro and arrowroot were torn up and stripped and left to perish; and there was nought left of the swarms of turtle and fish but their bones; for the black cloud and the swift shadows that ran before it had eaten out the heart of the land, and not even one coco-nut was left.
At these old fairs the showmen and gipsies take large sums in the "pleasure" departments for admission to their exhibitions swings, roundabouts, shooting-galleries, and coco-nut shies. In Evesham Post-Office a gipsy woman once asked me to write a letter; she handed me an order for £10, and instructed me to send it to a London firm for £5 worth of best coco-nuts and £5 worth of seconds.
I have heard of the cobra being found on the crown of a coco-nut palm, attracted, it was said, by the toddy which was flowing at the time, it being the season for drawing it. Surrounding Elie House, near Colombo, in which I resided, were a number of tall casuarinas and India-rubber trees, whose branches almost touched the lattices of the window of the room in which I usually sat.
So with forty of his sturdy Line Islanders, and seven hundred barrels of coco-nut oil, he had sailed; and now, said our five friends, he would soon be back perhaps in two days perhaps in ten, or twenty, or more, for how could one tell what the winds would be?
Finally, we use the oil to burn in our reading lamps, and light ourselves at last to bed with stearine candles. Altogether, an amateur census of a single small English cottage results in the startling discovery that it contains twenty-seven distinct articles which owe their origin in one way or another to the coco-nut palm.
And yet we affect in our black ingratitude to despise the question of the milk in the coco-nut. When a man and a bear meet together casually in an American forest, it makes a great deal of difference, to the two parties concerned at least, whether the bear eats the man or the man eats the bear.
A young coco-nut is thus seen to consist, first of a green outer skin, then of a fibrous coat, which afterwards becomes the hair, and next of a harder shell which finally gets quite woody; while inside all comes the actual seed or unripe nut itself.
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