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Updated: May 9, 2025
Eastward and across the now shallowed water of the lagoon was our village of Leassé, the russet-hued, saddle-backed houses of thatch peeping out from the coco-palms and breadfruit-trees; beyond, the broken, rugged outline of the towering mountain range, garmented from base to summit with God's mantle of living green; overhead a sky ot wondrous, un-specked blue.
Thus the solitary observer noted that while two of them, some six miles apart, were simply extensive reefs of bare coral rock, with a multitude of narrow, intricate channels of water running hither and thither through them, the third some nine or ten miles to the southward was an atoll of very similar character to that of the pearl-island which they had so abruptly left on the preceding day, but considerably larger, quite an extensive grove of coco-palms growing upon it.
Yet he is an active man, full of schemes; has bought land of the natives; has planted five thousand coco-palms; has a desert island in his eye, which he desires to lease, and a schooner in the stocks, which he has laid and built himself, and even hopes to finish. Mr. M'Callum and I did not meet, but, like gallant troubadours, corresponded in verse.
Scarcely a word is spoken, though sometimes the women sing softly together as they weave and stitch. And so another hour has gone, and the coco-palms along the shore begin to throw long lines of shadows across the sloping beach.
But, above all, there were more than 7000 young coco- palms doing well, and promising a perpetual source of wealth for the future. For as the trees grow, and the crops raised between them diminish, the coco-palms will require little or no care, but yield fruit the whole year round without further expense; and the establishment can then be removed elsewhere, to reclaim a fresh sheet of land.
Laying their rifles down they sat under the shade of a great jack-fruit tree, whose wide-spreading branches towered even higher than the lofty coco-palms which surrounded it. For nearly an hour they waited, listening to the ceaseless hum of the surf upon the outer reef as the long, swelling billows rose, curled their green cress, and broke upon the rocky barrier of living coral.
And then we came out upon a fair, green sward with nine stately coco-palms clustered, their branches drooping over the river of my dreams, which lay before us with open, waiting bosom. Under the shade of the nine cocos we made our camp, and old Sru and the women and children at once set to work to build a "house" to protect us in case it rained during the nights. Very quickly was the house built.
Overhead, the cocos join in a continuous and lofty roof; blackbirds are heard lustily singing; the island cock springs his jubilant rattle and airs his golden plumage; cow-bells sound far and near in the grove; and when you sit in the broad verandah, lulled by this symphony, you may say to yourself, if you are able: 'Better fifty years of Europe . . . Farther on, the floor of the valley is flat and green, and dotted here and there with stripling coco-palms.
If it were not for that, those odious habits of steady industry and perseverance might never have been developed in ourselves at all, and we might be lazily picking copra off our own coco-palms, to this day, to export in return for the piece-goods of some Arctic Manchester situated somewhere about the north of Spitzbergen or the New Siberian Islands.
"Put your back to that figure-head do you hear me? and stand fast!" said Herrick. The captain fetched a breath, stepped back against the figure-head, and instantly redirected his glances after Huish. There was a hollow place of the sand in that part, and, as it were, a glade among the coco-palms in which the direct noonday sun blazed intolerably.
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