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The grand feast was held about four o'clock, in a long arbor built for the occasion of upright sticks covered with cocoanut-palm leaves.
"Miss Harson," said Clara, holding up one of the books, "here is a picture called 'the cocoanut-palm, but I didn't know that cocoanuts grew on palm trees. Will you tell us something about it?" "Certainly I will, dear," was the reply. "I fully intended to do so, for the cocoanut-palm is too valuable a member of the family to be passed over.
You may sometimes see small cocoanut trees in hothouses or horticultural gardens, where they are shielded from our cold air. The island of Ceylon, in the East Indies, is full of cocoanut-palm trees, for they are carefully cultivated by the inhabitants, and the feathery groves stretch mile after mile.
About four and a half hours after Adam was turned out of the Garden of Eden he felt hungry, and so, bidding Eve take care that her head was not broken by the descending fruit, shinned up a cocoanut-palm.
Brushes, nets and other domestic articles are also manufactured from the husk. Scarcely any other tree in the world is so useful to man or contributes so much to his comfort as the cocoanut-palm. Food and drink are alike obtained from it. The kernel of the nut is an article of diet, and can be prepared in many ways.
The majestic bread trees and the spreading mangoes, the latter with their fruit verging from gold to russet, were surflnounted by the soaring cocoanuts, the monarchs of the tropics, whose banners fly from every atoll, and fall only before the most terrible might of the King of Storms. A cocoanut-palm bears at eight years and when about twenty-five feet high.
While we stood in the shade of a cocoanut-palm, gazing at these, we were joined by Baufré, the shaggy and drink-ruined Frenchman, in his torn and dirty overalls. "This weather is devilish," said Baufré, with a curse. "It is not as it used to be. The world goes to the devil. There were seven hundred people in Atuona when I came here.
The leaves are very much broader, and they have not the light, airy look of the foliage of the date-palm. But 'the cocoanut-palm is the most valuable of Nature's gifts to the inhabitants of those parts of the tropics where it grows, and its hundred uses, as they are not inaptly called, extend beyond the tropics over the civilized world.
The cocoanut-palm grows admirably here, and we had many refreshing draughts of the water contained in the nuts during our hot rides; and in pools beneath the trees the fibre of the nuts is placed to rot for making ropes, giving out an odour very similar to that of the flax-pits in the north of Ireland.
While I held the canoe, Miss Impossibility would remove her shapeless calico wrapper, and attired only in scarlet pareu, her hair piled high on her head and tied with the white filet of the cocoanut-palm, she would go overboard in one curving dive, a dozen feet or more beneath the sea.
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