THE MILK IN THE COCOA-NUT, 59 



you sell them at last for illimitable red cloth to the Manchester piece- 

 goods merchant. Nothing could be more simple or more satisfactory. 

 And yet it is difficult to see the precise moral distinction between the 

 owner of a cocoa-nut grove in the South-Sea Islands and the owner 

 of a coal-mine or a big estate in commercial England. Each lounges 

 decorously through life after his own fashion ; only the one lounges 

 in a Russia-leather chair at a club in Pall Mall, while the other 

 lounges in a nice soft dust-heap beside a rolling surf in Tahiti or the 

 Hawaiian Archipelago. 



Cnriously enough, at a little distance from the sandy levels or al- 

 luvial flats of the sea-shore, the sea-loving cocoa-nut will not bring its 

 nuts to perfection. It will grow, indeed, but it will not thrive or fruit 

 in due season. On the coast-line of Southern India, immense groves 

 of cocoa-nuts fringe the shore for miles and miles together ; and in 

 some parts, as in Travancore, they form the chief agricultural staple 

 of the whole country. " The state has hence facetiously been called 

 Cocoanutcore," says its historian ; which charmingly illustrates the 

 true Anglo-Indian notion of what constitutes facetiousness, and ought 

 to strike the last nail into the coffin of a competitive examination 

 system. A good tree in full bearing should produce one hundred and 

 twenty cocoa-nuts in a season ; so that a very small grove is quite 

 sufficient to maintain a respectable family in decency and comfort. 

 Ah, what a mistake the English climate made when it left off its 

 primitive warmth of the Tertiary period, and got chilled by the ice 

 and snow of the Glacial epoch down to its present misty and dreary 

 wheat-growing condition ! 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 

 cocoa-palms, to this day, to export in return for the piece-goods of 

 some Arctic Manchester situated somewhere about the north of Spitz- 

 bergen or the New Siberian Islands. 



Even as things stand at the present day, however, it is wonderful 

 how much use we modern Englishmen now make in our own houses 

 of this far Eastern nut, whose very name still bears upon its face the 

 impress of its originally savage origin. From morning to night we 

 never leave off being indebted to it. We wash with it as old brown 

 Windsor or glycerine soap the moment we leave our beds. We walk 

 across our passages on the mats made from its fiber. We sweep our 

 rooms with its brushes, and wipe our feet on it as we enter our doors. 

 As rope, it ties up our trunks and packages ; in the hands of the 

 house-maids it scrubs our floors ; or else, woven into coarse cloth, it 

 acts as a covering for bales and furniture sent by rail or steamboat. 

 The confectioner undermines our digestion in early life with cocoa- 

 nut candy ; the cook tempts us later on with cocoa-nut cake ; and 

 Messrs. Huntley and Palmer cordially invite us to complete the ruin 

 with cocoa-nut biscuits. We anoint our chapped hands with one of 



