78 THE PALMS OF ASIA. 



itself with nearly every want and convenience 

 of his life. It might tempt him to assert that 

 if he were placed upon earth, with nothing 

 whatever to minister to his temporal necessities 

 but the cocoa nut tree, he could pass his days 

 in content. *' When the Cingalese villager has 

 felled one of these trees, after it has done 

 bearing, (say in its seventieth year,) with its 

 trunk he builds his hut and his bullock stall, 

 which he thatches with its leaves. His bolts 

 and bars are slips of the bark, by which also 

 he suspends the small shelf which holds his 

 stock of home-made utensils and vessels. He 

 fences his little plot of chillies, tobacco, and fine 

 grain, with the leaf stalks. The infant is swung 

 to sleep in a rude net of coir string, made from 

 the husk of the fruit, and its meal of rice and 

 scraped cocoa nut is boiled over a fire of cocoa 

 nut shells and husks, and is eaten off a dish 

 formed of the plaited green leaves of the tree, with 

 a spoon cut out of the nv;t shell. When he goes a 

 fishing by torch light, his net is of cocoa nut 

 fibre ; the torch, or chule, is a bundle of dried 

 cocoa nut leaves and ilower stalks ; the little 

 canoe is a trunk of the cocoa palm hollowed l\y 

 his own hands, lie carries homo his net and 

 his string of fish on a yoke, or pingo, formed of 

 a cocoa nut stalk. When he is thirsty, he 



