178 THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 



mysterious article of commerce known as coir, which is 

 twisted into stout ropes, or woven into coco-nut matting 

 and ordinary door-mats. Brushes and brooms are also 

 made of it, and it is used, not always in the most honest 

 fashion, in place of real horse-hair in stuffing cushions. 

 The shell, cut in half, supplies good cups, and is artistically 

 carved by the Polynesians, Japanese, Hindoos, and other 

 benighted heathen, who have not yet learnt the true 

 methods of civilised machine-made shoddy manufacture. 

 The leaves serve as excellent thatch ; on the flat blades, 

 prepared like papyrus, the most famous Buddhist manu- 

 scripts are written ; the long mid-ribs or branches (strictly 

 speaking, the leaf-stalks) answer admirably for rafters, 

 posts, or fencing ; the fibrous sheath at the base is a 

 remarkable natural imitation of cloth, employed for 

 strainers, wrappers, and native hats ; while the trunk, or 

 stem, passes in carpentry under the name of porcupine 

 wood, and produces beautiful effects as a wonderfully 

 coloured cabinet-makers' material. These are only a few 

 selected instances out of the innumerable uses of the coco- 

 nut palm. 



Apart even from the manifold merits of the tree that 

 bears it, the milk itself has many and great claims to our 

 respect and esteem, as everybody who has ever drunk it in 

 its native surroundings will enthusiastically admit. In 

 England, to be sure, the white milk in the dry nuts is a 

 very poor stuff, sickly, and strong-flavoured, and rather in- 

 digestible. But in the tropics, coco-nut milk, or, as we 

 oftener call it there, coco-nut water, is a very different and 

 vastly superior sort of beverage. At eleven o'clock every 

 morning, when you are hot and tired with the day's work, 

 your black servant, clad from head to foot in his cool clean 

 white linen suit, brings you in a tall soda glass full of a 

 clear, light, crystal liquid, temptingly displayed against the 



