THE MILK IN THE COCO-NUT 189 



and graceful fern. In this early stage nothing can be more 

 beautiful or more essentially tropical in appearance than a 

 plantation of young coco-nuts. Their long feathery leaves 

 spreading out in great clumps from the buried stock, and 

 waving with lithe motion before the strong sea-breeze of 

 the Indies, are the very embodiment of those deceptive 

 ideal tropics which, alas, are to be found in actual reality 

 nowhere on earth save in the artificial palm-houses at Kew, 

 and the Casino Gardens at too entrancing Monte Carlo. 



For the first two or three years the young palms must 

 be well watered, and the soil around them opened ; after 

 which the tall graceful stem begins to rise rapidly into the 

 open air. In this condition it may be literally said to make 

 the tropics those fallacious tropics, I mean, of painters 

 and poets, of Enoch Arden and of Locksley Hall. You 

 may observe that whenever an artist wants to make a 

 tropical picture, he puts a group of coco-nut palms in the 

 foreground, as much as to say, ' You see there's no decep- 

 tion; these are the genuine unadulterated tropics.' But 

 as to painting the tropics without the palms, he might just 

 as well think of painting the desert without the camels. 

 At eight or ten years old the tree flowers, bearing blossoms 

 of the ordinary palm type, degraded likenesses of the lilies 

 and yuccas, greenish and inconspicuous, but visited by in- 

 sects for the sake of their pollen. The flower, however, is 

 fertilised by the wind, which carries the pollen grains from 

 one bunch of blossoms to another. Then the nuts gradually 

 swell out to an enormous size, and ripen very slowly, even 

 under the brilliant tropical sun. (I will admit that the tropics 

 are hot, though in other respects I hold them to be arrant 

 impostors, like that precocious American youth who 

 announced on his tenth birthday that in his opinion life 

 wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.) But the worst 

 thing about the coco-nut palm, the missionaries always 



