A LOST FEBRUARY 



spears that rattle in the wind. They curve and 

 sway gracefully, but it is rather the grace and neat- 

 ness of geometric figures than of wild free growths. 

 The roots, too, are not roots like those of other trees, 

 but mops of cords of a uniform size. The cocoanut- 

 tree lays hold of the ground by ten thousand of 

 these cords about the size of a pipe-stem, which in 

 the stem are gathered together and welded into a 

 huge cable, eight or ten inches through. The growth 

 of the cocoanut is in but one direction, — upward. 

 The stem does not increase in size as it shoots 

 heavenward. A tree sixty feet high has a trunk 

 no larger than one ten feet high. Up, up it goes, 

 like some extension arrangement or appliance, per- 

 petually pushing out new leaves and new fruit 

 blossoms at the top, and dropping the old ones ; 

 always with a circle of ripened fruit surmounted 

 by other circles of half-grown and just formed nuts, 

 crowned by a ring of new, cream-colored bloom. 

 Its young leaves emerge from the parent stem 

 swathed in coarse burlap. Their swaddling-clothes 

 would make a shirt in which the most austere and 

 fanatical of the old monks might have done pen- 

 ance. Probably nothing else is born in the world 

 wrapped up in such a harsh, forbidding integument; 

 a product of the tree's interior juices and vitii? 

 functions, it is nevertheless as dry and stiff anc 

 apparently as lifeless as the product of a weaver's 

 loom. Its office seems to be to hold up and to 



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