280 MYSTIC ISLES 



three inches thick, and with a fierce knob. It and its 

 tops are in demand. The breadfruit are as big as Dutch 

 cheese, weighing four or five pounds, their green rinds 

 tuberculated like a golf-ball. Sapadillos, tamarinds, 

 limes, mangoes, oranges, acachous, and a dozen other 

 native fruits are to be had. Cocoanuts and papayas 

 are of course, favorites. There are many kinds of co- 

 coanuts. I like best the young nut, which has the meat 

 yet unformed or barely so, and can be eaten with a 

 spoon, and holds about a quart of delicious wine. No 

 matter how hot the day, this wine is always cool. One 

 has only to pierce the top of the green rind, and tilt the 

 hole above one's mouth. If one has alcoholic leanings, 

 the wine of a cocoanut, an ounce of rum, two lumps of 

 sugar, a dash of grenadine, and the mixture were para- 

 dise enow. 



The papayas, which the British call manmiee-apple 

 or even mummy-apple or papaw, because of the West 

 Indian name, mamey, are much like pumpkins in ap- 

 pearance. They grow on trees, quite like palms, from 

 ten to thirty feet high, the trunk scaly like an alligator's 

 hide, and the leaves pointed. The fruit hangs in a 

 cluster at the crown of the tree, green and yellow, re- 

 sembling badly shaped melons. The taste is musky 

 sweet and not always agreeable to tyros. The seeds are 

 black and full of pepsin. Boiled when green, the pa- 

 paya reminds one of vegetable marrow; and cooked 

 when ripe, it makes a pie stuffing not to be despised. I 

 have often hung steaks or birds in the tree, protected by 

 a cage from pests, or wi*apped them in papaya-leaves to 

 make them tender. The very atmosphere does this, 



