Green Dots of the Empire. 
23 
only village, but no body of strange, dissolute 
foreigners would they have to live among them, 
accompanied by wild people from the Gilbert 
Islands, who fought with sharks’-teeth swords 
among themselves, and got madly drunk on 
toddy every few days. And so the trading 
firms retired discomfited, and the coconuts 
rotted away quietly in millions, and the rotting 
thereof troubled the careless owners not a whit. 
Time was when there were three thousand people 
to eat them, and, save for a cask of coconut oil 
sold now and then to some whaleship, white 
men visited them but at long intervals. But 
things are different now, and even these tiny 
spots that dot the broad bosom of the blue 
Pacific are sought out to appease the earth- 
hunger of the men of the civilised world. Yet 
not, be it said, altogether for their coconuts’ 
money value, but because of the new Pacific 
cable that is soon to be; for among these 
equatorial isles it is to be laid, thousands of 
fathoms deep, and no Power but England must 
possess a foot of soil in the mid-Pacific that 
would serve an enemy as a lair whence to issue 
and seize upon any of the islands that break the 
cable’s length 
