to give light for feasts or for feasting.  When the tree is young the network that holds the leaves is a beautiful silver, as fine as India paper and glossy; narrow strips of it are used as hair ornaments and contrast charmingly with the black and shining locks of the girls.  When older, this matting has every appearance of coarse cotton cloth, and is used to wrap food, or is made into bags and even rough garments, specially for fishermen.

The white flowers are small and grow along a branching stalk, protected by a sheath, and just above the commencement of the leaf.  From them is made the cocoanut-brandy that enables the native to forget his sorrows.  Flowers and nuts in every stage of development are on the same tree, a year elapsing between the first blossom and the ripe nut.  Long before it is ripe, but after full size has been attained, the nut contains a pint or even a quart of delicious juice, called milk, water, or wine, in different languages.  It is clear as spring water, of a delicate acidity, yet sweet, and no idea of its taste can be formed from the half-rancid fluid in the ripe nuts sold in Europe or America.  It must be drunk soon after being taken from the tree to know its full delights, and must have been gathered at the stage of growth called koie, when there is no pulp within the shell.

Not long after this time the pulp, white as snow, of the consistency and appearance of the white of a soft-boiled egg, forms in a thin layer about the walls of the nut.  This is a delicious food, and from it are made many dishes, puddings, and cakes.  It is no more like the shredded cocoanut of commerce than the peach plucked from the tree is like the tinned fruit.

The pulp hardens and thickens as time goes on, and finally is an inch in thickness.  Occasionally the meat when hard and ripe is broiled and eaten.  I like it fairly well served in this fashion.

If left on the tree, the nut will in time fall, and in due course there begins in it a marvelous process of germination.  A sweet, whitish sponge forms in the interior, starting from the inner end of the seed enclosed in the kernel, opposite one of the three eyes in the smaller end of the nut.  This sponge drinks up all the liquid, and, filling the inside, melts the hard meat, absorbs it, and turns it into a cellular substance, while a white bud, hard and powerful, pushes its way through one of the eyes of the shell, bores through several inches of husk, and reaches the air and light.

This bud now unfolds green leaves, and at the same period two other buds, beginning at the same point, find their way to the two other eyes and pierce them, turning down instead of up, and forcing their way through the former husk outside the shell, enter the ground.  Though no knife could cut the shell, the life within bursts it open, and husk and shell decay and fertilize the soil beside the new roots, which, within five or six years, have raised a tree eight or nine feet high, itself bearing nuts to reproduce their kind again.