and at night the rats besiege the houses and the artificial gardens.  The crab is good eating; possibly so is the rat; I have not tried.  Pandanus fruit is made, in the Gilberts, into an agreeable sweetmeat, such as a man may trifle with at the end of a long dinner; for a substantial meal I have no use for it.  The rest of the food-supply, in a destitute atoll such as Fakarava, can be summed up in the favourite jest of the archipelago—­cocoa-nut beefsteak.  Cocoa-nut green, cocoa-nut ripe, cocoa-nut germinated; cocoa-nut to eat and cocoa-nut to drink; cocoa-nut raw and cooked, cocoa-nut hot and cold—­such is the bill of fare.  And some of the entrees are no doubt delicious.  The germinated nut, cooked in the shell and eaten with a spoon, forms a good pudding; cocoa-nut milk—­the expressed juice of a ripe nut, not the water of a green one—­goes well in coffee, and is a valuable adjunct in cookery through the South Seas; and cocoa-nut salad, if you be a millionaire, and can afford to eat the value of a field of corn for your dessert, is a dish to be remembered with affection.  But when all is done there is a sameness, and the Israelites of the low islands murmur at their manna.

The reader may think I have forgot the sea.  The two beaches do certainly abound in life, and they are strangely different.  In the lagoon the water shallows slowly on a bottom of the fine slimy sand, dotted with clumps of growing coral.  Then comes a strip of tidal beach on which the ripples lap.  In the coral clumps the great holy-water clam (Tridacna) grows plentifully; a little deeper lie the beds of the pearl-oyster and sail the resplendent fish that charmed us at our entrance; and these are all more or less vigorously coloured.  But the other shells are white like lime, or faintly tinted with a little pink, the palest possible display; many of them dead besides, and badly rolled.  On the ocean side, on the mounds of the steep beach, over all the width of the reef right out to where the surf is bursting, in every cranny, under every scattered fragment of the coral, an incredible plenty of marine life displays the most wonderful variety and brilliancy of hues.  The reef itself has no passage of colour but is imitated by some shell.  Purple and red and white, and green and yellow, pied and striped and clouded, the living shells wear in every combination the livery of the dead reef—­if the reef be dead—­so that the eye is continually baffled and the collector continually deceived.  I have taken shells for stones and stones for shells, the one as often as the other.  A prevailing character of the coral is to be dotted with small spots of red, and it is wonderful how many varieties of shell have adopted the same fashion and donned the disguise of the red spot.  A shell I had found in plenty in the Marquesas I found here also unchanged in all things else, but there were the red spots.  A lively little crab wore the same markings.  The case of the hermit or soldier crab was more conclusive, being the result of conscious choice.  This nasty little wrecker, scavenger, and squatter has learned the value of a spotted house; so it be of the right colour he will choose the smallest shard, tuck himself in a mere corner of a broken whorl, and go about the world half naked; but I never found him in this imperfect armour unless it was marked with the red spot.