, which must be cooked, are about a foot in length,
and three inches in diameter, and grow in immense, heavy bunches in
the mountains, so that obtaining them is great labor. They are wild
creatures of heights, and love the spots most difficult of access. Only
barefooted men can reach them. These feis are a separate species. The
market-place is filled with them, and hardly a Tahitian but buys
his quota for the day. The fei-gatherers are men of giant strength,
naked save for the pareu about the loins, and often their feet from
climbing and holding on to rocks and roots are curiously deformed, the
toes spread an inch apart, and sometimes the big toe is opposed to the
others, like a thumb. There are besides many kinds of bananas here for
eating raw; some are as small as a man's finger, and as sweet as honey.

The fei-hunters hang six or seven bunches on a bamboo pole and bring
them thus to market. One meets these young Atlases moving along the
roads, chaplets of frangipani upon their curling hair, or perhaps a
single gardenia or tube-rose behind their ears, singing softly and
treading steadily, smiling, and all with a burden that would stagger
a white athlete.

The taro looks like a war-club, several feet long, 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 cocoanuts. 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 paradise enow.

The papayas, which the British call mammee-apple or even mummy-apple or
papaw, because of the West Indian name, mamey, are much like pumpkins
in appearance. 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, resembling badly shaped melons. The taste is mus