ama; and even in Fakarava the mosquitoes
were a pest. The land crab may be seen scuttling to his hole, 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 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 liv