f, with half a dozen green, baked bananas
for bread! Such fish, and so cooked, surely fall to the lot of few. Your
City professional diner who loves to instruct us in the daily papers
about "how to dine" cannot know anything about the real enjoyment of
eating. He is _blase_ he regulates his stomach to his costume and to
the season, and he eats as fashion dictates he should eat, and fills
his long-suffering stomach with nickety, tin-pot, poisonous "delicacies"
which he believes are excellent because they are expensive and are
prepared by a _chef_ whose income is ten times as much as his own.

So we ate our fish and bananas, and then followed on with the crayfish,
the women and children shelling them for us as fast as we could eat, the
largest and fittest being placed before the old chief and the white man.
And then for dessert we had a basket of red-ripe wild mangoes, with a
great smooth-leaved pineapple as big as a big man's head, and showing
red and green and yellow, and smelling fresh and sweet with the rain of
the previous night. Near by where we sat was a pile of freshly-husked
young coconuts, which a smiling-faced young girl opened for us as we
wanted a drink, carefully pouring out upon the ground all the liquid
that remained after Sru and myself had drank, and then putting the empty
shells, with their delicate lining of alabaster flesh, into the fire to
be consumed, for no one not of chiefly rank must partake even of that
which is cast aside by a chief or his guests.

Our first meal of the day finished, we--that is, Nalik, Sru, and
myself--lay down under the shade or the newly-built thatched roof and
smoked our pipes in content, whilst the women and children, attended by
the dogs, bathed in the deepest part of the pool, shouting, laughing,
and splashing and diving till they were tired. The dogs, mongrel as they
were, enjoyed the fun as much as their masters, biting and worrying each
other playfully as they swam round and round, and then crawling out upon
the bank, they ran to and fro upon the grassy sward till they too were
glad to rest under the shade of the clump of coco-palms.

In the afternoon--leaving the rest of our party to amuse themselves by
catching crayfish and to make traps for wild pigs--Sru, Nalik, Toka, and
myself set out towards _the_ pool at the head of the river, where, I
was assured, we were sure to get a pig or two by nightfall. The dogs
evidently were equally as certain of this as Nalik and S