ABSTRACT
N EXT morning no Gameu, no canoe, as I expected. The rogue turned up at last about one o'clock, in the full blaze of one of the hottest suns I ever faced, with the excuse that there was a great feast overnight at the club house, and that being much sought after for his elegance and skill in dancing he had been kept up late. Coconut toddy, he said, had flowed freely, also a Manilla man had sold them many bottles of red wine, of which not one was left. So invoking anything but a blessing on native shiftlessness and unpunctuality I gave the word to start, and under the propulsion of five stout bamboo poles the canoe was soon urged up to the wharf of Maneu, with a banana patch in the background shading off into dense forest, whilst here and there the little clearing is dotted with clumps of the M~r, a small species of bamboo, and the U tel, a tall graceful species of reed-grass bearing feathery tufts of blossom like the flowers of the sugar cane. Here we take on board a sack or two of coconuts, fully ripe for copra making. For as Gameu says very truly, "It is not good to call on a white man emptyhanded."
