onnection with our American negro "hant," a
goblin or ghost? Certainly the bird's long and dismal "Hoo-oo-oo"
wailing through the shuddering forest evoked dim and chilling
memories of tales told by candlelight when I was a child in Maryland.

Here on the lower levels I was still among the cocoanut-groves. The
trail passed through acres of them, their tall gray columns rising
like cathedral arches eighty feet above a green mat of creeping vines.
Again it dipped into the woods, where one or two palms struggled
upward from a clutching jungle. Everywhere I saw the nuts tied by
their natural stems in clumps of forty or fifty and fastened to
limbs which had been cut and lashed between trees. These had been
gathered by climbers and left thus to be collected for drying into
copra.

Constantly the ripe nuts not yet gathered fell about me. These heavy
missiles, many six or seven pounds in weight, fell from heights of
fifty to one hundred feet and struck the earth with a dull sound.
The roads and trails were littered with them. They fall every hour of
the day in the tropics, yet I have never seen any one hurt by them.
Narrow escapes I had myself, and I have heard of one or two who were
severely injured or even killed by them, but the accidents are
entirely out of proportion to the shots fired by the trees. One
becomes an expert at dodging, and an instinct draws one's eyes to
the branch about to shed a _mei_, or the palm intending to launch a
cocoanut.

As I made my way up the trail, pausing now and then to look about me,
I came upon an old woman leaning feebly on a tall staff. Although it
was the hour of afternoon sleep, she was abroad for some reason, and
I stopped to say "_Kaoha_," to her. A figure of wretchedness she was,
bent almost double, her withered, decrepit limbs clad in a ragged
_pareu_ and her lean arms clutching the stick that bore her weight.
She was so aged that she appeared unable to hear my greeting, and
replied only mutteringly, while her bleary eyes gleamed up at me
between fallen lids.

Such miserable age appealed to pity, but as she appeared to wish no
aid, I left her leaning on her staff, and moved farther along the
trail, stopping again to gaze at the shadowed valley below while I
mused on the centuries it had seen and the brief moment of a man's
life. Standing thus, I was like to lose my own, for suddenly I heard
a whirr like that of a shrapnel shell on its murderous errand, and
at my feet fell a proj