ich they held me, would spread an immense leaf on the ground,
and dropping one by one a few minute particles of the salt upon it, invite
me to taste them.

From the extravagant value placed upon the article, I verily believe, that
with a bushel of common Liverpool salt, all the real estate in Typee might
have been purchased. With a small pinch of it in one hand, and a quarter
section of a bread-fruit in the other, the greatest chief in the valley
would have laughed at all the luxuries of a Parisian table.

The celebrity of the bread-fruit tree, and the conspicuous place it
occupies in a Typee bill of fare, induces me to give at some length a
general description of the tree, and the various modes in which the fruit
is prepared.

The bread-fruit tree, in its glorious prime, is a grand and towering
object, forming the same feature in a Marquesan landscape that the
patriarchal elm does in New England scenery. The latter tree it not a
little resembles in height, in the wide spread of its stalwart branches,
and in its venerable and imposing aspect.

The leaves of the bread-fruit are of great size, and their edges are cut
and scolloped as fantastically as those of a lady's lace collar. As they
annually tend towards decay, they almost rival, in the brilliant variety
of their gradually changing hues, the fleeting shades of the expiring
dolphin. The autumnal tints of our American forests, glorious as they are,
sink into nothing in comparison with this tree.

The leaf, in one particular stage, when nearly all the prismatic colours
are blended on its surface, is often converted by the natives into a
superb and striking head-dress. The principal fibre traversing its length
being split open a convenient distance, and the elastic sides of the
aperture pressed apart, the head is inserted between them, the leaf
drooping on one side, with its forward half turned jauntily up on the
brows, and the remaining part spreading laterally behind the ears.

The fruit somewhat resembles in magnitude and general appearance one of
our citron melons of ordinary size; but, unlike the citron, it has no
sectional lines drawn along the outside. Its surface is dotted all over
with little conical prominences, looking not unlike the knobs on an
antiquated church door. The rind is perhaps an eighth of an inch in
thickness; and denuded of this, at the time when it is in the greatest
perfection, the fruit presents a beautiful globe of white pulp, the whole