of which may be eaten, with the exception of a slender core, which is
easily removed.

The bread-fruit, however, is never used, and is indeed altogether unfit to
be eaten, until submitted in one form or other to the action of fire.

The most simple manner in which this operation is performed, and, I think,
the best, consists in placing any number of the freshly-plucked fruit,
when in a particular state of greenness, among the embers of a fire, in
the same way that you would roast a potato. After a lapse of ten or
fifteen minutes, the green rind embrowns and cracks, showing through the
fissures in its sides the milk-white interior. As soon as it cools the
rind drops off, and you then have the soft round pulp in its purest and
most delicious state. Thus eaten, it has a mild and pleasing flavour.

Sometimes after having been roasted in the fire, the natives snatch it
briskly from the embers, and permitting it to slip out of the yielding
rind into a vessel of cold water, stir up the mixture, which they call
"bo-a-sho." I never could endure this compound, and indeed the preparation
is not greatly in vogue among the more polite Typees.

There is one form, however, in which the fruit is occasionally served,
that renders it a dish fit for a king. As soon as it is taken from the
fire the exterior is removed, the core extracted, and the remaining part
is placed in a sort of shallow stone mortar, and briskly worked with a
pestle of the same substance. While one person is performing this
operation, another takes a ripe cocoa-nut, and breaking it in half, which
they also do very cleverly, proceeds to grate the juicy meat into fine
particles. This is done by means of a piece of mother-of-pearl shell,
lashed firmly to the extreme end of a heavy stick, with its straight side
accurately notched like a saw. The stick is sometimes a grotesquely-formed
limb of a tree, with three or four branches twisting from its body like so
many shapeless legs, and sustaining it two or three feet from the ground.

The native, first placing a calabash beneath the nose, as it were, of his
curious-looking log-steed, for the purpose of receiving the grated
fragments as they fall, mounts astride of it as if it were a hobby-horse,
and twirling the inside of one of his hemispheres of cocoa-nut around the
sharp teeth of the mother-of-pearl shell, the pure white meat falls in
snowy showers into the receptacle provided. Having obtained a quantity
sufficient f