Travellers are often a little nervous at first, when riding or walking all day long through woods of palm, heavily laden with ponderous nuts. But the feeling never lasts more than a few days. One does not know why one is never hit by these cannon-balls of Nature--but one never is, neither is anybody else, so all uneasiness dies out very quickly, and one acquiesces placidly in the universal miracle.
Planters say that most of the nuts fall at night, when the dew has relaxed the fibres of the stalks. This would be an excellent reason, but for the fact that the nuts don’t fall any more at night than in the daytime, if one takes the trouble to observe, and that damp, or dew, tightens up fibres of all kind, instead of relaxing them. If one asks the natives, the usual answer is: “It just happens that way”; and I fancy that is as near as any one is likely to get to a solution.
Manuwai, since I saw it, has been purchased outright by a couple of adventurous young Englishmen, who are working it as a copra plantation. Takutea has, therefore, a neighbour in the Robinson Crusoe business, and is not likely to be quite so solitary as in times past.
The tour of the group was now ended, and the Government officials were conveyed back to Raratonga with all possible despatch--which is not saying very much, after all. There followed a luxurious interval of real beds and real meals, and similar Capuan delights, in the pretty island bungalow where my lot for the time had been cast. Then the _Duchess_ began to start again, and peace was over. A sailing vessel does not start in the same way as a steamer. She gives out that she will leave on such a day, at such an hour, quite like the steamer; but there the resemblance ends. When you pack your cabin trunk, and have it taken down at 11 a.m., you find there is no wind, so you take it back and call again next day. There is a wind now, but from the one quarter that makes it practically impossible to get out of port.’ You are told you had better leave your trunk, in case of the breeze shifting. You do, and go back for the second time to the hostess from whom you have already parted twice. The verandah (every one lives on verandahs, in the islands) is convulsed to see you come back, and tells you this is the way the ship always does “get off.” You spend a quiet evening, and go to bed. At twelve o’clock, just as you are in the very heart of your soundest sleep, a native boy comes running up to the house to say that the captain has sent for the passenger to come down at once, for the wind is getting up, and he will sail in a quarter of an hour! You scramble into your clothes, run down to the quay, get rowed out to the ship, and finish your sleep in your cabin to the accompaniment of stamping feet and the flapping sails; and behold, at eight o’clock, the bo’sun thunders on your door, and tells you that breakfast is in, but the breeze is away again, and the ship still in harbour! After breakfast you sneak up the well-known avenue again, feeling very much as if you had run away from school, and were coming back in disgrace. This time, the verandah shrieks until the natives run to the avenue gate to see what is the matter with the man “papalangis,” and then console you with the prophecy that the schooner won’t get away for another week.