"You are wrong, my boy," said I. "In the first place, we should not return evil for evil; then, again, they might be of great assistance to us in building a house of some sort; and lastly, you must remember that they took nothing with them from the vessel, and may be perishing of hunger."
Thus talking, we pushed on until we came to a pleasant grove which stretched down to the water's edge; here we halted to rest, seating ourselves under a large tree, by a rivulet which murmured and splashed along its pebbly bed into the great ocean before us. A thousand gayly-plumaged birds flew twittering above us, and Fritz and I gazed up at them.
My son suddenly started up.
"A monkey," he exclaimed; "I am nearly sure I saw a monkey."
As he spoke he sprang round to the other side of the tree, and in doing so stumbled over a round substance, which he handed to me, remarking, as he did so, that it was a round bird's nest, of which he had often heard.
"You may have done so," said I, laughing, "but you need not necessarily conclude that every round hairy thing is a bird's nest; this, for instance, is not one, but a cocoanut."
We split open the nut, but, to our disgust, found the kernel dry and uneatable.
"Hullo," cried Fritz, "I always thought a cocoanut was full of delicious sweet liquid, like almond milk."
"So it is," I replied, "when young and fresh, but as it ripens the milk becomes congealed, and in course of time is solidified into a kernel. This kernel then dries as you see here, but when the nut falls on favorable soil, the germ within the kernel swells until it bursts through the shell, and, taking root, springs up a new tree."
"I do not understand," said Fritz, "how the little germ manages to get through this great thick shell, which is not like an almond or hazel nutshell, that is divided down the middle already."