Surely enough, there was plainly marked a monkey’s eyes and mouth and hair and nose.
“We’ll soon settle this,” said Fil, who dashed the coconut on a stone, broke the hard shell, wasted half the sweet milk,—exposing the white, fragrant meat.
“Did you know that the coconut furnishes cloth, mats, roofs, fuel, soap oil, candy, puddings, cups, dyes, lamp oil, butter, candles, axle grease, ropes, brushes, furniture, shade, food, drink, and liquor to intoxicate,” asked Filippa’s mother, who was as wise as Fil’s father.
“Please go slowly,” I remarked, “for you are making me think that these islands are Paradise; that you touch some button, and every wish comes true, as in the fairy stories. In our country, a tree furnishes only lumber; or sometimes nuts or sugar in addition, but never over two things at once. Now you would have me believe that one slim tree with only a tuft of leaves at the top, furnishes you twenty useful and rich products. This is really too much to believe, though I ask you to forgive me for being so frank.”
Filippa’s mother replied: “These are the gardens of the sunny Equator; and you can, therefore, expect wonderful things. The rough covering of the shell is woven into mats, brushes, ropes, and bags. The fibers of the leaves make a fine cloth. The dried leaves make a roof-thatch. The trunk makes foundation poles. The coconut itself is fruit and drink. When the white meat is dried, it is shredded for pastry and candy. When the coconut meat is pressed, the oil extracted is used for fuel, light, hair pomades, butter, candles, and grease. It is used also in making the best hand soaps; in fact, it makes the only soap that can be used with salt sea water.”
“Please let me tell all its other valuable qualities,” said Fil.
“If you cut a coconut in half, you have two cups, or dishes. You can draw the milk through a small hole, plug the hole, and use the shell as a float. If you burn the shell, you can make a deep dye from the ashes,—a dye that will not fade or wash out.”
“I’ll tell you more about it,” Moro eagerly intruded. “The oddest use for a smoothed half of a coconut shell, is to use it as a rat-guard, to shed off rats from our strings of dried fruit hanging from the roof. As the rat comes down the rattan rope, the halved coconut shell tips, and down he falls from its smooth surface, to the floor, and misses the hanging fruit.
“If you climb up the high coconut tree, and cut a hole in the flowering stalk, the juice will run out. This is called the delicious ‘tuba’ liquor, and we catch it in cups made from half of a coconut shell.”
“And if you ferment and distill that liquor,” said the Padre, “you have the cocoa wine which is much used for medicine in America.”