"I think he is an amazing specimen," said Cyprian.
"I think he is an amazing duck.... And doesn't he just remind me of a white rat!"
"Mother," and John broke in upon Cyprian's amusement, "I've found a house and they say the man in it is going to have a baby. Come and see how he does it."
Ferlie looked at him.
"The daily round and common task will furnish all you need to ask here, I can foresee, my son," she told him.
"Dare we investigate?" asked Cyprian, when he had recovered his gravity. "He may have discovered something interesting in the way of a rite."
He had. The hut he referred to was, to the islanders, tabu, or forbidden, since an unfortunate husband, about to become a father, was imprisoned within it beside his wife, sharing her troubles by sympathetic imitation. He was deprived of the luxury of a bath and betel-chewing and, for some while before, he had not been allowed to bind any objects together nor to attend feasts. Moreover, a whole month must elapse, after the child's birth, before he would be permitted to escape.
Friend-of-England, whom they chanced upon in the vicinity, described the custom in much-broken English, and Ferlie managed to keep a straight face while Cyprian examined the texture of coco-nut leaves and wished, for the time being, that he had never been born at all, or, at any rate, that nobody knew how.
"Ought John to discover these things?" he asked Ferlie later; "isn't it spoiling his innocence rather young?"
She laughed at him. "I should be sorry to think that you had lost yours in learning of them," she said. "Nature did not fall with the Fall. But so long as Mankind is content to lie supine, including all Nature in his own disgrace, so long will the serpent insinuate horror into the man-made Eden."