Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/270

 244 "^^^ Natives of New Caledonia.

with little white cascades, " a place of falling waters." Where there is a strand, the soil is good, especially in the river valleys, and the houses of the natives cluster like collections of beehives along the coast, and stretch inland up the banks of the streams. The people are agricultural, cultivating coco-nut trees, bananas, and bread-fruit. The west coast, with much more of space between the moun- tains and the sea, is more thickly peopled ; the rivers having larger scope, and the sandstone detritus forming soil favourable to the cultivation of yams. Where the soil is of clay, nothing flourishes but the melancholy Naioulie, the Australian "tea-tree," with white papery-looking bark, and light foliage. Where it grows the districts are sin- gularly exempt from fever.

With its bare dry-looking grass hills. New Caledonia has little of a tropical aspect, in spite of the roar of the Barrier Reef, the waving coco-trees along the coast, and the hideous submerged forests of mangroves at the mouths of the rivers. The climate is delightful, much more humid than that of Australia, though the old men remember one long drought, followed by a hurricane which drove them into the shelter of caves.

In the central chain of hills natives are rare, as the amount of iron stone sterilizes the alluvial soil of the valleys. Nickel-bearing stone is plentiful, and copper mines are now worked. Thanks to an exclusively classical education, I missed potentialities of wealth. Prospecting with two friends, I camped on ground which we recognised as decidedly very peculiar ; and we slept that night on millions of money. But there was no show of gold ; signs of copper we did not recognise ; and, a few months later, a better-informed party of explorers found and staked out claims in one of the richest copper mines in the world. These explorers had never made a Latin verse in their lives.^

' In my opinion J. J. A. made very few. — A. L,