Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/192

168 relative to the agricultural and other advantages of Feejee, and also to the mode of life among the residents. The dinner consisted of pork, salt and fresh beef, chicken, yams, taro, and other vegetables, together with English and American preserves, and potted things that are found wherever Englishmen are settled in the eastern or southern hemisphere. "You may not think much of it when compared with a dinner in New York or London," said one of the planters, "but if you go and live six months or a year on a plantation you'll think a dinner here is the very height of luxury. Salt beef and occasional chickens and pigs are our only meats on the plantations, backed up by yams and taro in one unvarying round. Where we can afford it we have potted and canned things, but they are expensive, and very often cannot be had at any price. It has repeatedly happened that men who had been living on the rough fare of the plantations came to Levuka after an absence of months, and overfed themselves at the hotel-table to such an extent as to bring on a fatal illness."

After dinner they sat on the veranda of the hotel and enjoyed the land-breeze which sets in a little after sunset, and is considerably cooler than the day breeze from the sea. It is also free from flies and mosquitoes, which at this time retire to the sleeping-rooms of the hotel to make ready for the arrival of the lodgers. On the veranda the conversation was continued, and many features of Feejeean life were touched upon.

"It's a pity you are not to be here at balola time," said one of the residents to Fred, when the latter had explained that their visit was to be a very brief one.

Fred thought the gentleman said bakola, and immediately his thoughts ran on the cannibalism of the Feejeeans in times past. He remarked that he supposed those days were gone forever, but his informant answered, to the great astonishment of the youth, that they had the festival every year, and it was something not to be missed.

Then the gentleman went on to explain, and Fred soon ascertained the difference between bakola and balola.

"The balola, or balolo," said he, "is a sea-worm whose scientific name is palolo viridis. It looks like a string of vermicelli, being little larger than a thread, and varying from an inch or two to a yard in length. It lives somewhere in the sea, no one knows where; on two days of the year it comes to the surface, and all the rest of the three hundred and sixty-five it keeps carefully out of sight. The natives know exactly when it will come; it first appears in October, the date being fixed by