Page:The Swiss Family Robinson - 1851.djvu/394

Rh with our breakfast: opened the cocoa-nuts, and poured the milk into the shells, after separating the kernel; they arranged the fruits on the trunk of a tree, which served for a table, and did great credit to the talent of their instructress.

"I should have liked to have offered you coffee," said Madame Hirtel, "which grows this island, but having no utensils for roasting, grinding, or preparing it, it has been useless to me, and I have not even gathered it."

"Do you think, my dear, that it would grow in our island?" said my wife to me, some anxiety.

I then recollected, for the first time, how fond my wife was of coffee, which, in Europe, had always been her favorite breakfast. There would certainly be in the ship some bags, wch I might have brought away; but I had never thought of it, and my unselfish wife, not seeing it, had never named it, except once wishing we had some to plant in the garden. Now that there was a probability of obtaining it, she confessed that coffee and bread were the only luxuries she regretted. I promised to try and cultivate it in our island; foreseeing, however, that it would probably not be of the best quality, I told her she must not expect Mocha; but her long privation from this delicious beverage had made her less fastidious, and she assured me it would be a treat to her. After breakfast, we begged Madame Hirtel to resume her interesting narrative. She continued:

"After the reflections on my situation, wch I told you of last night, I determined only to return to the sea-shore, when our food failed us in the woods; but I acquired other means of procuring