The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-07-20


 shell is soft and easily cut, with the machete, or long, bladed knife which every countryman carries; or your own pocket knife may answer the purpose. Make a hole in one end of the nut about the size of a alf-dollar-and out gushes the milk" like a living spring; not by any means such sour stuff as you have seen come out of a cocoanut at home, white as chalk and thick as buttermilk. Give one of those import ed things to monkey, pining in cap tivlty for it's native food, and he will refuse it with scorn and indignation, The trouble is that the cocoanuts of commerce are gathered before they are ripe and entirely spoiled in transit, The fluid shut up within it should have no suggestion of milk, but be colorless as water, with slight sparkle like that from some clear mountain spring, eX- cent for slightly sweet and most de- licious flavor; and if freshly picked in the early morning, after the nut has been swinging all night in the cool breezes, the liquid is almost ice-cold. Where cocoanuts grow, you never see inside of their shells any of the hard, white layer which northerners grate and 'desslcate" Gone might as well say desecrate), for in it's best estate the nut has no such substances; only creamy white film inside of it, hardly | thicker than your thumb nail, which is scraped off with @ spoon when eaten. Before drinking the juice, the tender | foot' generally pours it out into an- | other vessel than that which nature intended; but the sophisticated epicure tilts the cocoanut at just the right an- | gle to let the milk trickle gently | down his throat-and like the old topper we have heard of, he wishes his throat were mile long. There is nothing in the wide world more nourshing or fat tening, more health-restoring and outh-preserving. Emaciated invalids are recommended to begin on the juice of half a dozen nuts a day, the dose to | be increased according to the patents inclination. And the invalid is yet to | be discovered who does not develop a taste for it so rapidly that in a weeks time half a dozen nuts at single sit ting will hardly satisfy him. Each full grown nut contains nearly a pint of this true fountain of youth'-the' same, perhaps, which the old Con | quistadores sought vainly far and wide, expecting to find it gushing out of the earth in some sequestered spot, instead of hanging, green and beauti- ful, everywhere overhead. The big nuts grow in punches, five or six on stem away up near the top of the tall tree, l just under it's crown of plume-like leaves. A native darkey, young or old | thinks nothing of shining up the smooth, branchless trunks, which looks like a telegraph pole, towering straight and slender from 50 to 100 feet-whack
 ink off the nuts with his mechete, Gear ried up in his teeth) and tossing them down with the ease and agility of his ancestors, the monkeys. No cocoanut ever falls from the parent stem until it is too old and Withered to be good for anything. The poorest denizen of the tropics would disdain to eat such wind falls-and so they are shipped to the north, to be eaten by those who know no better! Nowhere on the globe do | pine-apples thrive as in eastern Cuba, where the conditions of soil and eli mate bring ''the golden apples of Hes perdes" to absolute perfection; yet the pineapple industry has never had much attention in this section. Here is another chance for the enterprising Yankee A tract of unoccupied land, extending far as one can see, may be bought for few dollars and turned into fruit farm, the virgin soil of un- paralleled richness being capable of producing every tropical growth. Ship ping facilities are already established at Baracoa and several small ports 1 ha V,,,,, {yi on some other river so much the better for it's owner. Until one has seen the golden glory of a pineapple plantation he can think of no more attractive sight than a sugar-cane field, glsten- ing pale yellow under the torrid sun and billowing in the gentle breeze like wind-swept sea. But even more fas- cinating is field of pines each great apple" guarded by circle of glitter ing, sharp-edged bayonets. In Florida the pineapple leaf is so sharply ser rated that the thought of getting around among them suggests field of torture. Evolution seems to have progressed farther in Cuba, for in the older and more carefully cultivated plantations the saw-teeth that edge the long, pointed leaves have mainly disappeared.
 Before the war, it was the sight of a life time to go out to Marianao, a suburb of Havana, and there drive through an estate which had 80, 00C pineapple plants in full bearing Over in Nassau they call the pine-planta- tions "groves" and orchards as if they were trees. Whether groves or fields, it's plants are about the same
 producing one of the most lucious and popular fruits known to man, for which there is constant and ample de- mand. Like most things worth having in this troubled life, the golden pines
 are not easy to get at A very short stroll among the stinging leav- es will lead you to sympa- thize with the New Yorker who after a visit to Marianao said: "YoJ do not mind the first two thousand ol three thousand sticks and prods iron the needle-point of the bayonet-leaves as you cross field, but after a while your tortured cutis can endure no more and your remarks about the pineapple crop are likely to be prejudced by pres ent soreness. How much nicer it would be If the apples really did grow in or, chards' and you could send coloret boy up the trees to shake down a few and then you could sit down in tht