They
busied themselves 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 in 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, in some anxiety.
I then recollected, for the first time, how fond my wife was of coffee,
which, in Europe, had always been her favourite breakfast. There would
certainly be in the ship some bags, which 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.
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