 have laughed at
all the luxuries of a Parisian table.
    The celebrity of the bread-fruit tree, and the conspicuous place it occupies
in a Typee bill of fare, induces me to give at some length a general description
of the tree, and the various modes in which the fruit is prepared.
    The bread-fruit tree, in its glorious prime, is a grand and towering object,
forming the same feature in a Marquesan landscape that the patriarchal elm does
in New England scenery. The latter tree it not a little resembles in height, in
the wide spread of its stalwart branches, and in its venerable and imposing
aspect.
    The leaves of the bread-fruit are of great size, and their edges are cut and
scolloped as fantastically as those of a lady's lace collar. As they annually
tend toward decay, they almost rival, in the brilliant variety of their
gradually changing hues, the fleeting shades of the expiring dolphin. The
autumnal tints of our American forests, glorious as they are, sink into nothing
in comparison with this tree.
    The leaf, in one particular stage, when nearly all the prismatic colours are
blended on its surface, is often converted by the natives into a superb and
striking head-dress. The principal fibre traversing its length being split open
a convenient distance, and the elastic sides of the aperture pressed apart, the
head is inserted between them, the leaf drooping on one side, with its forward
half turned jauntily up on the brows, and the remaining part spreading laterally
behind the ears.
    The fruit somewhat resembles in magnitude and general appearance one of our
citron melons of ordinary size; but, unlike the citron, it has no sectional
lines drawn along the outside. Its surface is dotted all over with little
conical prominences, looking not unlike the knobs on an antiquated church door.
The rind is perhaps an eighth of an inch in thickness; and denuded of this, at
the time when it is in the greatest perfection, the fruit presents a beautiful
globe of white pulp, the whole of which may be eaten, with the exception of a
slender core, which is easily removed.
    The bread-fruit, however, is never used, and is indeed altogether unfit to
be eaten, until submitted in one form or other to the action of fire.
    The most simple manner in which this operation is performed, and, I think,
the best, consists in placing any number of the freshly-plucked fruit, when in a
particular state of greenness, among the embers of a fire, in the same way that
you would roast a
