men constantly, to do nothing else but
search for these insect-destroyers of the
coco-palms.

The termites, or white ants, are great
enemies of the coco-palms. The species
which build, their nests on the top of the
coco-palms kill them from their summits;
and the species which establish themselves
at their base, poison their roots.

Such are a few traits of the animal and
nominal coco-eaters. The termites are certainly
the most extraordinary of insects,
the sepoy-crabs the strangest of crustaceans,
and the nominal races which eat cocos are of
all men the furthest removed from the
European types. What shall I say to sum
up? Only this: that the coco-eaters are
as wonderful as the coco-palm, and the coco-palm
as surpassingly strange as the coco-eaters
—the hot forces of the equator pervade
them all; and the tree and its associates
combined, give us marvellous glimpses
into the worlds of life in the islands of the
sun.

MEMNON AND HIS MATE.

On Tébes' Plain, at labouring dawn,
Day's eldest daughter yet unborn,
Unmark'd as yet of laughing morn
The faintest glimm'ring smile;
The croaking chorus, tired and dumb,
Old Earth was silent in her tomb,
Along the banks of Nile.

With fertilising largesse fraught,
And secrets from the Tropics brought,
The weird waves glided, swift as Thought,
And silently as Time;
And, through the leaves of spectral palms,
No more the night-wind toss'd its arms,
Uniting to their fitful psalms
A melancholy rhyme.

To shore the drooping cangia clung
With folded wing and yard unslung,
A cradle of the Live among
The chambers of the Dead;
Nor was their breath enough to float
The pendant of that river-boat,
To wake the firefly on the lote
The cicade on the blade.

It was the hour; nor night nor day,
When if you fail, as old Sheikhs say,
To tell the white horse from the grey,
It is the peep of dawn.
But Sheikh and steed had taken flight
To realms of neither day nor night,
And scoured the Desert out of sight
On dreamy pinions borne.

It was the hour; nor night nor day,
When these my feet conspired to stray
Along the pathless sacred way,
That girds dark Acheron;
And all my heart with half-hope beat,
That Memnon then might wake to greet,
With olden music, soft and sweet,
Once more the rising sun.

As o'er the unctuous flats I pressed,
A lark shot startled from her nest,
And lo! half-naked to the waist,
There came an Arab maid!
A maiden like the morning star,
With midnight eyes, and raven hair,
Erect, as Egypt's daughters are,
With lupins on her head.

And, as she neared, she seemed to me
The Genius of Antiquity,
A swarthy Venus from a sea
Of green; and, as we met,
She drew her kerchief, to deny
Her graces to a stranger's eye,
But hailed me with the ancient cry,
" Y' Howàga Salamèt."*

Then, o'er the East a roseate hue
Intense, and more intenser grew,
Reflected in the splashing dew
Through which my ancles trod,
And as I laboured through the corn,
The silver spikes of headlong morn
Shot sudden up the world to warm:
It was the coming God.

There sat the everlasting Pair,
Full twenty cubits in the air,
Each on his monumental chair,
A superhuman pile!
A million morns had come and gone,
Since first those sentinels of stone
Kept guard upon the rising sun,
Beside the banks of Nile.

Graved on their massive feet were set
The marks of the departed great,
Who, ages back, stood here to wait
The strain, at morning-tide.
The asp of her that "most fair Queen,"
The quip of Grecian libertine,
And Cæsar's symbol, carved between
His freedman and his bride!

A spark upon an eagle's wing,
A palm-tree swiftly burnishing,
And, pregnant with the fulgent ring,
The heavenly gates flew wide.
Lift up their heads those heavenly gates,
And all the cliff, where Athor waits
To clasp the monarch when he sets,
Was in the radiance dyed.

Then, from that spacious brow, the cold
And dusky curtain downward rolled,
And all the statue, bathed in gold,
Sent forth a sound that day;
Whether my ears were sharply set,
Or Memnon did articulate,
These were the strains that haunt me yet
A thousand leagues away:—

"When Egypt's sun was on the wane,
And fierce Cambyses strove, in vain,
To cleave my ponderous bulk in twain,
And pierce the warder's heart;
Then, first Aurora failed to fire
The golden sinews of my lyre,
But hope was tardier to expire
Than gladness to depart.

* Salutation, O traveller!