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Melville, Herman

"Typee"

This contrivance greatly facilitates the act of climbing. The band pressed against the tree, and closely embracing it, yields a pretty firm support; while with the arms clasped about the trunk, and at regular intervals sustaining the body, the feet are drawn up nearly a yard at a time, and a corresponding elevation of the hands immediately succeeds. In this way I have seen little children, scarcely five years of age, fearlessly climbing the slender pole of a young cocoa-nut tree, and while hanging perhaps fifty feet from the ground, receiving the plaudits of their parents beneath, who clapped their hands, and encouraged them to mount still higher.


? ? ? ? What, thought I, on first witnessing one of these exhibitions would the nervous mothers of America and England say to a similar display of hardihood in any of their children? The Lacedemonian nation might have approved of it, but most modern dames would have gone into hysterics at the sight.


? ? ? ? At the top of the cocoa-nut tree the numerous branches, radiating on all sides from a common centre, form a sort of green and waving basket, between the leaflets of which you just discern the nuts thickly clustering together, and on the loftier trees looking no bigger from the ground than bunches of grapes. I remember one adventurous little fellow- Too-Too was the rascal's name- who had built himself a sort of aerial baby-house in the picturesque tuft of a tree adjoining Marheyo's habitation.


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