Boiled Ivory Nuts.

A gentle extension of the legs of un suspecting tourists is one of the well-known indoor sports in the Solomons. Nearly every steamer has its quota of “round trippers” who are on a sight-seeing holiday and most of them are easy marks, though some who have assimilated the travel booklet descriptions of the Islands are sus picious of any information given them unsolicited. When the old “Melusia” was on the Solomon Islands service in the good old days when there was more money about, she arrived in Makambo one trip with a good proportion of trip pers in her complement. Two of them —obviously Sydney school-marms — came across to Tulagi in B.P’s. launch and on their return to the steamer were attracted by a few boys sorting ivory nuts outside W. R. Carpenter’s copra shed. They immediately sought information. “What are those things?” one of them asked the labour over seer who was near. “Ivory nuts,” he replied. Then came the inevitable “What are they used for?” to which the unblushing overseer replied, “Oh, they’re good to eat. We feed the labour on them here.” After remark ing that they were rather hard tucker and being told that they required four hours’ boiling to render them fit to eat, the school-marms asked for some to take back to Sydney. Then the white man was very obliging; he got a copra bag, half filled it with nuts and handed it over and the ladies staggered off to their launch with it.

Nobody “blew the gaff” before the “Melusia” left Makambo; but it is sin cerely hoped, for the sake of the gas bill in a Sydney flat, that somebody told those trippers that ivory nuts could not be made fit for human con sumption by boiling.