This work, with the necessary intervals for attending to my fishing lines, cooking the fish, and preparing firewood, took up most of the day, and I determined to devote the remainder to felling a young Odúm tree that I had noted growing near the middle of the island. It stood some fifty feet high, and was nine or ten inches in diameter at the base--a considerable thickness to hack through with a knife, especially as the wood is very hard and tough; but it had a fine crown of branches at its summit, which would furnish nearly all the straight wood that I should want, so the labour of felling it would be well spent. However, the darkness came when I had hacked but half through the trunk, and I had to leave it to finish on the morrow. That night, as I sat by the firelight in my house, I continued to perfect the design of my canoe; but also I gave some serious thought to the question of food, for the diet of fish was becoming excessively distasteful, to say nothing of the shortness of the supply. I was loth to waste my precious time in seeking provisions, but, I must be fed or I could not work; so at last I reluctantly made up my mind to give up the ensuing day, or part of it, to a search for fresh food. Accordingly, on the following morning, after setting my lines and making up the fire, I sharpened my spear upon a slab of sandstone that I had picked up in the bed of the river, and crossed the shallows to the side of the river that was most distant from the hill. Plunging at once into the forest, I went forward softly, peering in all directions and keeping a careful eye upon the shadows so that I should not lose my way. It was a most tantalising place to a hungry man, for it abounded in game, and fruit was fairly plentiful; but the game--mostly hornbills and parrots--was up in the far-away tree-tops, and the fruit was all strange, and I dared not taste it lest it should be poisonous. Presently, however, I had a stroke of luck, for I came to a tree the trunk of which was covered with a trailing vine bearing numbers of globular fruit somewhat like oranges. I was much tempted to try one of these, and was standing before them irresolute, with watering mouth, when a pair of Diana monkeys came down the creeper, hand over hand, and each picked one of the fruit and retreated to the top regions, where I saw them seat themselves on a branch and nibble off pieces of peel which they spat down on to me. Concluding that what was wholesome for a monkey could not be poisonous to me, I cut off a couple of branches, each bearing a bunch of the fruit, and dropping one bunch into my pocket sat down among the roots of a tree to breakfast off the remaining bunch. As I proceeded with my meal I noticed that a thick milky juice was exuding freely from the cut end of the branch, and before I had finished eating, this sap had begun to grow thicker and more tenacious. Much interested, I was examining the sticky exudation