In these genial regions one's wants are naturally diminished; and those which remain are easily gratified; fuel, house-shelter, and, if you please, clothing, may be entirely dispensed with.
How different our hard northern latitudes! Alas! the lot of a "poor devil," twenty degrees north of the tropic of Cancer, is indeed pitiable.
At last, the beach contracted to hardly a yard's width, and the dense thicket almost dipped into the sea.

In place of the smooth sand, too, we had sharp fragments of broken coral, which made travelling exceedingly unpleasant.

"Lord! my foot!" roared the doctor, fetching it up for inspection, with a galvanic fling of the limb.

A sharp splinter had thrust itself into the flesh through a hole in his boot.
My sandals were worse yet; their soles taking a sort of fossil impression of everything trod upon.
Turning round a bold sweep of the beach, we came upon a piece of fine, open ground, with a fisherman's dwelling in the distance, crowning a knoll which rolled off into the water.
The hut proved to be a low, rude erection, very recently thrown up; for the bamboos were still green as grass, and the thatching fresh and fragrant as meadow hay.

It was open upon three sides; so that, upon drawing near, the domestic arrangements within were in plain sight.