bluer sea; a sweet, soft breeze rustled through the palms, lazy
ripples plashed lightly on the sand; humanity basked, flower-clad,
in sunny indolence; everything was redundant, fervid, beautiful.
How can I make you realize the glorious, bountiful, sun-steeped
tropics under our cold grey skies, and amidst our pale, monotonous,
lustreless greens?

Yet Molokai is only enchanting in the distance, for its blue petals
enfold 400 lepers doomed to endless isolation, and 300 more are
shortly to be weeded out and sent thither.  In to-day's paper
appeared the painful notice, "All lepers are required to report
themselves to the Government health officer within fourteen days
from this date for inspection, and final banishment to Molokai."  It
is hoped that leprosy may be "stamped out" by these stringent
measures, but the leprous taint must be strong in many families, and
the social, gregarious natives smoke each other's pipes and wear
each other's clothes, and either from fatalism or ignorance have
disregarded all precautions regarding this woful disease; and now
that measures are being taken for the isolation of lepers, they are
concealing them under mats and in caves and woods.  This forlorn
malady, called here Chinese leprosy, in the cases that I have seen,
confers nothing of the white, scaly look attributed to Syrian
leprosy; but the face is red, puffed, bloated, and shining, and the
eyes glazed, and I am told that in its advanced stage the swollen
limbs decay and drop off.  It is a fresh item of the infinite curse
which has come upon this race, and with Molokai in sight the
Hesperides vanished, and I ceased to believe that the Fortunate
Islands exist here or elsewhere on this weary earth.

My destination was the industrial training and boarding school for
girls, taught and superintended by two English ladies of Miss
Sellon's sisterhood, Sisters Mary Clara and Phoebe; and I found it
buried under the shade of the finest candlenut trees I have yet
seen.  A rude wooden cross in front is a touching and fitting emblem
of the Saviour, for whom these pious women have sacrificed friends,
sympathy, and the social intercourse and amenities which are within
daily reach of our workers at home.  The large house, which is
either plastered stone or adobe, contains the dormitories, visitors'
room, and oratory, and three houses at the back, all densely shaded,
are used as schoolroom, cook-house, laundry, and refectory.  There
is a playground under some fine tamarind trees, and an adobe wall
encloses, without secluding, the whole.  The visitors' room is about
twelve feet by eight feet, very bare, with a deal table and three
chairs in it, but it was vacant, and I crossed to the large, shady,
airy schoolroom, where I found the senior sister engaged in
teaching, while the junior was busy in the cook-house.  These ladies
in eight years have never left Lahaina.  Other people may think it
necessary to leave its broiling heat and seek health and recreation
on the mountains, but their work has left them no leisure, and their
zeal no desire, for a holiday.  A very solid, careful English
education is given here, as well as a thorough training in all
housewifely arts, and in the more important matters of modest dress
and deportment, and propriety in language.  There are thirty-seven
boarders, native and half-native, and mixed native and Chinese,
between the ages of four and eighteen.  They provide their own
clothes, beds, and bedding, and I think pay forty dollars a year.
The capitation grant from Government for two years was 2325 dollars.
Sister Phoebe was my cicerone, and I owe her one of the pleasantest
days I have spent on the islands.  The elder Sister is in middle
life, but though fragile-looking, has a pure complexion and a lovely
countenance; the younger is scarcely middle-aged, one of the
brightest, bonniest, sweetest-looking women I ever saw, with fun
dancing in her eyes and round the corners of her mouth; yet the
regnant expression on both faces was serenity, as though they had
attained to "the love which looketh kindly, and the wisdom which
looketh soberly on all things."

I never saw such a mirthful-looking set of girls.  Some were cooking
the dinner, some ironing, others reading English aloud; but each
occupation seemed a pastime, and whenever they spoke to the Sisters
they clung about them as if they were their mothers.  I heard them
read the Bible and an historical lesson, as well as play on a piano
and sing, and they wrote some very difficult passages from dictation
without any errors, and in a flowing, legible handwriting that I am
disposed to envy.  Their accent and intonation were pleasing, and
there was a briskness and emulation about their style of answering
questions, rarely found in country schools with us, significant of
intelligence and good teaching.  All but the younger girls spoke
English as fluently as Hawaiian.  I cannot convey a notion of the
blitheness and independence of manner of these children.  To say
that they were free and easy would be wrong; it was rather the
manner of very frolicsome daughters to very indulgent mothers or
aunts.  It was a family manner rather than a school manner, and the
rule is obviously one of love.  The Sisters are very wise in
adapting their discipline to the native character and circumstances.
The rigidity which is customary in similar institutions at home
would be out of place, as well as fatal here, and would ultimately
lead to a rebound of a most injurious description.  Strict obedience
is of course required, but the rules are few and lenient, and there
is no more pressure of discipline than in a well-ordered family.
The native amusements generally are objectionable, but Hawaiians are
a dancing people, and will dance, or else indulge in less innocent
pastimes; so the Sisters have taught them various English dances,
and I never saw anything prettier or more graceful than their style
of dancing.  There is no uniform dress.  The girls wear pretty print
frocks, made in the English style, and several of them wore the
hibiscus in their shining hair.  Some of the older girls were
beautiful in face as well as graceful in figure, but there was a
snaky undulation about their movements which I never saw among
Europeans.  All looked bubbling over with fun and frolic, and there
was a refinement and intelligence about their expression which
contrasted favourably with that of the ordinary female face on the
islands.

There are two dormitories, excellently ventilated, with a four-post
bed, with mosquito-bars, for each girl, and the beds were covered
with those brilliant-coloured quilts in which the natives delight,
and in which they exercise considerable ingenuity as well as
individuality of taste.  One Sister sleeps in each dormitory, and
these highly-educated and refined women have no place of retirement
except a very plain oratory; and having taken the vow of poverty,
they have of course no possessions, none of the books, pictures, and
knick-knacks wherewith others adorn their surroundings.  Their whole
lives, with the exception of the time passed in the oratory, are
spent with the girls, and in visiting the afflicted at their homes,
and this through eight blazing years, with the mercury always at 80
degrees!

The Hawaiian women have no notions of virtue as we understand it,
and if there is to be any future for this race it must come through
a higher morality.  Consequently the removal of these girls from
evil and impure surroundings, the placing them under the happiest
influences in favour of purity and goodness, the forming and
fostering of industrious and housewifely habits, and the raising
them in their occupations and amusements above those which are
natural to their race, are in themselves a noble, and in some
degree, a hopeful work, but it admits of neither pause nor
relaxation.  Those who carry it on are truly "the lowest in the
meanest task," for they have undertaken not only the superintendence
of menial work (so called), but the work itself, in teaching by
example and instruction the womanly industries of home.  They have
no society, until lately no regular Liturgical worship, and of
necessity a very infrequent celebration of the Holy Communion; and
they have undergone the trial which arose very naturally out of the
ecclesiastical relations of the American missionaries, of being
regarded as enemies, or at least dangerous interlopers, by the
excellent men who had long resided on the islands as Christian
teachers, and with whose views on such matters as dress and
recreation their own are somewhat at variance.  In the first
instance, the habit they wore, their designations, the presence of
Miss Sellon, the fame of whose Ritualistic tendencies had reached
the islands, and their manifest connection with a section of the
English Church which is regarded here with peculiar disfavour,
roused a strongly antagonistic feeling regarding their work and the
drift of their religious teaching.  They are not connected with what
is known at home as the "Honolulu Mission." {256}
                                    I.L.B.

LETTER XVIII.

HAWAIIAN HOTEL, HONOLULU.  March 20th.

Oahu, with its grey pinnacles, its deep valleys, its cool chasms,
its ruddy headlands, and volcanic cones, all clothed in green by the
recent rains, looked unspeakably lovely as we landed by sunrise in a
rose-flushed atmosphere, and Honolulu, shady, dew-bathed, and
brilliant with flowers, deserved its name, "The Paradise of the
Pacific."  The hotel is pleasant, and Mrs. D.'s presence makes it
sweet and homelike; but in a very few days I have lost much of the
health I gained on Hawaii, and the "Rolling Moses" and the Rocky
Mountains can hardly come too soon.  For Honolulu is truly a
metropolis, gay, hospitable, and restless, and this hotel
centralizes the restlessness.  Visiting begins at breakfast time,
when it ends I know not, and receiving and making visits, court
festivities, entertainments given by the commissioners of the great
powers, riding parties, picnics, verandah parties, "sociables," and
luncheon and evening parties on board the ships of war, succeed each
other with frightful rapidity.  This is all on the surface, but
beneath and better than this is a kindness which leaves no stranger
to a sense of loneliness, no want uncared for, and no sorrow
unalleviated.  This, more than its beauty and its glorious climate,
makes Honolulu "Paradise" for the many who arrive here sick and
friendless.  I notice that the people are very intimate with each
other, and generally address each other by their Christian names.
Very many are the descendants of the clerical and secular members of
the mission, and these, besides being naturally intimate, are
further drawn and held together by a society called "The Cousins'
Society," the objects of which are admirable.  The people take an
intense interest in each other, and love each other unusually.
Possibly they may hate each other as cordially when occasion offers.
It is a charming town, and the society is delightful.  I wish I were
well enough to enjoy it.

For people in the early stages of consumption this climate is
perfect, owing to its equability, as also for bronchial affections.
Unlike the health resorts of the Mediterranean, Algeria, Madeira,
and Florida, where great summer heats or an unhealthy season compel
half-cured invalids to depart in the spring, to return the next
winter with fresh colds to begin the half-cure process again, people
can live here until they are completely cured, as the climate is
never unhealthy, and never too hot.  Though the regular trades,
which blow for nine months of the year, have not yet set in, and the
mercury stands at 80 degrees, there is no sultriness:  a tremulous
sea-breeze and a mountain breeze fan the town, and the purple
nights, when the stars hang out like lamps, and the moon gives a
light which is almost golden, are cool and delicious.  Roughly
computed, the annual mean temperature is 75 degrees 55', with a
divergence in either direction of only 7 degrees 55'.  As a general
rule the temperature is cooler by four degrees for every thousand
feet of altitude, so that people can choose their climate to suit
themselves without leaving the islands.

I am gradually learning a little of the topography of this island
and of Honolulu, but the last is very intricate.  The appearance of
Oahu from the sea is deceptive.  It looks hardly larger than Arran,
but it is really forty-six miles long by twenty-five broad, and is
530 square miles in extent.  Diamond Hill, or Leahi, is the most
prominent object south of the town, beyond the palm groves of
Waikiki.  It is red and arid, except when, as now, it is verdure-
tinged by recent rains.  Its height is 760 feet, and its crater
nearly as deep, but its cone is rapidly diminishing.  Some years
ago, when the enormous quantity of thirty-six inches of rain fell in
one week, the degradation of both exterior and interior was
something incredible, and the same process is being carried on
slowly or rapidly at all times.  The Punchbowl, immediately behind
Honolulu, is a crater of the same kind, but of yet more brilliant
colouring:  so red is it indeed, that one might suppose that its
fires had but just died out.  In 1786 an observer noted it as being
composed of high peaks; but atmospheric influences have reduced it
to the appearance of a single wasting tufa cone, similar to those
which stud the northern slopes of Mauna Kea.  There are a number of
shore craters on the island, and six groups of tufa cones, but from
the disintegration of the lava, and the great depth of the soil in
many places, it is supposed that volcanic action ceased earlier than
on Maui or Hawaii.  The shores are mostly fringed with coral reefs,
often half a mile in width, composed of cemented coral fragments,
shells, sand, and a growing species of zoophyte.  The ancient reefs
are elevated thirty, forty, and even 100 feet in some places,
forming barriers which have changed lagoons into solid ground.
Honolulu was a bay or lagoon, protected from the sea by a coral reef
a mile wide; but the elevation of this reef twenty-five feet has
furnished a site for the capital, by converting the bay into a low
but beautifully situated plain.

The mountainous range behind is a rocky wall with outlying ridges,
valleys of great size cutting the mountain to its core on either
side, until the culminating peaks of Waiolani and Konahuanui, 4000
feet above the sea, seem as if rent in twain to form the Nuuanu
Valley.  The windward side of this range is fertile, and is dotted
over with rice and sugar plantations, but the leeward side has not a
trace of the redundancy of the tropics, and this very barrenness
gives a unique charm to the exotic beauty of Honolulu.

To me it is daily a fresh pleasure to stroll along the shady streets
and revel among palms and bananas, to see clusters of the granadilla
and night-blowing cereus mixed with the double blue pea, tumbling
over walls and fences, while the vermilion flowers of the Erythrina
umbrosa, like spikes of red coral, and the flaring magenta
Bougainvillea (which is not a flower at all, but an audacious freak
of terminal leaves) light up the shade, and the purple-leaved
Dracaena which we grow in pots for dinner-table ornament, is as
common as a weed.

Besides this hotel, and the handsome but exaggerated and
inappropriate Government buildings not yet finished, there are few
"imposing edifices" here.  The tasteful but temporary English
Cathedral, the Kaiwaiaho Church, diminished once to suit a dwindled
population, but already too large again; the prison, a clean, roomy
building, empty in the daytime, because the convicts are sent out to
labour on roads and public works; the Queen's Hospital for Curables,
for which Queen Emma and her husband became mendicants in Honolulu;
the Court House, a staring, unshaded building; and the Iolani
Palace, almost exhaust the category.  Of this last, little can be
said, except that it is appropriate and proportioned to a kingdom of
56,000 souls, which is more than can be said of the income of the
king, the salaries of the ministers, and some other things.  It
stands in pleasure-grounds of about an acre in extent, with a fine
avenue running through them, and is approached by a flight of steps
which leads to a tolerably spacious hall, decorated in the European
style.  Portraits of Louis Philippe and his queen, presented by
themselves, and of the late Admiral Thomas, adorn the walls.  The
Hawaiians have a profound respect for this officer's memory, as it
was through him that the sovereignty of the islands was promptly
restored to the native rulers, after the infamous affair of its
cession to England, as represented by Lord George Paulet.  There are
also some ornamental vases and miniature copies of some of
Thorwaldsen's works.  The throne-room takes up the left wing of the
palace.  This unfortunately resembles a rather dreary drawing-room
in London or New York, and has no distinctive features except a
decorated chair, which is the Hawaiian throne.  There is an Hawaiian
crown also, neither grand nor costly, but this I have not seen.  At
present the palace is only used for state receptions and
entertainments, for the king is living at his private residence of
Haemoeipio, not far off.

Miss W. kindly introduced me to Queen Emma, or Kaleleonalani, the
widowed queen of Kamehameha IV., whom you will remember as having
visited England a few years ago, when she received great attention.
She has one-fourth of English blood in her veins, but her complexion
is fully as dark as if she were of unmixed Hawaiian descent, and her
features, though refined by education and circumstances, are also
Hawaiian; but she is a very pretty, as well as a very graceful
woman.  She was brought up by Dr. Rooke, an English physician here,
and though educated at the American school for the children of
chiefs, is very English in her leanings and sympathies, an attached
member of the English Church, and an ardent supporter of the
"Honolulu Mission."  Socially she is very popular, and her exceeding
kindness and benevolence, with her strongly national feeling as an
Hawaiian, make her much beloved by the natives.

The winter palace, as her town house is called, is a large shady
abode, like an old-fashioned New England house externally, but with
two deep verandahs, and the entrance is on the upper one.  The lower
floor seemed given up to attendants and offices, and a native woman
was ironing clothes under a tree.  Upstairs, the house is like a
tasteful English country house, with a pleasant English look, as if
its furniture and ornaments had been gradually accumulating during a
series of years, and possessed individual histories and
reminiscences, rather than as if they had been ordered together as
"plenishings" from stores.  Indeed, it is the most English-looking
house I have seen since I left home, except Bishopscourt at
Melbourne.  If there were a bell I did not see it; and we did not
ring, for the queen received us at the door of the drawing-room,
which was open.  I had seen her before in European dress, driving a
pair of showy black horses in a stylish English phaeton; but on this
occasion she was not receiving visitors formally, and was indulging
in wearing the native holuku, and her black wavy hair was left to
its own devices.  She is rather below the middle height, very young-
looking for her age, which is thirty-seven, and very graceful in her
movements.  Her manner is indeed very fascinating from a combination
of unconscious dignity with ladylike simplicity.  Her expression is
sweet and gentle, with the same look of sadness about her eyes that
the king has, but she has a brightness and archness of expression
which give a great charm to her appearance.  She has sorrowed much:
first, for the death, at the age of four, of her only child, the
Prince of Hawaii, who when dying was baptized into the English
Church by the name of Albert Edward, Queen Victoria and the Prince
of Wales being his sponsors; and secondly, for the premature death
of her husband, to whom she was much attached.  She speaks English
beautifully, only hesitating now and then for the most correct form
of expression.  She spoke a good deal and with great pleasure of
England; and described Venice and the emotions it excited in her so
admirably, that I should like to have heard her describe all Europe.

A few days afterwards I went to a garden party at her house.  It was
a very pretty sight, and the "everybody" of Honolulu was there to
the number of 250.  I must describe it for the benefit of ----, who
persists in thinking that coloured royalty must necessarily be
grotesque.  People arrived shortly before sunset, and were received
by Queen Emma, who sat on the lawn, with her attendants about her,
very simply dressed in black silk.  The king, at whose entrance the
band played the national anthem, stood on another lawn, where
presentations were made by the chamberlain; and those who were
already acquainted with him had an opportunity for a few minutes'
conversation.  He was dressed in a very well-made black morning
suit, and wore the ribbon and star of the Austrian order of Francis
Joseph.  His simplicity was atoned for by the superlative splendour
of his suite; the governor of Oahu, and the high chief Kalakaua, who
was a rival candidate for the throne, being conspicuously
resplendent.  The basis of the costume appeared to be the Windsor
uniform, but it was smothered with epaulettes, cordons, and lace;
and each dignitary has a uniform peculiar to his office, so that the
display of gold lace was prodigious.  The chiefs are so raised above
the common people in height, size, and general nobility of aspect,
that many have supposed them to be of a different race; and the alii
who represented the dwindled order that night were certainly superb
enough in appearance to justify the supposition.  Beside their
splendour and stateliness, the forty officers of the English and
American war-ships, though all in full-dress uniform, looked
decidedly insignificant; and I doubt not that the natives who were
assembled outside the garden railings in crowds were not behind me
in making invidious comparisons.

Chairs and benches were placed under the beautiful trees, and people
grouped themselves on these, and promenaded, flirted, talked
politics and gossip, or listened to the royal band, which played at
intervals, and played well.  The dress of the ladies, whether white
or coloured, was both pretty and appropriate.  Most of the younger
women were in white, and wore natural flowers in their hair; and
many of the elder ladies wore black or coloured silks, with lace and
trains.  There were several beautiful leis of the gardenia, which
filled all the garden with their delicious odour.  Tea and ices were
handed round on Sevres china by footmen and pages in appropriate
liveries.  What a wonderful leap from calabashes and poi, malos and
paus, to this correct and tasteful civilization!  As soon as the
brief amber twilight of the tropics was over, the garden was
suddenly illuminated by myriads of Chinese lanterns, and the effect
was bewitching.  The upper suite of rooms was thrown open for those
who preferred dancing under cover; but I think that the greater part
of the assemblage chose the shady walks and purple night.  Supper
was served at eleven, and the party broke up soon afterwards; but I
must confess that, charming as it was, I left before eight, for
society makes heavier demands on any strength than the rough open-
air life of Hawaii.

The dwindling of the race is a most pathetic subject.  Here is a
sovereign chosen amidst an outburst of popular enthusiasm, with a
cabinet, a legislature, and a costly and elaborate governing
machinery, sufficient in Yankee phrase to "run" an empire of several
millions, and here are only 49,000 native Hawaiians; and if the
decrease be not arrested, in a quarter of a century there will not
be an Hawaiian to govern.  The chiefs, or alii, are a nearly extinct
order; and, with a few exceptions, those who remain are childless.
In riding through Hawaii I came everywhere upon traces of a once
numerous population, where the hill slopes are now only a wilderness
of guava scrub, and upon churches and school-houses all too large,
while in some hamlets the voices of young children were altogether
wanting.  This nation, with its elaborate governmental machinery,
its churches and institutions, has to me the mournful aspect of a
shrivelled and wizened old man dressed in clothing much too big, the
garments of his once athletic and vigorous youth.  Nor can I divest
myself of the idea that the laughing, flower-clad hordes of riders
who make the town gay with their presence, are but like butterflies
fluttering out their short lives in the sunshine,

       ".  .  .  a wreck and residue,
        Whose only business is to perish."

The statistics on this subject are perfectly appalling.  If we
reduce Captain Cook's estimate of the native population by one-
fourth, it was 300,000 in 1779.  In 1872 it was only 49,000.  The
first official census was in 1832, when the native population was
130,000.  This makes the decrease 80,000 in forty years, or at the
rate of 2000 a year, and fixes the period for the final extinction
of the race in 1897, if that rate were to continue.  It is a pity,
for many reasons, that it is dying out.  It has shown a singular
aptitude for politics and civilization, and it would have been
interesting to watch the development of a strictly Polynesian
monarchy starting under passably fair conditions.  Whites have
conveyed to these shores slow but infallible destruction on the one
hand, and on the other the knowledge of the life that is to come;
and the rival influences of blessing and cursing have now been fifty
years at work, producing results with which most reading people are
familiar.

I have not heard the subject spoken of, but I should think that the
decrease in the population must cause the burden of taxation to
press heavily on that which remains.  Kings, cabinet ministers, an
army, a police, a national debt, a supreme court, and common
schools, are costly luxuries or necessaries.  The civil list is
ludicrously out of proportion to the resources of the islands, and
the heads of the four departments--Foreign Relations, Interior,
Finance, and Law(Attorney-General)--receive $5,000 a year each!
Expenses and salaries have been increasing for the last thirty
years.  For schools alone every man between twenty-one and sixty
pays a tax of two dollars annually, and there is an additional
general tax for the same purpose.  I suppose that there is not a
better educated country in the world.  Education is compulsory; and
besides the primary schools, there are a number of academies, all
under Government supervision, and there are 324 teachers, or one for
every twenty-seven children.  There is a Board of Education, and
Kamakau, its president, reported to the last biennial session of the
legislature that out of 8931 children between the ages of six and
fifteen, 8287 were actually attending school!  Among other direct
taxes, every quadruped that can be called a horse, above two years
old, pays a dollar a year, and every dog a dollar and a half.  Does
not all this sound painfully civilized?  If the influence of the
tropics has betrayed me into rhapsody and ecstacy in earlier
letters, these dry details will turn the scale in favour of prosaic
sobriety!

I have said little about Honolulu, except of its tropical beauty.
It does not look as if it had "seen better days."  Its wharves are
well cared for, and its streets and roads are very clean.  The
retail stores are generally to be found in two long streets which
run inland, and in a splay street which crosses both.  The upper
storekeepers, with a few exceptions, are Americans, but one street
is nearly given up to Chinamen's stores, and one of the wealthiest
and most honourable merchants in the town is a Chinaman.  There is
an ice factory, and icecream is included in the daily bill of fare
here, and iced water is supplied without limit, but lately the
machinery has only worked in spasms, and the absence of ice is
regarded as a local calamity, though the water supplied from the
waterworks is both cool and pure.  There are two good photographers
and two booksellers.  I don't think that plateglass fronts are yet
to be seen.  Many of the storekeepers employ native "assistants;"
but the natives show little aptitude for mercantile affairs, or
indeed for the "splendid science" of money-making generally, and in
this respect contrast with the Chinamen, who, having come here as
Coolies, have contrived to secure a large share of the small traffic
of the islands.  Most things are expensive, but they are good.  I
have seen little of such decided rubbish as is to be found in the
cheap stores of London and Edinburgh, except in tawdry artificial
flowers.  Good black silks are to be bought, and are as essential to
the equipment of a lady as at home.  Saddles are to be had at most
of the stores, from the elaborate Mexican and Californian saddle,
worth from 30 to 50 dollars, to a worthless imitation of the English
saddle, dear at five.  Boots and shoes, perhaps because in this
climate they are a mere luxury, are frightfully dear, and so are
books, writing paper, and stationery generally; a sheet of Bristol
board, which we buy at home for 6d., being half a dollar here.  But
it is quite a pleasure to make purchases in the stores.  There is so
much cordiality and courtesy that, as at this hotel, the bill
recedes into the background, and the purchaser feels the indebted
party.

The money is extremely puzzling.  These islands, like California,
have repudiated greenbacks, and the only paper currency is a small
number of treasury notes for large amounts.  The coin in circulation
is gold and silver, but gold is scarce, which is an incovenience to
people who have to carry a large amount of money about with them.
The coinage is nominally that of the United States, but the dollars
are Mexican, or French 5 franc pieces, and people speak of "rials,"
which have no existence here, and of "bits," a Californian slang
term for 12.5 cents, a coin which to my knowledge does not exist
anywhere.  A dime, or 10 cents, is the lowest coin I have seen, and
copper is not in circulation.  An envelope, a penny bottle of ink, a
pencil, a spool of thread, cost 10 cents each; postage-stamps cost 2
cents each for inter-island postage, but one must buy five of them,
and dimes slip away quickly and imperceptibly.  There is a loss on
English money, as half-a-crown only passes for a half-dollar,
sixpence for a dime, and so forth; indeed, the average loss seems to
be about twopence in the shilling.

There are four newspapers:  the Honolulu Gazette, the Pacific
Commercial Advertiser, Ka Nupepa Kuokoa (the "Independent Press"),
and a lately started spasmodic sheet, partly in English and partly
in Hawaiian, the Nuhou (News). {270}  The two first are moral and
respectable, but indulge in the American sins of personalities and
mutual vituperation.  The Nuhou is scurrilous and diverting, and
appears "run" with a special object, which I have not as yet
succeeded in unravelling from its pungent but not always
intelligible pages.  I think perhaps the writing in each paper has
something of the American tendency to hysteria and convulsions,
though these maladies are mild as compared with the "real thing" in
the Alta California, which is largely taken here.  Besides these
there are monthly sheets called The Friend, the oldest paper in the
Pacific, edited by good "Father Damon," and the Church Messenger,
edited by Bishop Willis, partly devotional and partly devoted to the
Honolulu Mission.  All our popular American and English literature
is read here, and I have hardly seen a table without "Scribner's" or
"Harper's Monthly" or "Good Words."

I have lived far too much in America to feel myself a stranger
where, as here, American influence and customs are dominant; but the
English who are in Honolulu just now, in transitu from New Zealand,
complain bitterly of its "Yankeeism," and are very far from being at
home, and I doubt not that Mr. M---, whom you will see, will not
confirm my favourable description.  It is quite true that the
islands are Americanized, and with the exception of the Finance
Minister, who is a Scotchman, Americans "run" the Government and
fill the Chief Justiceship and other high offices of State.  It is,
however, perfectly fair, for Americans have civilized and
Christianized Hawaii-nei, and we have done little except make an
unjust and afterwards disavowed seizure of the islands.

On looking over this letter I find it an olla podrida of tropical
glories, royal festivities, finance matters, and odds and ends in
general.  I dare say you will find it dull after my letters from
Hawaii, but there are others who will prefer its prosaic details to
Kilauea and Waimanu; and I confess that, amidst the general
lusciousness of tropical life, I myself enjoy the dryness and
tartness of statistics, and hard uncoloured facts.
                                      I.L.B.

LETTER XIX.

HAWAIIAN HOTEL, HONOLULU.

My latest news of you is five months old, and though I have not the
slightest expectation that I shall hear from you, I go up to the
roof to look out for the "Rolling Moses" with more impatience and
anxiety than those whose business journeys are being delayed by her
non-arrival.  If such an unlikely thing were to happen as that she
were to bring a letter, I should be much tempted to stay five months
longer on the islands rather than try the climate of Colorado, for I
have come to feel at home, people are so very genial, and suggest so
many plans for my future enjoyment, the islands in their physical
and social aspects are so novel and interesting, and the climate is
unrivalled and restorative.

Honolulu has not yet lost the charm of novelty for me.  I am never
satiated with its exotic beauties, and the sight of a kaleidoscopic
whirl of native riders is always fascinating.  The passion for
riding, in a people who only learned equitation in the last
generation, is most curious.  It is very curious, too, to see women
incessantly enjoying and amusing themselves in riding, swimming, and
making leis.  They have few home ties in the shape of children, and
I fear make them fewer still by neglecting them for the sake of
riding and frolic, and man seems rather the help-meet than the
"oppressor" of woman; though I believe that the women have abandoned
that right of choosing their husbands, which, it is said, that they
exercised in the old days.  Used to the down-trodden look and
harrassed care-worn faces of the over-worked women of the same class
at home, and in the colonies, the laughing, careless faces of the
Hawaiian women have the effect upon me of a perpetual marvel.  But
the expression generally has little of the courteousness, innocence,
and childishness of the negro physiognomy.  The Hawaiians are a
handsome people, scornful and sarcastic-looking even with their
mirthfulness; and those who know them say that they are always
quizzing and mimicking the haoles, and that they give everyone a
nickname, founded on some personal peculiarity.

The women are free from our tasteless perversity as to colour and
ornament, and have an instinct of the becoming.  At first the
holuku, which is only a full, yoke nightgown, is not attractive, but
I admire it heartily now, and the sagacity of those who devised it.
It conceals awkwardness, and befits grace of movement; it is fit for
the climate, is equally adapted for walking and riding, and has that
general appropriateness which is desirable in costume.  The women
have a most peculiar walk, with a swinging motion from the hip at
each step, in which the shoulder sympathises.  I never saw anything
at all like it.  It has neither the delicate shuffle of the
Frenchwoman, the robust, decided jerk of the Englishwoman, the
stately glide of the Spaniard, or the stealthiness of the squaw; and
I should know a Hawaiian woman by it in any part of the world.  A
majestic wahine with small, bare feet, a grand, swinging, deliberate
gait, hibiscus blossoms in her flowing hair, and a le of yellow
flowers falling over her holuku, marching through these streets, has
a tragic grandeur of appearance, which makes the diminutive, fair-
skinned haole, tottering along hesitatingly in high-heeled shoes,
look grotesque by comparison.

On Saturday, our kind host took Mrs. D. and myself to the market,
where we saw the natives in all their glory.  The women, in squads
of a dozen at a time, their Pa-us streaming behind them, were
cantering up and down the streets, and men and women were thronging
into the market-place; a brilliant, laughing, joking crowd, their
jaunty hats trimmed with fresh flowers, and leis of the crimson ohia
and orange lauhala falling over their costumes, which were white,
green, black, scarlet, blue, and every other colour that can be dyed
or imagined.  The market is a straggling, open space, with a number
of shabby stalls partially surrounding it, but really we could not
see the place for the people.  There must have been 2000 there.

Some of the stalls were piled up with wonderful fish, crimson,
green, rose, blue, opaline--fish that have spent their lives in
coral groves under the warm, bright water.  Some of them had
wonderful shapes too, and there was one that riveted my attention
and fascinated me.  It was, I thought at first, a heap, composed of
a dog fish, some limpets, and a multitude of water snakes, and other
abominable forms; but my eyes slowly informed me of the fact, which
I took in reluctantly and with extreme disgust, that the whole
formed one living monster, a revolting compound of a large paunch
with eyes, and a multitude of nervy, snaky, out-reaching, twining,
grasping, tentacular arms, several feet in length, I should think,
if extended, but then lying in a crowded undulating heap; the
creature was dying, and the iridescence was passing over what seemed
to be its body in waves of colour, such as glorify the last hour of
the dolphin.  But not the colours of the rainbow could glorify this
hideous, abominable form, which ought to be left to riot in ocean
depths, with its loathsome kindred.  You have read "Les Travailleurs
du Mer," and can imagine with what feelings I looked upon a living
Devil-fish!  The monster is much esteemed by the natives as an
article of food, and indeed is generally relished.  I have seen it
on foreign tables, salted, under the name of squid. {276}

We passed on to beautiful creatures, the kihi-kihi, or sea-cock,
with alternate black and yellow transverse bands on his body; the
hinalea, like a glorified mullet, with bright green, longitudinal
bands on a dark shining head, a purple body of different shades, and
a blue spotted tail with a yellow tip.  The Ohua too, a pink scaled
fish, shaped like a trout; the opukai, beautifully striped and
mottled; the mullet and flying fish as common here as mackerel at
home; the hala, a fine pink-fleshed fish, the albicore, the bonita,
the manini striped black and white, and many others.  There was an
abundance of opilu or limpets, also the pipi, a small oyster found
among the coral; the ula, as large as a clawless lobster, but more
beautiful and variegated; and turtles which were cheap and
plentiful.  Then there were purple-spiked sea urchins, black-spiked
sea eggs or wana, and ina or eggs without spikes, and many other
curiosities of the bright Pacific.  It was odd to see the pearly
teeth of a native meeting in some bright-coloured fish, while the
tail hung out of his mouth, for they eat fish raw, and some of them
were obviously at the height of epicurean enjoyment.  Seaweed and
fresh-water weed are much relished by Hawaiians, and there were four
or five kinds for sale, all included in the term limu.  Some of this
was baked, and put up in balls weighing one pound each.  There were
packages of baked fish, and dried fish, and of many other things
which looked uncleanly and disgusting; but no matter what the
package was, the leaf of the Ti tree was invariably the wrapping,
tied round with sennet, the coarse fibre obtained from the husk of
the cocoa-nut.  Fish, here, averages about ten cents per pound, and
is dearer than meat; but in many parts of the islands it is cheap
and abundant.

There is a ferment going on in this kingdom, mainly got up by the
sugar planters and the interests dependent on them, and two
political lectures have lately been given in the large hall of the
hotel in advocacy of their views; one, on annexation, by Mr.
Phillips, who has something of the oratorical gift of his cousin,
Wendell Phillips; and the other, on a reciprocity treaty, by Mr.
Carter.  Both were crowded by ladies and gentlemen, and the first
was most enthusiastically received.  Mrs. D. and I usually spend our
evenings in writing and working in the verandah, or in each other's
rooms; but I have become so interested in the affairs of this little
state, that in spite of the mosquitos, I attended both lectures, but
was not warmed into sympathy with the views of either speaker.

I daresay that some of my friends here would quarrel with my
conclusions, but I will briefly give the data on which they are
based.  The census of 1872 gives the native population at 49,044
souls; of whom, 700 are lepers; and it is DECREASING at the rate of
from 1,200 to 2,000 a year, while the excess of native males over
females on the islands is 3,216.  The foreign population is 5,366,
and it is INCREASING at the rate of 200 a year; and the number of
half-castes of all nations has INCREASED at the rate of 140 a year.
The Chinese, who came here originally as plantation coolies,
outnumber all the other nationalities together, excluding the
Americans; but the Americans constitute the ruling and the monied
class.  Sugar is the reigning interest on the islands, and it is
almost entirely in American hands.  It is burdened here by the
difficulty of procuring labour, and at San Francisco by a heavy
import duty.  There are thirty-five plantations on the islands, and
there is room for fifty more.  The profit, as it is, is hardly worth
mentioning, and few of the planters do more than keep their heads
above water.  Plantations which cost $50,000 have been sold for
$15,000; and others, which cost $150,000 have been sold for $40,000.
If the islands were annexed, and the duty taken off, many of these
struggling planters would clear $50,000 a year and upwards.  So, no
wonder that Mr. Phillips's lecture was received with enthusiastic
plaudits.  It focussed all the clamour I have heard on Hawaii and
elsewhere, exalted the "almighty dollar," and was savoury with the
odour of coming prosperity.  But he went far, very far; he has
aroused a cry among the natives "Hawaii for the Hawaiians," which,
very likely, may breed mischief; for I am very sure that this brief
civilization has not quenched the "red fire" of race; and his hint
regarding the judicious disposal of the king in the event of
annexation, was felt by many of the more sober whites to be highly
impolitic.

The reciprocity treaty, very lucidly advocated by Mr. Carter, and
which means the cession of a lagoon with a portion of circumjacent
territory on this island, to the United States, for a Pacific naval
station, meets with more general favour as a safer measure; but the
natives are indisposed to bribe the great Republic to remit the
sugar duties by the surrender of a square inch of Hawaiian soil;
and, from a British point of view, I heartily sympathise with them.
Foreign, i.e. American, feeling is running high upon the subject.
People say that things are so bad that something must be done, and
it remains to be seen whether natives or foreigners can exercise the
strongest pressure on the king.  I was unfavourably impressed in
both lectures by the way in which the natives and their interests
were quietly ignored, or as quietly subordinated to the sugar
interest.

It is never safe to forecast destiny; yet it seems most probable
that sooner or later in this century, the closing catastrophe must
come.  The more thoughtful among the natives acquiesce helplessly
and patiently in their advancing fate; but the less intelligent, as
I had some opportunity of hearing at Hilo, are becoming restive and
irritable, and may drift into something worse if the knowledge of
the annexationist views of the foreigners is diffused among them.
Things are preparing for change, and I think that the Americans will
be wise in their generation if they let them ripen for many years to
come.  Lunalilo has a broken constitution, and probably will not
live long.  Kalakaua will probably succeed him, and "after him the
deluge," unless he leaves a suitable successor, for there are no
more chiefs with pre-eminent claims to the throne.  The feeling
among the people is changing, the feudal instinct is disappearing,
the old despotic line of the Kamehamehas is extinct; and king-making
by paper ballots, introduced a few months ago, is an approximation
to president-making, with the canvassing, stumping, and wrangling,
incidental to such a contested election.  Annexation, or peaceful
absorption, is the "manifest destiny" of the islands, with the
probable result lately most wittily prophesied by Mark Twain in the
New York Tribune, but it is impious and impolitic to hasten it.
Much as I like America, I shrink from the day when her universal
political corruption and her unrivalled political immorality shall
be naturalised on Hawaii-nei. . . .  Sunday evening.  The "Rolling
Moses" is in, and Sabbatic quiet has given place to general
excitement.  People thought they heard her steaming in at 4 a.m.,
and got up in great agitation.  Her guns fired during morning
service, and I doubt whether I or any other person heard another
word of the sermon.  The first batch of letters for the hotel came,
but none for me; the second, none for me; and I had gone to my room
in cold despair, when some one tossed a large package in at my
verandah door, and to my infinite joy I found that one of my benign
fellow-passengers in the Nevada, had taken the responsibility of
getting my letters at San Francisco and forwarding them here.  I
don't know how to be grateful enough to the good man.  With such
late and good news, everything seems bright; and I have at once
decided to take the first schooner for the leeward group, and remain
four months longer on the islands.
                                     I.L.B.

LETTER XX.

KOLOA, KAUAI, March 23rd.

I am spending a few days on some quaint old mission premises, and
the "guest house," where I am lodged, is a dobe house, with walls
two feet thick, and a very thick grass roof comes down six feet all
round to shade the windows.  It is itself shaded by date palms and
algarobas, and is surrounded by hibiscus, oleanders, and the datura
arborea(?), which at night fill the air with sweetness.  I am the
only guest, and the solitude of the guest house in which I am
writing is most refreshing to tired nerves.  There is not a sound
but the rustling of trees.

The first event to record is that the trade winds have set in, and
though they may yet yield once or twice to the kona, they will soon
be firmly established for nine months.  They are not soft airs as I
supposed, but riotous, rollicking breezes, which keep up a constant
clamour, blowing the trees about, slamming doors, taking liberties
with papers, making themselves heard and felt everywhere, flecking
the blue Pacific with foam, lowering the mercury three degrees,
bringing new health and vigour with them,--wholesome, cheery,
frolicsome north-easters.  They brought me here from Oahu in
eighteen hours, for which I thank them heartily.

You will think me a Sybarite for howling about those eighteen hours
of running to leeward, when the residents of Kauai, if they have to
go to Honolulu in the intervals between the quarterly trips of the
Kilauea, have to spend from three to nine days in beating to
windward.  These inter-island voyages of extreme detention, rolling
on a lazy swell in tropical heat, or beating for days against the
strong trades without shelter from the sun, and without anything
that could be called accommodation, were among the inevitable
hardships to which the missionaries' wives and children were exposed
in every migration for nearly forty years.

When I reached the wharf at Honolulu the sight of the Jenny, the
small sixty-ton schooner by which I was to travel, nearly made me
give up this pleasant plan, so small she looked, and so cumbered
with natives and their accompaniments of mats, dogs, and calabashes
of poi.  But she is clean, and as sweet as a boat can be which
carries through the tropics cattle, hides, sugar, and molasses.  She
is very low in the water, her deck is the real "fisherman's walk,
two steps and overboard;" and on this occasion was occupied solely
by natives.  The Attorney General and Mrs. Judd were to have been my
fellow voyagers, but my disappointment at their non-appearance was
considerably mitigated by the fact that there was not stowage room
for more than one white passenger!  Mrs. Dexter pitied me heartily,
for it made her quite ill to look down the cabin hatch; but I
convinced her that no inconveniences are legitimate subjects for
sympathy which are endured in the pursuit of pleasure.  There was
just room on deck for me to sit on a box, and the obliging,
gentlemanly master, who, with his son and myself, were the only
whites on board, sat on the taffrail.

The Jenny spread her white duck sails, glided gracefully away from
the wharf, and bounded through the coral reef; the red sunlight
faded, the stars came out, the Honolulu light went down in the
distance, and in two hours the little craft was out of sight of land
on the broad, crisp Pacific.  It was so chilly, that after admiring
as long as I could, I dived into the cabin, a mere den, with a
table, and a berth on each side, in one of which I lay down, and the
other was alternately occupied by the captain and his son.  But
limited as I thought it, boards have been placed across on some
occasions, and eleven whites have been packed into a space six feet
by eight!  The heat and suffocation were nearly intolerable, the
black flies swarming, the mosquitos countless and vicious, the fleas
agile beyond anything, and the cockroaches gigantic.  Some of the
finer cargo was in the cabin, and large rats, only too visible by
the light of a swinging lamp, were assailing it, and one with a
portentous tail ran over my berth more than once, producing a
stampede among the cockroaches each time.  I have seldom spent a
more miserable night, though there was the extreme satisfaction of
knowing that every inch of canvas was drawing.

Towards morning the short jerking motion of a ship close hauled,
made me know that we were standing in for the land, and at daylight
we anchored in Koloa Roads.  The view is a pleasant one.  The rains
have been abundant, and the land, which here rises rather gradually
from the sea, is dotted with houses, abounds in signs of
cultivation, and then spreads up into a rolling country between
precipitous ranges of mountains.  The hills look something like
those of Oahu, but their wonderful greenness denotes a cooler
climate and more copious rains, also their slopes and valleys are
densely wooded, and Kauai obviously has its characteristic features,
one of which must certainly be a superabundance of that most
unsightly cactus, the prickly pear, to which the motto nemo me
impune lacessit most literally applies.

I had not time to tell you before that this trip to Kauai was
hastily arranged for me by several of my Honolulu friends, some of
whom gave me letters of introduction, while others wrote forewarning
their friends of my arrival.  I am often reminded of Hazael's
question, "Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?"
There is no inn or boarding house on the island, and I had hitherto
believed that I could not be concussed into following the usual
custom whereby a traveller throws himself on the hospitality of the
residents.  Yet, under the influence of Honolulu persuasions, I am
doing this very thing, but with an amount of mauvaise honte and
trepidation, which I will not voluntarily undergo again.

My first introduction was to Mrs. Smith, wife of a secular member of
the Mission, and it requested her to find means of forwarding me a
distance of twenty-three miles.  Her son was at the landing with a
buggy, a most unpleasant index of the existence of carriage roads,
and brought me here; and Mrs. Smith most courteously met me at the
door.  When I presented my letter I felt like a thief detected in a
first offence, but I was at once made welcome, and my kind hosts
insist on my remaining with them for some days.  Their house is a
pretty old-fashioned looking tropical dwelling, much shaded by
exotics, and the parlour is homelike with new books.  There are two
sons and two daughters at home, all, as well as their parents,
interesting themselves assiduously in the welfare of the natives.
Six bright-looking native girls are receiving an industrial training
in the house.  Yesterday being Sunday, the young people taught a
Sunday school twice, besides attending the native church, an act of
respect to Divine service in Hawaiian which always has an influence
on the native attendance.

We have had some beautiful rides in the neighbourhood.  It is a
wild, lonely, picturesque coast, and the Pacific moans along it,
casting itself on it in heavy surges, with a singularly dreary
sound.  There are some very fine specimens of the phenomena called
"blow-holes" on the shore, not like the "spouting cave" at Iona,
however.  We spent a long time in watching the action of one, though
not the finest.  At half tide this "spouting horn" throws up a
column of water over sixty feet in height from a very small orifice,
and the effect of the compressed air rushing through a crevice near
it, sometimes with groans and shrieks, and at others with a hollow
roar like the warning fog-horn on a coast, is magnificent, when, as
to-day, there is a heavy swell on the coast.

Kauai is much out of the island world, owing to the infrequent
visits of the Kilauea, but really it is only twelve hours by steam
from the capital.  Strangers visit it seldom, as it has no active
volcano like Hawaii, or colossal crater like Maui, or anything
sensational of any kind.  It is called the "Garden Island," and has
no great wastes of black lava and red ash like its neighbours.  It
is queerly shaped, almost circular, with a diameter of from twenty-
eight to thirty miles, and its area is about 500 square miles.
Waialeale, its highest mountain, is 4,800 feet high, but little is
known of it, for it is swampy and dangerous, and a part of it is a
forest-covered and little explored tableland, terminating on the sea
in a range of perpendicular precipices 2,000 feet in depth, so steep
it is said, that a wild cat could not get round them.  Owing to
these, and the virtual inaccessibility of a large region behind
them, no one can travel round the island by land, and small as it
is, very little seems to be known of portions of its area.

Kauai has apparently two centres of formation, and its mountains are
thickly dotted with craters.  The age and density of the vegetation
within and without those in this Koloa district, indicate a very
long cessation from volcanic action.  It is truly an oddly contrived
island.  An elevated rolling region, park-like, liberally ornamented
with clumps of ohia, lauhala, hau, (hibiscus) and koa, and
intersected with gullies full of large eugenias, lies outside the
mountain spurs behind Koloa.  It is only the tropical trees,
specially the lauhala or "screw pine," the whimsical shapes of
outlying ridges, which now and then lie like the leaves in a book,
and the strange forms of extinct craters, which distinguish it from
some of our most beautiful park scenery, such as Windsor Great Park
or Belvoir.  It is a soft tranquil beauty, and a tolerable road
which owes little enough to art, increases the likeness to the sweet
home scenery of England.  In this part of the island the ground
seems devoid of stones, and the grass is as fine and smooth as a
race course.

The latest traces of volcanic action are found here.  From the Koloa
Ridge to, and into the sea, a barren uneven surface of pahoehoe
extends, often bulged up in immense bubbles, some of which have
partially burst, leaving caverns, one of which, near the shore, is
paved with the ancient coral reef!

The valleys of Kauai are long, and widen to the sea, and their dark
rich soil is often ten feet deep.  On the windward side the rivers
are very numerous and picturesque.  Between the strong winds and the
lightness of the soil, I should think that like some parts of the
Highlands, "it would take a shower every day."  The leeward side,
quite close to the sea, is flushed and nearly barren, but there is
very little of this desert region.  Kauai is less legible in its
formation than the other islands.  Its mountains, from their
impenetrable forests, dangerous breaks, and swampiness, are
difficult of access, and its ridges are said to be more utterly
irregular, its lavas more decomposed, and its natural sections more
completely smothered under a profuse vegetation than those of any
other island in the tropical Pacific.  Geologists suppose, from the
degradation of its ridges, and the absence of any recent volcanic
products, that it is the oldest of the group, but so far as I have
read, none of them venture to conjecture how many ages it has taken
to convert its hard basalt into the rich soil which now sustains
trees of enormous size.  If this theory be correct, the volcanoes
must have gone on dying out from west to east, from north to south,
till only Kilauea remains, and its energies appear to be declining.
The central mountain of this island is built of a heavy ferruginous
basalt, but the shore ridges contain less iron, are more porous, and
vary in their structure from a compact phonolite, to a ponderous
basalt.

The population of Kauai is a widely scattered one of 4,900, and as
it is an out of the world region the people are probably better, and
less sophisticated.  They are accounted rustics, or "pagans," in the
classical sense, elsewhere.  Horses are good and very cheap, and the
natives of both sexes are most expert riders.  Among their feats,
are picking up small coins from the ground while going at full
gallop, or while riding at the same speed wringing off the heads of
unfortunate fowls, whose bodies are buried in the earth.

There are very few foreigners, and they appear on the whole a good
set, and very friendly among each other.  Many of them are actively
interested in promoting the improvement of the natives, but it is
uphill work, and ill-rewarded, at least on earth.  The four sugar
plantations employ a good deal of Chinese labour, and I fear that
the Chinamen are stealthily tempting the Hawaiians to smoke opium.

All the world over, however far behind aborigines are in the useful
arts, they exercise a singular ingenuity in devising means for
intoxicating and stupifying themselves.  On these islands
distillation is illegal, and a foreigner is liable to conviction and
punishment for giving spirits to a native Hawaiian, yet the natives
contrive to distil very intoxicating drinks, specially from the root
of the ti tree, and as the spirit is unrectified it is both fiery
and unwholesome.  Licences to sell spirits are confined to the
capital.  In spite of the notoriously bad effect of alcohol in the
tropics, people drink hard, and the number of deaths which can be
distinctly traced to spirit drinking is quite startling.

The prohibition on selling liquor to natives is the subject of
incessant discussions and "interpellations" in the national
legislature.  Probably all the natives agree in regarding it as a
badge of the "inferiority of colour;" but I have been told generally
that the most intelligent and thoughtful among them are in favour of
its continuance, on the ground that if additional facilities for
drinking were afforded, the decrease in the population would be
accelerated.  In the printed "Parliamentary Proceedings," I see that
petitions are constantly presented praying that the distillation of
spirits may be declared free, while a few are in favour of "total
prohibition."  Another prayer is "that Hawaiians may have the same
privileges as white people in buying and drinking spirituous
liquors."

A bill to repeal the invidious distinction was brought into the
legislature not long since; but the influence of the descendants of
the missionaries and of an influential part of the white community
is so strongly against spirit drinking, as well as against the sale
of drink to the natives, that the law remains on the Statute-book.

The tone in which it was discussed is well indicated by the language
of Kalakaua, the present king's rival:  "The restrictions imposed by
this law do the people no good, but rather harm; for instead of
inculcating the principles of honour, they teach them to steal
behind the bar, the stable, and the closet, where they may be
sheltered from the eyes of the law.  The heavy licence imposed on
the liquor dealers, and the prohibition against selling to the
natives are an infringement of our civil rights, binding not only
the purchaser but the dealer against acquiring and possessing
property.  Then, Mr. President, I ask, where lies virtue, where lies
justice?  Not in those that bind the liberty of this people, by
refusing them the privilege that they now crave, of drinking
spirituous liquors without restriction.  Will you by persisting that
this law remain in force make us a nation of hypocrites? or will you
repeal it, that honour and virtue may for once be yours, O Hawaii."
A committee of the Assembly, in reporting on the question of the
prohibition of the sale of intoxicants to anybody, through its
chairman, Mr. Carter, stated, "Experience teaches that such
prohibition could not be enforced without a strong public sentiment
to indorse it, and such a sentiment does not prevail in this
community, as is evidenced by the fact that the sale of intoxicating
drinks to natives is largely practised in defiance of law and the
executive, and that the manufacture of intoxicating drinks, though
prohibited, is carried on in every district of the kingdom."  So the
question which is rising in every country ruled or colonised by
Anglo-Saxons, is also agitated here with very strong feeling on both
sides.

I was led to this digression by seeing, for the first time, some
very fine plants of the Piper methysticum.  This is awa, truly a
"plant of renown" throughout Polynesia.  Strange tales are told of
it.  It is said to produce profound sleep, with visions more
enchanting than those of opium or hasheesh, and that its repetition,
instead of being deleterious, is harmless and even wholesome.  Its
sale is prohibited, except on the production of evidence that it has
been prescribed as a drug.  Nevertheless no law on the islands is so
grossly violated.  It is easy to GIVE it, and easy to grow it, or
dig it up in the woods, so that, in spite of the legal restrictions,
it is used to an enormous extent.  It was proposed absolutely to
prohibit the sale of it, though the sum paid for the licence is no
inconsiderable item in the revenue of a kingdom, which, like many
others, is experiencing the difficulty of "making both ends meet;"
but the committee which sat upon the subject reported "that such
prohibition is not practicable, unless its growth and cultivation
are prevented.  So long as public sentiment permits the open
violation of the existing laws regulating its sale without rebuke,
so long will it be of little use to attempt prohibition."  One
cannot be a day on the islands without hearing wonderful stories
about awa; and its use is defended by some who are strongly opposed
to the use as well as abuse of intoxicants.  People who like "The
Earl and the Doctor" delight themselves in the strongly sensuous
element which pervades Polynesian life, delight themselves too, in
contemplating the preparation and results of the awa beverage; but
both are to me extremely disgusting, and I cannot believe that a
drink, which stupifies the senses, and deprives a human being of the
power to exercise reason and will, is anything but hurtful to the
moral nature.

While passing the Navigator group, one of my fellow-passengers, who
had been for some time in Tutuila, described the preparation of awa
poetically, the root "being masticated by the pearly teeth of dusky
flower-clad maidens;" but I was an accidental witness of a nocturnal
"awa drinking" on Hawaii, and saw nothing but very plain prose.  I
feel as if I must approach the subject mysteriously.  I had no time
to tell you of the circumstance when it occurred, when also I was
completely ignorant that it was an illegal affair; and, now with a
sort of "guilty knowledge" I tremble to relate what I saw, and to
divulge that though I could not touch the beverage, I tasted the
root, which has an acrid pungent taste, something like horse-radish,
with an aromatic flavour in addition, and I can imagine that the
acquired taste for it must, like other acquired tastes, be perfectly
irresistible, even without the additional gratification of the
results which follow its exercise.

In the particular instance which I saw, two girls who were not
beautiful, and an old man who would have been hideous but for a set
of sound regular teeth, were sitting on the ground masticating the
awa root, the process being contemplated with extreme interest by a
number of adults.  When, by careful chewing, they had reduced the
root to a pulpy consistence, they tossed it into a large calabash,
and relieved their mouths of superfluous saliva before preparing a
fresh mouthful.  This went on till a considerable quantity was
provided, and then water was added, and the mass was kneaded and
stirred with the hands till it looked like soap suds.  It was then
strained; and after more water had been added it was poured into
cocoa-nut calabashes, and handed round.  Its appearance eventually
was like weak, frothy coffee and milk.  The appearance of purely
animal gratification on the faces of those who drank it, instead of
being poetic, was of the low gross earth.  Heads thrown back, lips
parted with a feeble sensual smile, eyes hazy and unfocussed, arms
folded on the breast, and the mental faculties numbed and sliding
out of reach.

Those who drink it pass through the stage of idiocy into a deep
sleep, which it is said can be reproduced once without an extra
dose, by bathing in cold water.  Confirmed awa drinkers might be
mistaken for lepers, for they are covered with whitish scales, and
have inflamed eyes and a leathery skin, for the epidermis is
thickened and whitened, and eventually peels off.  The habit has
been adopted by not a few whites, specially on Hawaii, though, of
course, to a certain extent clandestinely.  Awa is taken also as a
medicine, and was supposed to be a certain cure for corpulence.

The root and base of the stem are the parts used, and it is best
when these are fresh.  It seems to exercise a powerful fascination,
and to be loved and glorified as whisky is in Scotland, and wine in
southern Europe.  In some of the other islands of Polynesia, on
festive occasions, when the chewed root is placed in the calabash,
and the water is poured on, the whole assemblage sings appropriate
songs in its praise; and this is kept up until the decoction has
been strained to its dregs.  But here, as the using it as a beverage
is an illicit process, a great mystery attends it.  It is said that
awa drinking is again on the increase, and with the illicit
distillation of unwholesome spirits, and the illicit sale of
imported spirits and the opium smoking, the consumption of
stimulants and narcotics on the islands is very considerable. {295}

To turn from drink to climate.  It is strange that with such a heavy
rainfall, dwellings built on the ground and never dried by fires
should be so perfectly free from damp as they are.  On seeing the
houses here and in Honolulu, buried away in dense foliage, my first
thought was, "how lovely in summer, but how unendurably damp in
winter," forgetting that I arrived in the nominal winter, and that
it is really summer all the year.  Lest you should think that I am
perversely exaggerating the charms of the climate, I copy a sentence
from a speech made by Kamehameha IV., at the opening of an Hawaiian
agricultural society:--

"Who ever heard of winter on our shores?  Where among us shall we
find the numberless drawbacks which, in less favoured countries, the
labourer has to contend with?  They have no place in our beautiful
group, which rests like a water lily on the swelling bosom of the
Pacific.  The heaven is tranquil above our heads, and the sun keeps
his jealous eye upon us every day, while his rays are so tempered
that they never wither prematurely what they have warmed into life."
{296}  The kindness of my hosts is quite overwhelming.  They will
not hear of my buying a horse, but insist on my taking away with me
the one which I have been riding since I came, the best I have
ridden on the islands, surefooted, fast, easy, and ambitious.  I
have complete sympathy with the passion which the natives have for
riding.  Horses are abundant and cheap on Kauai:  a fairly good one
can be bought for $20.  I think every child possesses one.  Indeed
the horses seem to outnumber the people.

The eight native girls who are being trained and educated here as a
"family school" have their horses, and go out to ride as English
children go for a romp into a play-ground.  Yesterday Mrs. S. said,
"Now, girls, get the horses," and soon two little creatures of eight
and ten came galloping up on two spirited animals.  They had not
only caught and bridled them, but had put on the complicated Mexican
saddles as securely as if men had done it; and I got a lesson from
them in making the Mexican knot with the thong which secures the
cinch, which will make me independent henceforward.

These children can all speak English, and their remarks are most
original and amusing.  They have not a particle of respect of
manner, as we understand it, but seem very docile.  They are naive
and fascinating in their manners, and the most joyous children I
ever saw.  When they are not at their lessons, or household
occupations, they are dancing on stilts, acting plays of their own
invention, riding or bathing, and they laugh all day long.  Mrs. S.
has trained nearly seventy since she has been here.  If there were
nothing else they see family life in a pure and happy form, which
must in itself be a moral training, and by dint of untiring
watchfulness they are kept aloof from the corrupt native
associations.  Indeed they are not allowed to have any intercourse
with natives, for, according to one of the missionaries who has
spent many years on the islands:  "None know or can conceive without
personal observation the nameless taint that pervades the whole
garrulous talk and gregarious life of all heathen peoples, and above
which our poor Hawaiian friends have not yet risen."  Of this
universal impurity of speech every one speaks in the strongest
terms, and careful white parents not only seclude their children in
early years from unrestrained intercourse with the natives, but
prevent them from acquiring the Hawaiian tongue.  In this respect
the training of native girls involves a degree of patient
watchfulness which must at times press heavily on those who
undertake it, as the carefulness of years might fail of its result,
if it were intermitted for one afternoon.
                                   I.L.B.

LETTER XXI.

MAKAUELI, KAUAI.

After my letters from Hawaii, and their narratives of volcanoes,
freshets, and out of the world valleys, you will think my present
letters dull, so I must begin this one pleasantly, by telling you
that though I have no stirring adventures to relate, I am enjoying
myself and improving again in health, and that the people are
hospitable, genial, and cultivated, and that Kauai, though
altogether different from Hawaii, has an extreme beauty altogether
its own, which wins one's love, though it does not startle one into
admiration like that of the Hawaiian gulches.  Is it because that,
though the magic of novelty is over it, there is a perpetual
undercurrent of home resemblance?  The dash of its musical waters
might be in Cumberland; its swelling uplands, with their clumps of
trees, might be in Kent; and then again, steep, broken, wooded
ridges, with glades of grass, suggest the Val Moutiers; and broader
sweeps of mountain outline, the finest scenery of the Alleghanies.

But yet the very things which have a certain tenderness of
familiarity, are in a foreign setting.  The great expanse of restful
sea, so faintly blue all day, and so faintly red in the late
afternoon, is like no other ocean in its unutterable peace; and this
joyous, riotous trade-wind, which rustles the trees all day, and
falls asleep at night, and cools the air, seems to come from some
widely different laboratory than that in which our vicious east
winds, and damp west winds, and piercing north winds, and
suffocating south winds are concocted.  Here one cannot ride "into
the teeth of a north-easter," for such the trade-wind really is,
without feeling at once invigorated, and wrapped in an atmosphere of
balm.  It is not here so tropical looking as in Hawaii, and though
there are not the frightful volcanic wildernesses which make a
thirsty solitude in the centre of that island, neither are there
those bursts of tropical luxuriance which make every gulch an
epitome of Paradise:  I really cannot define the difference, for
here, as there, palms glass themselves in still waters, bananas
flourish, and the forests are green with ferns.

We took three days for our journey of twenty-three miles from Koloa,
the we, consisting of Mrs. ---, the widow of an early missionary
teacher, venerable in years and character, a native boy of ten years
old, her squire, a second Kaluna, without Kaluna's good qualities,
and myself.  Mrs. --- is not a bold horsewoman, and preferred to
keep to a foot's pace, which fretted my ambitious animal, whose
innocent antics alarmed her in turn.  We only rode seven miles the
first day, through a park-like region, very like Western Wisconsin,
and just like what I expected and failed to find in New Zealand.
Grass-land much tumbled about, the turf very fine and green, dotted
over with clumps and single trees, with picturesque, rocky hills,
deeply cleft by water-courses were on our right, and on our left the
green slopes blended with the flushed, stony soil near the sea, on
which indigo and various compositae are the chief vegetation.  It
was hot, but among the hills on our right, cool clouds were coming
down in frequent showers, and the white foam of cascades gleamed
among the ohias, whose dark foliage at a distance has almost the
look of pine woods.

Our first halting place was one of the prettiest places I ever saw,
a buff frame-house, with a deep verandah festooned with passion
flowers, two or three guest houses also bright with trailers,
scattered about under the trees near it, a pretty garden, a
background of grey rocky hills cool with woods and ravines, and over
all the vicinity, that air of exquisite trimness which is
artificially produced in England, but is natural here.

Kaluna the Second soon showed symptoms of being troublesome.  The
native servants were away, and he was dull, and for that I pitied
him.  He asked leave to go back to Koloa for a "sleeping tapa,"
which was refused, and either out of spite or carelessness, instead
of fastening the horses into the pasture, he let them go, and the
following morning when we were ready for our journey they were lost.
Then he borrowed a horse, and late in the afternoon returned with
the four animals, who were all white with foam and dust, and this
escapade detained us another night.  Subsequently, after disobeying
orders, he lost his horse, which was a borrowed one, deserted his
mistress, and absconded!

The slopes over which we travelled were red, hot, and stony, cleft
in one place however, by a green, fertile valley, full of rice and
kalo patches, and native houses, with a broad river, the Hanapepe,
flowing quietly down the middle, which we forded near the sea, where
it was half-way up my horse's sides.  After plodding all day over
stony soil in the changeless sunshine, as the shadows lengthened, we
turned directly up towards the mountains and began a two hours
ascent.  It was delicious.  They were so cool, so green, so varied,
their grey pinnacles so splintered, their precipices so abrupt,
their ravines so dark and deep, and their lower slopes covered with
the greenest and finest grass; then dark ohias rose singly, then in
twos and threes, and finally mixed in dense forest masses, with the
pea-green of the kukui.

It became yet lovelier as the track wound through deep wooded
ravines, or snaked along the narrow tops of spine-like ridges; the
air became cooler, damper, and more like elixir, till at a height of
1500 feet we came upon Makaueli, ideally situated upon an unequalled
natural plateau, a house of patriarchal size for the islands, with a
verandah festooned with roses, fuchsias, the water lemon, and other
passion flowers, and with a large guest-house attached.  It stands
on a natural lawn, with abrupt slopes, sprinkled with orange trees
burdened with fruit, ohias, and hibiscus.  From the back verandah
the forest-covered mountains rise, and in front a deep ravine widens
to the grassy slopes below and the lonely Pacific,--as I write, a
golden sea, on which the island of Niihau, eighteen miles distant,
floats like an amethyst.

The solitude is perfect.  Except the "quarters" at the back, I think
there is not a house, native or foreign, within six miles, though
there are several hundred natives on the property.  Birds sing in
the morning, and the trees rustle throughout the day; but in the
cool evenings the air is perfectly still, and the trickle of a
stream is the only sound.

The house has the striking novelty of a chimney, and there is a fire
all day long in the dining-room.

I must now say a little about my hosts and try to give you some idea
of them.  I heard their history from Mr. Damon, and thought it too
strange to be altogether true until it was confirmed by themselves.
{303}  The venerable lady at the head of the house emigrated from
Scotland to New Zealand many years ago, where her husband was
unfortunately drowned, and she being left to bring up a large
family, and manage a large property, was equally successful with
both.  Her great ambition was to keep her family together, something
on the old patriarchal system; and when her children grew up, and it
seemed as if even their very extensive New Zealand property was not
large enough for them, she sold it, and embarking her family and
moveable possessions on board a clipper-ship, owned and commanded by
one of her sons-in-law, they sailed through the Pacific in search of
a home where they could remain together.

They were strongly tempted by Tahiti, but some reasons having
decided them against it, they sailed northwards and put into
Honolulu.  Mr. Damon, who was seaman's chaplain, on going down to
the wharf one day, was surprised to find their trim barque, with
this immense family party on board, with a beautiful and brilliant
old lady at its head, books, pictures, work, and all that could add
refinement to a floating home, about them, and cattle and sheep of
valuable breeds in pens on deck.  They then sailed for British
Columbia, but were much disappointed with it, and in three months
they re-appeared at Honolulu, much at a loss regarding their future
prospects.

The island of Niihau was then for sale, and in a very short time
they purchased it of Kamehameha V. for a ridiculously low price, and
taking their wooden houses with them, established themselves for
seven years.  It is truly isolated, both by a heavy surf and a
disagreeable sea-passage, and they afterwards bought this beautiful
and extensive property, made a road, and built the house.  Only the
second son and his wife live now on Niihau, where they are the only
white residents among 350 natives.  It has an area of 70,000 acres,
and could sustain a far larger number of sheep than the 20,000 now
upon it.  It is said that the transfer of the island involved some
hardships, owing to a number of the natives having neglected to
legalise their claims to their kuleanas, but the present possessors
have made themselves thoroughly acquainted with the language, and
take the warmest interest in the island population.  Niihau is
famous for its very fine mats, and for necklaces of shells six yards
long, as well as for the extreme beauty and variety of the shells
which are found there.

The household here consists first and foremost of its head, Mrs. ---
, a lady of the old Scotch type, very talented, bright, humorous,
charming, with a definite character which impresses its force upon
everybody; beautiful in her old age, disdaining that servile
conformity to prevailing fashion which makes many old people at once
ugly and contemptible:  speaking English with a slight, old-
fashioned, refined Scotch accent, which gives naivete to everything
she says, up to the latest novelty in theology and politics:
devoted to her children and grandchildren, the life of the family,
and though upwards of seventy, the first to rise, and the last to
retire in the house.  She was away when I came, but some days
afterwards rode up on horseback, in a large drawn silk bonnet, which
she rarely lays aside, as light in her figure and step as a young
girl, looking as if she had walked out of an old picture, or one of
Dean Ramsay's books.

Then there are her eldest son, a bachelor, two widowed daughters
with six children between them, three of whom are grown up young
men, and a tutor, a young Prussian officer, who was on Maximilian's
staff up to the time of the Queretaro disaster, and is still
suffering from Mexican barbarities.  The remaining daughter is
married to a Norwegian gentleman, who owns and resides on the next
property.  So the family is together, and the property is large
enough to give scope to the grandchildren as they require it.

They are thoroughly Hawaiianised.  The young people all speak
Hawaiian as easily as English, and the three young men, who are
superb young fellows, about six feet high, not only emulate the
natives in feats of horsemanship, such as throwing the lasso, and
picking up a coin while going at full gallop, but are surf-board
riders, an art which it has been said to be impossible for
foreigners to acquire.

The natives on Niihau and in this part of Kauai, call Mrs. ---
"Mama."  Their rent seems to consist in giving one or more days'
service in a month, so it is a revival of the old feudality.  In
order to patronise native labour, my hosts dispense with a Chinese,
and employ a native cook, and native women come in and profess to do
some of the housework, but it is a very troublesome arrangement, and
ends in the ladies doing all the finer cooking, and superintending
the coarser, setting the table, trimming the lamps, cutting out and
"fixing" all the needlework, besides planning the indoor and outdoor
work which the natives are supposed to do.  Having related their
proficiency in domestic duties, I must add that they are splendid
horsewomen, one of them an excellent shot, and the other has enough
practical knowledge of seamanship, as well as navigation, to enable
her to take a ship round the world!  It is a busy life, owing to the
large number of natives daily employed, and the necessity of looking
after the native lunas, or overseers.  Dr. Smith at Koloa, twenty-
two miles off, is the only doctor on the island, and the natives
resort to this house in great numbers for advice and medicine in
their many ailments.  It is much such a life as people lead at
Raasay, Applecross, or some other remote Highland place, only that
people who come to visit here, unless they ride twenty-two miles,
must come to the coast in the Jenny instead of being conveyed by one
of David Hutcheson's luxurious steamers.  If the Clansman were "put
on," probably the great house would not contain the strangers who
would arrive!

We were sitting in the library one morning when Mr. M., of Timaru,
N.Z., rode up with an introduction, and was of course cordially
welcomed.  He goes on to England, where you will doubtless cross-
question him concerning my statements.  During his visit a large
party of us made a delightful expedition to the Hanapepe Falls, one
of the "lions" of Kauai.  It is often considered too "rough" for
ladies, and when Mrs. --- and I said we were going, I saw Mr. M.
look as if he thought we should be a dependent nuisance; I was
amused afterwards with his surprise at Mrs. ---'s courageous
horsemanship, and at his obvious confusion as to whether he should
help us, which question he wisely decided in the negative.

If "happiness is atmosphere," we were surely happy.  The day was
brilliant, and as cool as early June at home, but the sweet, joyous
trade-wind could not be brewed elsewhere than on the Pacific.  The
scenery was glorious, and mountains, trees, frolicsome water, and
scarlet birds, all rioted as if in conscious happiness.  Existence
was a luxury, and reckless riding a mere outcome of the animal
spirits of horses and riders, and the thud of the shoeless feet as
the horses galloped over the soft grass was sweeter than music.  I
could hardly hold my horse at all, and down hills as steep as the
east side of Arthur's Seat, over knife-like ridges too narrow for
two to ride abreast, and along side-tracks only a foot wide, we rode
at full gallop, till we pulled up at the top of a descent of 2,000
feet with a broad, rapid river at its feet, emerging from between
colossal walls of rock to girdle a natural lawn of the bright
manienie grass.  There had been a "drive" of horses, and numbers of
these, with their picturesque saddles, were picketed there, while
their yet more picturesque, scarlet-shirted riders lounged in the
sun.

It was a difficult two hours' ride from thence to the Falls, worthy
of Hawaii, and since my adventures in the Hilo gulches I cannot
cross running water without feeling an amount of nervousness which I
can conceal, but cannot reason myself out of.  In going and
returning, we forded the broad, rugged river twenty-six times,
always in water up to my horse's girths, and the bottom was so rocky
and full of holes, and the torrent so impetuous, that the animals
floundered badly and evidently disliked the whole affair.  Once it
had been possible to ride along the edge, but the river had torn
away what there was of margin in a freshet, so that we had to cross
perpetually, to attain the rough, boulder-strewn strips which lay
between the cliffs and itself.  Sometimes we rode over roundish
boulders like those on the top of Ben Cruachan, or like those of the
landing at Iona, and most of those under the rush of the bright
foaming water were covered with a silky green weed, on which the
horses slipped alarmingly.  My companions always took the lead, and
by the time that each of their horses had struggled, slipped, and
floundered in and out of holes, and breasted and leapt up steep
banks, I was ready to echo Mr. M.'s exclamation regarding Mrs. ---,
"I never saw such riding; I never saw ladies with such nerve."  I
certainly never saw people encounter such difficulties for the sake
of scenery.  Generally, a fall would be regarded as practically
inaccessible which could only be approached in such a way.

I will not inflict another description of similar scenery upon you,
but this, though perhaps exceeding all others in beauty, is not only
a type, perhaps the finest type, of a species of canon very common
on these islands, but is also so interesting geologically that you
must tolerate a very few words upon it.

The valley for two or three miles from the sea is nearly level, very
fertile, and walled in by palis 250 feet high, much grooved
vertically, and presenting fine layers of conglomerate and grey
basalt; and the Hanapepe winds quietly through the region which it
fertilises, a stream several hundred feet wide, with a soft, smooth
bottom.  But four miles inland the bed becomes rugged and
declivitous, and the mountain walls close in, forming a most
magnificent canon from 1,000 to 2,500 feet deep.  Other canons of
nearly equal beauty descend to swell the Hanapepe with their clear,
cool, tributaries, and there are "meetings of the waters" worthier
of verse than those of Avoca.  The walls are broken and highly
fantastic, narrowing here, receding there, their strangely-arched
recesses festooned with the feathery trichomanes, their clustering
columns and broken buttresses suggesting some old-world minster, and
their stately tiers of columnar basalt rising one above another in
barren grey into the far-off blue sky.  The river in carving out the
gorge so grandly has most energetically removed all rubbish, and
even the tributaries of the lateral canons do not accumulate any
"wash" in the main bed.  The walls as a rule rise clear from the
stream, which, besides its lateral tributaries, receives other
contributions in the form of waterfalls, which hurl themselves into
it from the cliffs in one leap.

After ascending it for four miles all further progress was barred by
a pali which curves round from the right, and closes the chasm with
a perpendicular wall, over which the Hanapepe precipitates itself
from a height of 326 feet, forming the Koula Falls.  At the summit
is a very fine entablature of curved columnar basalt, resembling the
clam shell cave at Staffa, and two high, sharp, and impending peaks
on the other side form a stately gateway for a stream which enters
from another and broader valley; but it is but one among many small
cascades, which round the arc of the falls flash out in foam among
the dark foliage, and contribute their tiny warble to the diapason
of the waterfall.  It rewards one well for penetrating the deep gash
which has been made into the earth.  It seemed so very far away from
all buzzing, frivolous, or vexing things, in the cool, dark abyss
into which only the noon-day sun penetrates.  All beautiful things
which love damp; all exquisite, tender ferns and mosses; all shade-
loving parasites flourish there in perennial beauty.  And high above
in the sunshine, the pea-green candle-nut struggles with the dark
ohia for precarious roothold on rocky ledges, and dense masses of
Eugenia, aflame with crimson flowers, and bananas, and all the leafy
wealth born of heat and damp fill up the clefts which fissure the
pali.  Every now and then some scarlet tropic bird flashed across
the shadow, but it was a very lifeless and a very silent scene.  The
arches, buttresses, and columns suggest a temple, and the deep tone
of the fall is as organ music.  It is all beauty, solemnity, and
worship.

It was sad to leave it and to think how very few eyes can ever feast
themselves on its beauty.  We came back again into gladness and
sunshine, and to the vulgar necessity of eating, which the natives
ministered to by presenting us with a substantial meal of stewed
fowls and sweet potatoes at the nearest shanty.  There must have
been something intoxicating in the air, for we rode wildly and
recklessly, galloping down steep hills (which on principle I object
to), and putting our horses to their utmost speed.  Mine ran off
with me several times, and once nearly upset Mr. M.'s horse, as he
probably will tell you.

The natives annoy me everywhere by their inhumanity to their horses.
To-day I became an object of derision to them for hunting for sow-
thistles, and bringing back a large bundle of them to my excellent
animal.  They starve their horses from mere carelessness or
laziness, spur them mercilessly, when the jaded, famished things
almost drop from exhaustion, ride them with great sores under the
saddles, and with their bodies deeply cut with the rough girths; and
though horses are not regarded as more essential in any part of the
world, they neglect and maltreat them in every way, and laugh
scornfully if one shows any consideration for them.  Except for
short shopping distances in Honolulu, I have never seen a native man
or woman walking.  They think walking a degradation, and I have seen
men take the trouble to mount horses to go 100 yards.

I have no time to tell you of a three days' expedition which five of
us made into the heart of the nearer mountainous district, attended
by some mounted natives.  Mr. K., from whose house we started, has
the finest mango grove on the islands.  It is a fine foliaged tree,
but is everywhere covered with a black blight, which gives the
groves the appearance of being in mourning, as the tough, glutinous
film covers all the older leaves.  The mango is an exotic fruit, and
people think a great deal of it, and send boxes of mangoes as
presents to their friends.  It is yellow, with a reddish bloom,
something like a magnum bonum plum, three times magnified.  The only
way of eating it in comfort is to have a tub of water beside you.
It should be eaten in private by any one who wants to retain the
admiration of his friends.  It has an immense stone, and a
disproportionately small pulp.  I think it tastes strongly of
turpentine at first, but this is a heresy.

Beyond Waielva and its mango groves there is a very curious sand
bank about 60 feet high, formed by wind and currents, and of a
steep, uniform angle from top to bottom.  It is very coarse sand,
composed of shells, coral, and lava.  When two handfuls are slapped
together, a sound like the barking of a dog ensues, hence its name,
the Barking Sands.  It is a common amusement with strangers to slide
their horses down the steep incline, which produces a sound like
subterranean thunder, which terrifies unaccustomed animals.  Besides
this phenomenon, the mirage is often seen on the dry, hot soil, and
so perfectly, too, that strangers have been known to attempt to ride
round the large lake which they saw before them.

Pleasant as our mountain trip was, both in itself, and as a specimen
of the way in which foreigners recreate themselves on the islands, I
was glad to get back to the broad Waimea, on which long shadows of
palms reposed themselves in the slant sunshine, and in the short red
twilight to arrive at this breezy height, and be welcomed by a
blazing fire.

Mrs. ---, in speaking of the mode of living here, was telling me
that on a recent visit to England she felt depressed the whole time
by what appeared to her "the scarcity" in the country.  I never knew
the meaning of the Old Testament blessing of "plenty" and "bread to
the full" till I was in abundant Victoria, and it is much the same
here.  At home we know nothing of this, which was one of the
chiefest of the blessings promised in the Old Testament.  Its
GENIALISING effect is very obvious.  A man feels more practically
independent, I think, when he can say to all his friends, "Drop in
to dinner whenever you like," than if he possessed the franchise six
times over; and people can indulge in hospitality and exercise the
franchise, too, here, for meat is only twopence a pound, and bananas
can be got for the gathering.  The ever-increasing cost of food with
us makes free-hearted hospitality an impossibility, and withers up
all those kindly instincts which find expression in housing and
feeding both friends and strangers.
                                   I.L.B.

LETTER XXII.

LIHUE.  KAUAI.

I rode from Makaueli to Dr. Smith's, at Koloa, with two native
attendants, a luna to sustain my dignity, and an inferior native to
carry my carpet-bag.  Horses are ridden with curb-bits here, and I
had only brought a light snaffle, and my horse ran away with me
again on the road, and when he stopped at last, these men rode
alongside of me, mimicking me, throwing themselves back with their
feet forwards, tugging at their bridles, and shrieking with
laughter, exclaiming Maikai!  Maikai!  (good).

I remained several days at Koloa, and would gladly have accepted the
hospitable invitation to stay as many weeks, but for a cowardly
objection to "beating to windward" in the Jenny.  The scenery in the
Koloa woods is exquisitely beautiful.  Such supreme beauty produces
on me some of the effects which fine music has upon those who have
an exquisite sense of it.  It speaks in a language of its own, like
music, and is equally untranslatable.

One day, the girls asked me to go with them to the forests and
return by moonlight, but they only spoke of them as the haunts of
ferns, because they supposed that I should think nothing of them
after the forests of Australia and New Zealand!  They were not like
the tropical woods of Hawaii, and owe more to the exceeding
picturesqueness of the natural scenery.  Hawaii is all domes and
humps, Kauai all peaks and sierras.  There were deep ravines, along
which bright fern-shrouded streams brawled among wild bananas,
overarched by Eugenias, with their gory blossoms:  walls of peaks,
and broken precipices, grey ridges rising out of the blue forest
gloom, high mountains with mists wreathing their spiky summits, for
a background:  gleams of a distant silver sea:  and the nearer many-
tinted woods were not matted together in jungle fashion, but
festooned and adorned with numberless lianas, and even the prostrate
trunks of fallen trees took on new beauty from the exquisite ferns
which covered them.  Long cathedral aisles stretched away in far-off
vistas, and so perfect at times was the Gothic illusion, that I
found myself listening for anthems and the roll of organs.  So cool
and moist it was, and triumphantly redundant in vagaries of form and
greenery, it was a forest of forests, and it became a necessity to
return the next day, and the next; and I think if I had remained at
Koloa I should have been returning still.

This place is outside the beauty, among cane-fields, and is much
swept by the trade winds.  Mr. Rice, my host, is the son of an
esteemed missionary, and he and his wife take a deep interest in the
natives.  When he brought her here as a bride a few months ago, the
natives were so delighted that he had married an island lady who
could speak Hawaiian, that they gave them an ahaaina, or native
feast, on a grand scale.  The food was cooked in Polynesian style,
by being wrapped up in greens called luau, and baked underground.
There were two bullocks, nineteen hogs, a hundred fowls, any
quantity of poi and fruit, and innumerable native dishes.  Five
hundred natives, profusely decorated with leis of flowers and maile,
were there, and each brought a gift for the bride.  After the feast
they chaunted meles in praise of Mr. Rice, and Mrs. Rice played to
them on her piano, an instrument which they had not seen before, and
sang songs to them in Hawaiian.  Mr. and Mrs. R. teach in and
superintend a native Sunday-school, and have enlisted twenty native
teachers, and in order to keep up the interest and promote cordial
feeling, they and the other teachers meet once a month for a regular
teachers' meeting, taking the houses in rotation.  Refreshments are
served afterwards, and they say that nothing can be more agreeable
than the good feeling at the meetings, and the tact and graceful
hospitality which prevail at the subsequent entertainments.

The Hawaiians are a most pleasant people to foreigners, but many of
their ways are altogether aggravating.  Unlike the Chinamen, they
seldom do a thing right twice.  In my experience, they have almost
never saddled and bridled my horse quite correctly.  Either a strap
has been left unbuckled, or the blanket has been wrinkled under the
saddle.  They are too easy to care much about anything.  If any
serious loss arises to themselves or others through their
carelessness, they shrug their shoulders, and say, "What does it
matter?"  Any trouble is just a pilikia.  They can't help it.  If
they lose your horse from neglecting to tether it, they only laugh
when they find you are wanting to proceed on your journey.  Time,
they think, is nothing to any one.  "What's the use of being in a
hurry?"  Their neglect of their children, a cause from which a large
proportion of the few born perish, is a part of this universal
carelessness.  The crime of infanticide, which formerly prevailed to
a horrible extent, has long been extinct; but the love of pleasure
and the dislike of trouble which partially actuated it, are
apparently still stronger among the women than the maternal
instinct, and they do not take the trouble necessary to rear their
infants.  They give their children away, too, to a great extent, and
I have heard of instances in which children have been so passed from
hand to hand, that they are quite ignorant of their real parents.
It is an odd caprice in some cases, that women who have given away
their own children are passionately attached to those whom they have
received as presents, but I have nowhere seen such tenderness
lavished upon infants as upon the pet dogs that the women carry
about with them.  Though they are so deficient in adhesiveness to
family ties, that wives seek other husbands, and even children
desert their parents for adoptive homes, the tie of race is
intensely strong, and they are remarkably affectionate to each
other, sharing with each other food, clothing, and all that they
possess.  There are no paupers among them but the lunatics and the
lepers, and vagrancy is unknown.  Happily on these sunny shores no
man or woman can be tempted into sin by want.

With all their faults, and their intolerable carelessness, all the
foreigners like them, partly from the absolute security which they
enjoy among them.  They are so thoroughly good-natured, mirthful,
and friendly, and so ready to enter heart and soul into all haole
diversions, that the islands would be dreary indeed if the dwindling
race became extinct.

Among the many misfortunes of the islands, it has been a fortunate
thing that the missionaries' families have turned out so well, and
that there is no ground for the common reproach that good men's sons
turn out reprobates.

The Americans show their usual practical sagacity in missionary
matters.  In 1853, when these islands were nominally Christianised,
and a native ministry consisting of fifty-six pastors had been
established, the American Board of Missions, which had expended
during thirty-five years nine hundred and three thousand dollars in
Christianising the group, and had sent out 149 male and female
missionaries, resolved that it should not receive any further aid
either in men or money.

In the early days, the King and chiefs had bestowed lands upon the
Mission, on which substantial mission premises had been erected, and
on withdrawing from the islands, the Board wisely made over these
lands to the Mission families as freehold property.  The result has
been that, instead of a universal migration of the young people to
America, numbers of them have been attached to Hawaiian soil.  The
establishment at an early date of Punahou College, at which for a
small sum both boys and girls receive a first-class English
education, also contributed to retain them on the islands, and
numbers of the young men entered into sugar-growing, cattle-raising,
storekeeping, and other businesses here.  At Honolulu and Hilo a
large proportion of the residents of the upper class are
missionaries' children; most of the respectable foreigners on Kauai
are either belonging to, or intimately connected with, the Mission
families; and they are profusely scattered through Maui and Hawaii
in various capacities, and are bound to each other by ties of
extreme intimacy and friendliness, as well as by marriage and
affinity.  This "clan" has given society what it much wants--a sound
moral core, and in spite of all disadvantageous influences, has
successfully upheld a public opinion in favour of religion and
virtue.  The members of it possess the moral backbone of New
England, and its solid good qualities, a thorough knowledge of the
language and habits of the natives, a hereditary interest in them, a
solid education, and in many cases much general culture.

In former letters I have mentioned Mr. Coan and Mr. Lyons as
missionaries.  I must correct this, as there have been no actual
missionaries on the islands for twenty years.  When the Board
withdrew its support, many of the missionaries returned to America;
some, especially the secular members, went into other positions on
the group, while the two first-mentioned and two or three besides,
remained as pastors of native congregations.

I venture to think that the Board has been premature in transferring
the islands to a native pastorate at such a very early stage of
their Christianity.  Such a pastorate must be too feeble to uphold a
robust Christian standard.  As an adjunct it would be essential to
the stability of native Christianity, but it is not possible that it
can be trusted as the sole depository of doctrine and discipline,
and even were it all it ought to be, it would lack the power to
repress the lax morality which is ruining the nation.  Probably each
year will render the overhaste of this course more apparent, and it
is likely that some other mode of upholding pure Christianity will
have to be adopted, when the venerable men who now sustain and guide
the native pastors by their influence shall have been gathered to
their rest.
                                   I.L.B.

LETTER XXIII.

LIHUE.  KAUAI, April 17.

Before leaving Kauai I must tell you of a solitary expedition I have
just made to the lovely valley of Hanalei.  It was only a three days
"frolic," but an essentially "good time."  Mr. Rice provided me with
a horse and a very pleasing native guide.  I did not leave till two
in the afternoon, as I only intended to ride fifteen miles, and, as
the custom is, ask for a night's lodging at a settler's house.
However, as I drew near Mr. B.'s ranch, I felt my false courage
oozing out of the tips of my fingers, and as I rode up to the door,
certain obnoxious colonial words, such as "sundowners," and
"bummers," occurred to me, and I felt myself a "sundowner" when the
host came out and asked me to dismount.  He said he was sorry his
wife was away, but he would do his best for me in her absence, and
took me down to a room where a very rough-looking man was tenderly
nursing a baby a year old, which was badly burned or scalded, and
which began to cry violently at my entrance, and required the united
efforts of the two bereaved men to pacify it.  They had the charge
of it between them.  I took it while they went to make some tea, and
it kicked, roared, and fought until they came back.  By that time I
had prepared a neat little speech, saying that I was not the least
tired, and would only trouble them for a glass of water; and, having
covered my cowardice successfully, I went on, having been urged by
the hospitable ranchman to be sure to stay for the night at his
father-in-law's house, a few miles further on.  I saw that the
wishes of the native went in the same direction, but after my one
experience I assured myself that I had not the necessary nerve for
this species of mendicancy, and went on as fast as the horse could
gallop wherever the ground admitted of it, the scenery becoming more
magnificent as the dark, frowning mountains of Hanalei loomed
through the gathering twilight.

But they were fifteen miles off, and on the way we came to a broad,
beautiful ravine, through which a broad, deep river glided into the
breakers.  I had received some warnings about this, but it was
supposed that we could cross in a ferry scow, of which, however, I
only found the bones.  The guide and the people at the ferryman's
house talked long without result, but eventually, by many signs, I
contrived to get them to take me over in a crazy punt, half full of
water, and the horses swam across.  Before we reached the top of the
ravine, the last redness of twilight had died from off the
melancholy ocean, the black forms of mountains looked huge in the
darkness, and the wind sighed so eerily through the creaking
lauhalas, as to add much to the effect.  It became so very dark that
I could only just see my horse's ears, and we found ourselves
occasionally in odd predicaments, such as getting into crevices, or
dipping off from steep banks; and it was in dense darkness that we
arrived above what appeared to be a valley with twinkling lights,
lying at the foot of a precipice, and walled in on all sides but one
by lofty mountains.  It was rather queer, diving over the wooded
pali on a narrow track, with nothing in sight but the white jacket
of the native, who had already indicated that he was at the end of
his resources regarding the way, but just as a river gleamed
alarmingly through the gloom, a horseman on a powerful horse brushed
through the wood, and on being challenged in Hawaiian replied in
educated English, and very politely turned with me, and escorted me
over a disagreeable ferry in a scow without rails, and to my
destination, two miles beyond.

Yesterday, when I left, the morning was brilliant, and after
ascending the pali, I stayed for some time on an eminence which
commands the valley, presented by Mr. Wyllie to Lady Franklin, in
compliment to her admiration of its loveliness.  Hanalei has been
likened by some to Paradise, and by others to the Vale of Caschmir.
Everyone who sees it raves about it.  "See Hanalei and die," is the
feeling of the islanders, and certainly I was not disappointed, nor
should I be with Paradise itself were it even a shade less fair!  It
has every element of beauty, and in the bright sunshine, with the
dark shadows on the mountains, the waterfalls streaking their wooded
sides, the river rushing under kukuis and ohias, and then lingering
lovingly amidst living greenery, it looked as if the curse had never
lighted there.

Its mouth, where it opens on the Pacific, is from two to three miles
wide, but the boundary mountains gradually approach each other, so
that five miles from the sea a narrow gorge of wonderful beauty
alone remains.  The crystal Hanalei flows placidly to the sea for
the last three or four miles, tired by its impetuous rush from the
mountains, and mirrors on its breast hundreds of acres of cane,
growing on a plantation formerly belonging to Mr. Wyllie, an
enterprising Ayrshire man, and one of the ablest and most
disinterested foreigners who ever administered Hawaiian affairs.
Westward of the valley there is a region of mountains, slashed by
deep ravines.  The upper ridges are densely timbered, and many of
the ohias have a circumference of twenty-five feet, three feet from
the ground.  It was sad to turn away for ever from the loveliness of
Hanalei, even though by taking another route, which involved a ride
of forty miles, I passed through and in view of, most entrancing
picturesqueness.  Indeed, for mere loveliness, I think that part of
Kauai exceeds anything that I have seen.

The atmosphere and scenery were so glorious that it was possible to
think of nothing all day, but just allow oneself passively to drink
in sensations of exquisite pleasure.  I wish all the hard-worked
people at home, who lead joyless lives in sunless alleys, could just
have one such day, and enjoy it as I did, that they might know how
fair God's earth is, and how far fairer His Paradise must be, if
even from this we cannot conceive "of the things which He hath
prepared for them that love Him."  I never before felt so sad for
those whose lives are passed amidst unpropitious surroundings, or so
thankful for my own capacity of enjoying nature.

Just as we were coming up out of a deep river, a native riding about
six feet from me was caught in a quicksand.  He jumped off, but the
horse sank half way up its body.  I wanted to stay and see it
extricated, for its struggles only sank it deeper, but the natives
shrugged their shoulders, and said in Hawaiian, "only a horse," and
something they always say when anything happens, equivalent to
"What's the odds?"  It was a joyously-exciting day, and I was
galloping down a grass hill at a pace which I should not have
assumed had white people been with me, when a native rode up to me
and said twice over, "maikai! paniola," and laughed heartily.  When
my native came up, he pointed to me and again said "paniola;" and
afterwards we were joined by two women, to whom my guide spoke of me
as paniola; and on coming to the top of a hill they put their horses
into a gallop, and we all rode down at a tremendous, and, as I
should once have thought, a break-neck speed, when one of the women
patted me on the shoulder, exclaiming, "maikai! maikai! paniola."  I
thought they said "spaniola," taking me for a Spaniard, but on
reaching Lihue, and asking the meaning of the word, Mrs. Rice said,
"Oh, lassoing cattle, and all that kind of thing."  I was disposed
to accept the inference as a compliment; but when I told Mrs. R.
that the word had been applied to myself, she laughed very much, and
said she would have toned down its meaning had she known that!

We rode through forests lighted up by crimson flowers, through
mountain valleys greener than Alpine meadows, descended steep palis,
and forded deep, strong rivers, pausing at the beautiful Wailua
Falls, which leap in a broad sheet of foam and a heavy body of water
into a dark basin, walled in by cliffs so hard that even the ferns
and mosses which revel in damp, fail to find roothold in the naked
rock.  Both above and below, this river passes through a majestic
canon, and its neighbourhood abounds in small cones, some with
crateriform cavities at the top, some broken down, and others,
apparently of great age, wooded to their summits.  A singular ridge,
called Mauna Kalalea, runs along this part of the island,
picturesque beyond anything, and, from its abruptness and peculiar
formation, it deceives the eye into judging it to be as high as the
gigantic domes of Hawaii.  Its peaks are needle-like, or else blunt
projections of columnar basalt, rising ofttimes as terraces.  At a
beautiful village called Anahola the ridge terminates abruptly, and
its highest portion is so thin that a large patch of sky can be seen
through a hole which has been worn in it.

I reached Lihue by daylight, having established my reputation as a
paniola by riding forty miles in 7.5 hours, "very good time" for the
islands.  I hope to return here in August, as my hospitable friends
will not allow me to leave on any other condition.  The kindness I
have received on Kauai is quite overwhelming, and I shall remember
its refined and virtuous homes as long as its loveliness and
delicious climate.

HAWAIIAN HOTEL.  HONOLULU.  April 23rd.

I have nothing new to add.  Mr. Dexter is so far recovered that I
fear I shall not find my friends here on my return.  People are in
the usual fever about the mail, and I must close this.
                                I.L.B.

LETTER XXIV.

ULUPALAKUA.  MAUI.  May 12th.

It is three weeks since I left the Hawaiian Hotel and its green mist
of algarobas, but my pleasant visits in this island do not furnish
much that will interest you.  There was great excitement on the
wharf at Honolulu the evening I left.  It was crowded with natives,
the king's band was playing, old hags were chanting meles, and
several of the royal family, and of the "upper ten thousand" were
there, taking leave of the Governess of Hawaii, the Princess
Keelikolani, the late king's half-sister.  The throng and excitement
were so great, that we were outside the reef before I got a good
view of this lady, the largest and the richest woman on the islands.
Her size and appearance are most unfortunate, but she is said to be
good and kind.  She was dressed in a very common black holuku, with
a red bandana round her throat, round which she wore a le of immense
oleanders, as well as round her hair, which was cut short.  She had
a large retinue, and her female attendants all wore leis of
oleander.  They spread very fine mats on the deck, under pulu beds,
covered with gorgeous quilts, on which the Princess and her suite
slept, and in the morning the beds were removed, breakfast was
spread on the mats, and she, some of her attendants, and two or
three white men who received invitations, sat on the deck round it.
It was a far less attractive meal than that which the serene steward
served below.  The calabashes, which contained the pale pink poi,
were of highly polished kou wood, but there were no foreign
refinements.  The other dishes were several kinds of raw fish, dried
devil-fish, boiled kalo, sweet potatoes, bananas, and cocoa-nut
milk.

I had a very uncomfortable night on a mattress on the deck, which
was overcrowded with natives, and some of the native women and two
foreigners had got a whiskey bottle, and behaved disgracefully.  We
went round by the Leper Island.

I landed at Maaleia, on the leeward side of the sandy isthmus which
unites East and West Maui, got a good horse, and, with Mr. G---,
rode across to the residence of "Father Alexander," at Wailuku, a
flourishing district of sugar plantations.  Mr. and Mrs. Alexander
were among the early missionaries, and still live on the mission
premises.  Several of their sons are settled on the island in the
sugar business, and it was to the Heiku plantation, fifteen miles
off, of which Mr. S. Alexander is manager, that I went on the
following day, still escorted by Mr. G---.  Here we heard that
captains of schooners which had arrived from Hawaii, report that a
light is visible on the terminal crater of Mauna Loa, 14,000 feet
above the sea, that Kilauea, the flank crater, is unusually active,
and that several severe shocks of earthquake have been felt.  This
is exciting news.

Behind Wailuku is the Iao valley, up which I rode with two island
friends, and spent a day of supreme, satisfied admiration.  At Iao
people may throw away pen and pencil in equal despair.  The trail
leads down a gorge dark with forest trees, and then opens out into
an amphitheatre, walled in by precipices, from three to six thousand
feet high, misty with a thousand waterfalls, plumed with kukuis, and
feathery with ferns.  A green-clad needle of stone, one thousand
feet in height, the last refuge of an army routed when the Wailuku
(waters of destruction) ran red with blood, keeps guard over the
valley.  Other needles there are; and mimic ruins of bastions and
ramparts and towers came and passed mysteriously:  and the shining
fronts of turrets gleamed through trailing mists, changing into
drifting visions of things that came and went, in sunshine and
shadow, mountains raising battered peaks into a cloudless sky, green
crags moist with ferns, and mists of water that could not fall, but
frittered themselves away on slopes of maiden-hair, and depths of
forest and ferns through which bright streams warble through the
summer years.  Clouds boiling up from below drifted at times across
the mountain fronts, or lay like snow masses in the unsunned chasms:
and over the grey crags and piled up pinnacles, and glorified green
of the marvellous vision, lay a veil of thin blue haze, steeping the
whole in a serenity which seemed hardly to belong to earth.

The track from Wailuku to Heiku is over a Sahara in miniature, a
dreary expanse of sand and shifting sandhills, with a dismal growth
in some places of thornless thistles and indigo, and a tremendous
surf thunders on the margin.  Trackless, glaring, choking, a guide
is absolutely necessary to a stranger, for the footprints or wheel-
marks of one moment are obliterated the next.  I crossed the isthmus
three times, and the third time was quite as incapable of shaping my
course across it as the first, and though I had recklessly declined
a guide, was only too thankful for the one who was forced upon me.
It is a hateful ride, yet anything so hideous and aggressively
odious is a salutary experience in a land of so much beauty.  Sand,
sand, sand!  Sand-hills, smooth and red; sand plains, rippled,
whites and glaring; sand drifts shifting; sand clouds whirling; sand
in your eyes, nose, and mouth; sand stinging your face like pin
points; sand hiding even your horse's ears; sand rippling like
waves, hissing like spin-drift, malignant, venomous!  You can only
open one eye at a time for a wink at where you are going.  Looking
down upon it from Heiku, you can see nothing all day but the dense
brown clouds of a perpetual sand-storm.

My charming hostess and her husband made Heiku so fascinating, that
I only quitted it hoping to return.  The object which usually
attracts strangers to Maui is the great dead volcano of Haleakala,
"The house of the sun," and I was fortunate in all the circumstances
of my ascent.  My host at Heiku provided me with a horse and native
attendant, and I rode over the evening before to the house of his
brother, Mr. J. Alexander, who accompanied me, and his intelligent
and cultured society was one of the pleasures of the day.

People usually go up in the afternoon, camp near the summit, light a
fire, are devoured by fleas, roast and freeze alternately till
morning, and get up to see the grand spectacle of the sunrise, but I
think our plan preferable, of leaving at two in the morning.  The
moon had set.  It was densely dark, and it was raining on one side
of the road, though quite fine on the other.  By the lamplight which
streamed from our early breakfast table, I only saw wet mules and
horses, laden with gear for a mountain ascent, a trim little
Japanese, who darted about helping, my native, who was picturesquely
dressed in a Mexican poncho, Mr. Alexander, who wore something which
made him unrecognisable; and myself, a tatterdemalion figure,
wearing a much-worn green topcoat of his over my riding suit, and a
tartan shawl arranged so as to fall nearly to my feet.  Then we went
forth into the darkness.  The road soon degenerated into a wood
road, then into a bridle track, then into a mere trail ascending all
the way; and at dawn, when the rain was over, we found ourselves
more than half-way up the mountain, amidst rocks, scoriae, tussocks,
ohelos, a few common compositae, and a few coarse ferns and woody
plants, which became coarser and scantier the higher we went up, but
never wholly ceased; for, at the very summit, 10,200 feet high,
there are some tufts of grass, and stunted specimens of a common
asplenium in clefts.  Many people suffer from mountain sickness on
this ascent, but I suffered from nothing but the excruciating cold,
which benumbed my limbs and penetrated to my bones; and though I
dismounted several times and tried to walk, uphill exercise was
impossible in the rarefied air.  The atmosphere was but one degree
below the freezing-point, but at that height, a brisk breeze on
soaked clothes was scarcely bearable.

The sunrise turned the densely packed clouds below into great rosy
masses, which broke now and then, showing a vivid blue sea, and
patches of velvety green.  At seven, after toiling over a last steep
bit, among scoriae, and some very scanty and unlovely vegetation, we
reached what was said to be the summit, where a ragged wall of rock
shut out the forward view.  Dismounting on some cinders, we stepped
into a gap, and from thence looked down into the most gigantic
crater on the earth.  I confess that with the living fires of
Kilauea in my memory, I was at first disappointed with the deadness
of a volcano of whose activity there are no traditions extant.
Though during the hours which followed, its majesty and wonderment
grew upon me, yet a careful study of the admirable map of the
crater, a comparison of the heights of the very considerable cones
which are buried within it, and the attempt to realize the figures
which represent its circumference, area, and depth, not only give a
far better idea of it than any verbal description, but impress its
singular sublimity and magnitude upon one far more forcibly than a
single visit to the actual crater.

I mentioned in one of my first letters that East Maui, that part of
the island which lies east of the isthmus of perpetual dust-storms,
consists of a mountain dome 10,000 feet in height, with a monstrous
base.  Its slopes are very regular, varying from eight to ten
degrees.  Its lava-beds differ from those of Kauai and Oahu in being
lighter in colour, less cellular, and more impervious to water.  The
windward side of the mountain is gashed and slashed by streams,
which in their violence have excavated large pot-holes, which serve
as reservoirs, and it is covered to a height of over 2000 feet by a
luxuriant growth of timber.  On the leeward side, several black and
very fresh-looking streams of lava run into the sea, and the whole
coast for some height above the shore shows most vigorous volcanic
action.  Elsewhere the rock is red and broken, and lateral cones
abound near the base.

The ascent from Makawao, though it is over rather a desolate tract
of land, has in its lower stages such a dismal growth of pining koa
and spurious sandal-wood, and in its upper ones so much ohelo scrub,
with grass and common aspleniums quite up to the top, that as one
sits lazily on one's sure-footed horse, the fact that one is
ascending a huge volcano is not forced upon one by any overmastering
sterility and nakedness.  Somehow, one expects to pass through some
ulterior stage of blackness up to the summit.  It is no such thing;
and the great surprise of Haleakala to me was, that when according
to calculation there should have been a summit, an abyss of vast
dimensions opened below.  The mountain top has been in fact blown
off, and one is totally powerless to imagine what the forces must
have been which rent it asunder.

The crater was clear of fog and clouds, and lighted in every part by
the risen sun.  The whole, with its contents, can be seen at a
single glance, though its girdling precipices are nineteen miles in
extent.  Its huge, irregular floor is 2000 feet below; New York
might be hidden away within it, with abundant room to spare; and
more than one of the numerous subsidiary cones which uplift
themselves solitary or in clusters through the area, attain the
height of Arthur's Seat at Edinburgh.  On the north and east are the
Koolau and Kaupo Gaps, as deep as the crater, through which oceans
of lava found their way to the sea.  It looks as if the volcanic
forces, content with rending the mountain top in twain, had then
passed into an endless repose.

The crater appears to be composed of a hard grey clinkstone, much
fissured; but lower down the mountain, the rock is softer, and has a
bluish tinge.  The internal cones are of very regular shape, and
most of them look as if their fires had only just gone out, with
their sides fiercely red, and their central cavities lined with
layers of black ash.  They are all composed of cinders of light
specific gravity, and much of the ash is tinged with the hydrated
oxide of iron.  Very few of the usual volcanic products are present.
{335}  Small quantities of sulphur, in a very impure form, exist
here and there, but there are no sulphur or steam-cracks, or hot
springs on any part of the mountain.  With its cold ashes and dead
force, it is a most tremendous spectacle of the power of fire.

Some previous travellers had generously left some faggots on the
summit, and we made a large fire for warmth, and I rolled my blanket
round me, and sat with my feet among the hot embers, but all to no