[Illustration: (1) Where the Queen Composed “Aloha Oe”. (2) A

Hair-raising Bridge on the Ditch Trail. (3) A Characteristic Mountain

Trail in Hawaii. (4) The Flume Across a Gulch.]

Aboard the _Thaddeus_ were Mr. and Mrs. Asa Thurston, grandparents of

our Kakina. All must have suffered outlandish inconveniences, to say the

least, in that primitive environment. I am minded of having read how, on

one occasion, those early Thurstons made a passage from Kailua to

Lahaina in a very small brig that scarcely furnished standing room for

its four hundred and seventy-five passengers and numerous live stock;

which was not considered an unusual overcrowding.

A good five-mile pull it is from the village to the “Doctorage,” through

quaint Kailua, past Hackfeld’s old store, and the small, formal white

palace where Prince Kalanianaole and his princess are staying; on,

higher and higher, across a sloping desert of cactus blooming white and

red and yellow, and laden with juicy-sweet “prickly pears,” called

_papipi_, and sometimes _panini_, by the natives. In these, with care

for the prickles, we eased a continuous thirst in the sapping noonday

heat.

Shortly after quitting Kailua, we were pointed out a tumble-down frame

dwelling, the home of the original Thurstons, which is now almost

disintegrated by _termites_, borers, inaccurately termed “white ants,”

whose undermining must ceaselessly be fought in the Islands. This house

is a dreamfully pathetic reminder of those long-dead men and women who

voyaged so courageously to a far land where, oh, savage association! a

conch shell was the bell for the afternoon session of school. Their

special interest in the Hawaiian people had been awakened in the New

England missionaries by the acquaintance of several kanaka sailors

brought to New Haven by Captain Brintnall in 1809, more especially one

Opukahaia, whom they dubbed Obookiah. In 1817 the “Foreign Mission

School” was instituted at Cornwall, Connecticut, for heathen youth, and

five Sandwich Islanders were among the first pupils. Obookiah died in

1818, but three of his countrymen embarked for their native isles, with

the missionaries, in 1819, in the _Thaddeus_, Captain Blanchard.

Presently we began to enjoy a cooler altitude, in which the vegetation

changed to a sort of exotic orchard—a wilderness of avocado, kukui,

guava, and breadfruit trees burdened with shining knobby globes of

emerald, like those of Aladdin’s jeweled forest. And coffee—Kona

coffee; spreading miles of glossy, green shrubbery sprinkled with its

red, sweet berry inclosing the blessed bean.

At 1000 feet elevation the road emerged upon a variously level, winding

highway which we pursued to the post office of Holualoa. From there we

turned down an intricate lane between stone walls overhung with blossomy

trees, that with sudden twist delivered us upon a verdant shelf of the

long seaward lava incline. Here the Goodhues live and work and raise

their young family of two in this matchless equable climate; and here

with the unstudied graciousness of their adopted land welcomed us as we

had been kinfolk.

“Now, this is what I call a white-man’s climate,” Jack enounces. “Few of

us Anglo-Saxons are so made as to thrive in fervent spots like Kailua

yonder,” indicating the far-distant and just-visible thumb-sketch of

that storied hamlet, “no matter how beautiful they may be to the eye and

mind.”

Dr. Goodhue agrees to this; but Jack will not follow him in the

contention that, under the Hawaiian sun, even in this semi-temperate

climate, said Anglo-Saxon should rest more than do we. “I wish you’d

heed what I am advising,” almost wistfully the good Doctor urges.

“You’ll last longer under the equator and have a better time on your

voyage.—If I did not have such sweet responsibilities,” he smiled upon

his wife and young ones, “I’d beg the chance to go along as ship’s

physician!... And as for myself,” he added, “I _have_ to work too

hard—largely prescribing for people like you and myself, who have not

heeded my own warnings.”

There is small need for residents of Kona to plan special entertainment

for guests, provided those guests have eyes. First, one’s imagination is

set in motion by this unheard-of gradient vastness of molten rock so

ancient that it has become rich soil overspread in the higher reaches

with bright sugar cane, coffee, bracken and forestage. Below this belt

of vegetation, barren, seamy lava stretches to the coast line, lost in

distance to right and left, all its miniature palm-feathered bays

pricked out by a restless edge of pearly surf in dazzling contrast to

the vivid turquoise water inshore. Off to the south, the last

indentation visible is historic Kealakekua Bay, where Captain Cook paid

with his life for stupid mishandling of a people proud beyond that

Englishman’s comprehension of a brown-skinned people. We have never seen

anything like this azure hemisphere of sea and sky. For we have observed

no horizon from the Kona Coast. The water lies motionless as the sky—a

frosted blue-crystal plane, no longer a “pathless, trackless ocean,” for

over its limitless surface run serpentine paths, coiling and

intermingling as in an inconceivable breadth of watered silk. Ocean and

dome overhead are wedded by cloud masses that rear celestial castles in

the blue, which in turn are reflected in the “windless, glassy floor”;

and the atmospheric and vaporous suffusion I can only call a _blue

flush_. The very air is blue.

We can just make out our house-upon-the-sea, tiny pearl upon lapis

lazuli, beyond the slender, white spire of Kailua’s church. Fair little

Dorothy, her eyes the all-prevalent azure, glides white-frocked and cool

to our side and lisps her father’s child-verse:

“There’s Jack London coming, see?

In a little white-speck boat;

He will wave his hands to me,

Then he’ll float and float and float;

So he said last time he wrote—

He is such a man of note!”

For three miles today we rode south along the fine road skirting the

mighty sweep of mountain. On our saddles were tied raincoats, for smart

rains are frequent of an afternoon, filling one’s nostrils with the

smell of the good red earth.

“Oh, look—look at your yacht!” Jack suddenly cried; and there was she,

the “white-speck boat,” in a whisper of wind crawling out across the

level blue carpet of the open roadstead, growing dimmer and still dimmer

in the Blue Flush, bound for Hilo, our port of departure for the

Marquesas.

We turned downhill on a trail through guava and lantana shrubbery

sparkling from the latest shower. Owing to the success of an imported

enemy, large tracts of that beautiful pest, the lantana, have the

appearance of having been burned.

One of our party bestrode a ridiculous dun ass, a pet that for the most

part wreaked its own will upon its young rider, especially when its

large braying, “a sound as of a dry pump being ‘fetched’ by water and

suction,” elicited like responses from the “bush” where these Kona

Nightingales, as they are known throughout the region, breed unchecked

and are had for the catching. If not a favorite, they are an inexpensive

and popular means of travel among the poorer natives and the long-legged

_pakés_ (Chinese) on the roads of the district.

Winning through the expanse of shrubbery, we traversed a desert of

decomposed lava, our path edged pastorally with wild flowers, among them

the tiny dark-blue ones of the indigo plant. Across this arid prospect

undulates the ruin of the prehistoric _holualoa_—a causeway built fifty

feet wide of irregular lava blocks, flanked either side by massive,

squat walls of masonry several feet thick. This amazing slide extends

from water’s edge two or three miles up-mountain, and its origin, like

that of the ambitious fish ponds, is lost in the fogs of antiquity. Its

supposed use was as an athletic track for the ancient game of

_holua_—coasting on a few-inches-wide sledge—_papa holua_—with

runners a dozen feet long and several inches deep, fashioned of polished

wood, hard as iron, curving upward in front, and fastened together by

ten or more crosspieces. The rider, with one hand grasping the sledge

near the center, ran a few yards for headway, then leaped upon it and

launched headforemost on the descent. Ordinarily, a smooth track of dry

_pili_ grass was prepared on some long declivity that ended in a plain;

but this _holualoa_ (_loa_ connotes _long_) is believed to have been

sacred to high chiefdom, whose papa holuas were constructed with

canoe-bottoms. Picture a mighty chief of chiefs, and his court of

magnificent warriors, springing upon their carved and painted

canoe-sleds, flashing with ever increasing flight down this regal course

until, at the crusty edge of the solid world, shouting they breasted the

surf of ocean!

We have heard that there is another holua, a short one, with a level

approach of but seventy-five feet, eight feet wide, with a

two-hundred-foot incline widening to twenty feet at the sea-edge. This

may be visited by canoe, with a chance to see beautiful colored fish by

water-telescopes.

The ancients of Hawaii were keen sportsmen—and gamblers. One historian

asserts that many of their games were resorted to primarily for the

betting, which was pursued by both sexes, and often resulted in

impromptu pitched battles. We should hesitate before speaking loosely of

“modern” sports, for in Old Hawaii boxing, _moko-moko_, regulated by

umpires who rigidly enforced strict rules, was the favorite national

sport, often attended by spectators numbering ten thousand.

And there was wrestling, _hakoko_, and the popular _kukini_,

foot-racing. Disk-throwing, _maika_, was done with a highly polished

stone disk, _ulu_, three or four inches in diameter, slightly convex

from edge to center, on a track half a mile long and three feet broad.

The game was either to send the stone between two upright sticks fixed

but a few inches apart at a distance of thirty or forty yards, or to see

which side could bowl it the greater length. The champions would

sometimes succeed in propelling it upward of a hundred rods.

They also knew a complicated game of checkers, played with black and

white pebbles upon a board marked with numerous squares. These

irrepressible gamesters raised cocks for fighting, and wagered hotly

around the ringside. The tug-of-war was not unknown, _hukihuki_; and

there was a polite parlor game, _loulou_, the pulling of crooked fingers

hooked in those of an opponent. Another mild amusement was similar to

“cat’s cradle,” the _hei_. A wide variety of ball-playing was done with

a round ball, and called _kini-popo_. _Po-hee_ was a contest in which

darts or spears were made to skip along the ground or over the grass.

Even children played at this, with reeds or sugar-canes, getting their

hand in for adult spear-throwing, in which Kamehameha was so proficient.

There were schools for warriors, in which the use of the sling-shot,

_maa_, was taught as a fine art with warlike purpose.

Mr. Ford should resurrect some of the games of Hawaii—even to the

restoration of the Great Slide—as he has done with surf-boarding, for

not only would the natives doubtless be interested, but haole residents

have their lives enriched by either the novelty or the resemblance of

the ancient sports to modern ones. Visitors would welcome the

innovations. I do not mean merely as a spectacle, such as Honolulu

resurrects so splendidly from time to time, but that some of these

forgotten athletics be incorporated into the life of the Islands.

That monster scenic railway, _holualoa_, of Polynesian forefathers, lies

in flowing undulations like our twentieth century ones, showing the

engineers to have been men of calculation. One old Hawaiian told us the

story that the arduous toil of building it was performed by amorous

youths contesting for a single look at the loveliness of a favorite of

the _moi_, king.

Despite the fact that wahines existed under severe and sometimes

heartless tabus and punishments for the infringement thereof, they

played the usual important role of femininity among superior races. For

one thing, they were exempt from sacrifice; and rank was inherited

chiefly from the maternal parents. War canoes were christened for the

loved one of the chiefs, as evidenced by Kamehameha, whose sentiment for

Kaahumanu caused him to rename for her the brig _Forester_, bought from

Captain Piggott in exchange for sandalwood. And after Kamehameha II,

Liholiho, had removed the ban of Adamless feasting, woman’s emancipation

went on apace. When, in the past century, the “people” were called by

their white government to vote, there was no murmur from the husbands,

fathers, and brothers, if report can be credited, at having their

womenkind accompany them to the polls to cast their own ballot. The

haole law-makers, however, not ripe to tolerate woman suffrage, and

equally unwilling to cause hurt, got around the embarrassing difficulty

by merely neglecting to count the feminine names![9]

The “free life of the savage” is a myth, so far as concerns the early

Hawaiians. Almost every act was accompanied by prayer and offering, to

the tutelar deities. Every vocation had its patron gods, who must be

propitiated, and innumerable omens were observed. A fisherman could not

use his new net without sacrifice to his patron fane, more especially

the shark-god. A professional diviner, _kilokilo_, had to be called in

for advice as to the position of a house to be erected; and no tree must

stand directly before the door for some distance, lest bad luck be the

portion of the householder. Canoe-building was a ceremonial of the

strictest sort; while, most important of all, the birth of a male child

was attended by offerings to the idols, with complicated services.

Again am I lost in the labyrinth of Hawaii’s tempting history, for

between the lines one may find the utmost romance.

The Kona coast is said to be as primitive in its social status as

anywhere in Hawaii to-day, but we saw none but wooden dwellings, tucked

in the foliage of the high bank behind Keauhou’s miniature crescent

beach with its miniature surf—a mere nick in the snowy coastline, where

small steamers call at a little roofed pier. In a small lot inclosed by

a low stone wall, gravely we were shown by the natives a large sloping

rock, upon which, they said, Kamehameha III, grandson of the Great

Ancestor, was born. Queen Liliuokalani has lately caused the wall to be

built around the sacred birthplace.

August 23.

This perfect day, in high balmy coolness, found us driving twenty miles

over the shower-laid highway. Once more we detected the _Snark_, still

holding to westward in order to lay her proper slant for the coastwise

course—by now a mere-flick of white or silver or shadow in the shifting

light, sometimes entirely eluding sight in the cloud-dimming blue

mirror.

The road swings along through forest of lehua and tree-ferns, the larger

koa being found in higher regions of the acclivity; and on some of the

timbered hillsides Jack and I exclaimed over the likeness to our home

woods.

At intervals, up little trails branching from the road, poi-flags

fluttered appetizingly in the breeze—a white cloth on a stick being

advertisement of this staple for sale. I longed to follow those crooked

pathways for the sake of a peep at the native folk and their huts.

“I wish I had miles of these stone walls on my ranch,” quoth Jack, on

the broad top of one of which he sat, munching a sandwich in the kukui

shade. Every where one sees examples of this well-made rock-fencing,

built by the hands of bygone Hawaiian commoners to separate the lands of

the alii. But most of the stone-fencing along the highway has been done

since 1888, when the first wagon-road was built in Kona.

The return miles were covered in a downpour that the side-curtains could

not entirely exclude, and we stopped but once—to make a call upon a

neighbor, a hale and masterful man of eighty-odd years, whose fourth

wife, in her early twenties, is nursing their two-months-old babe.

“Gee!” Jack said in an awed tone as we resumed our way under a

sunset-breaking sky, “the possibilities of this high Kona climate are

almost appalling! This is certainly the place to spend one’s declining

years.” And the Doctor added, “They say in this district that people

never die. They simply dry up and float away in the wind!”

Jack’s admiration for the holoku remains unabated; and so, as have many

Americans, I have adopted it for housewear as the most logically

beautiful toilette in this easy-going latitude. Callers arrive: I am

bending over the typewriter, wrapped in a kimono. In a trice, I am

completely gowned in a robe of fine muslin and lace, with ruffled train,

ready for domestic social emergency.

August 24.

To Keauhou again we came this lovely evening, guests of Mr and Mrs.

Thomas White, of Kona, she of alii stock. After a mad dash, neck and

neck, on the bunched and flying horses, with heavy warm rain beating in

our warmer faces, someone led the riot makai on the muddiest trail

through the slapping, dripping lantana. We arrived at the seashore

drenched to the buff, feet squashing unctuously in our boots.

Turkey-red calico muumuus had been brought for us malihini haoles, that

we might be entirely Hawaiian in the water, and at last I was able to

demonstrate to my own skepticism that it is more than possible to keep

from drowning in a flowing robe. A bevy of chocolate colored

water-babies were already bobbing blissfully in the sunset-rosy flood

that was tepid as new milk.

In the water I was seized with a small panic when a distressful stinging

sensation began spreading over my body like flame. Simultaneously,

others began to make for the beach with little shrieks of pain and

laughter. The brown mer-babies tried with wry, half-smiling faces to

explain, but it took an older indigene to make plain that in the

twilight we had blundered into a squadron of Portuguese men of war,

whose poisonous filaments are thrown out somewhat as spiders cast their

webs over victims. A man-of-war has been known to lower these filaments

many feet, say into a shoal of sardines, whereupon the fish become

paralyzed from poison at the instant of contact and the enemy is able to

hoist them to the surface. No wonder our tender skins felt the

irritation. Never again shall I be able to look upon the fairy fleets of

Lilliputian azure ships with the same unalloyed pleasure in their pretty

harmlessness.

Robust appetites we brought to Mrs. White’s luau, spread on the little

wharf. Although we did sit on the floor, in approved posture, it was

disappointing to note the forks, spoons, and knives, together with many

haole dishes. Jack considerately forestalled comment from me by

whispering, “They do not know us well enough to realize that we would

appreciate the strictly Hawaiian customs.”

Some of the Keauhou folk sat with us, but were extremely shy, for few

strangers find their way to the little village by the sea; and at the

shore end of the pier a group of singers stared at us out of their

beautiful eyes while their voices blended “with true consent” in older

melodies than any we had heard.

Jack and I rode home in the dim misty moonlight, beholding the land and

sea in a wondrous new aspect, the Blue Flush transformed into iridescent

pearl and the frosted silver sea streaked with dull gold by a

low-dipping moon. In the stillness the hoofs rang sharply on the stony

steep, or a clash of palm swords in a vagrant puff of wind startled the

horses to the side. It was a wild ride, up into the chiller air strata

and along the clattering highway, and I enjoyed imagining myself a

half-winged creature in a dream.

August 25.

Farther than any day yet we have bowled along the blithesome highroad,

and then dropped into the increasing heat of the shimmering tropic

levels, into Napoopoo village under its fruitful palms on the beach of

Kealakekua Bay where Captain Cook met his fate. Mr. Leslie had us into

his pleasant home to rest from the hot drive, and then led to where two

canoes lay ready at the landing to paddle us over the romantic waters to

the Cook Monument. Weather-grayed little outriggers they were; one of

them propelled by an astonishing person, a full-blooded Hawaiian

albino—curious paradox of a white man who was not a white man.

Skimming the lustrous water beyond the inshore breakers, on our way to

the point of land, Kaawaloa, where stands the white monument pure and

silent in the green gloom of trees, our eyes roved the palm-feathered,

surf-wreathed shore and beetling cliffs honeycombed with tombs where

rotting canoes still hold tapa-swathed bones of bygone inhabitants. Some

of these, undoubtedly, knew the features of the Captain James Cook whom

they deified as an incarnation of their secondary god, Lono, previous to

slaying him for his misbehavior with a people too decent to countenance

methods he had found possible among certain South Sea groups.

Day-dreaming I reinvested the roadstead with its sturdy whalers and

picturesque adventurers’ ships, and garlanded dusky mermaidens swimming

out in laughing schools to the strange white men from an unimagined

bourne beyond the blue flush that encircled theirs, while again the

friendly natives made high luau beneath the palms of the waterside. Our

handsome boatman somewhat disturbed the mermaid fantasy: “_Aole_—no; no

swim this place ... I tell you—planty, planty shark.”

No shark could we discern; only, in coral caverns deep below the quaint

outrigger, burnished fishes playing in and out like sunbeams. We skimmed

a jeweled bowl, the blue contents shot through with broadsides of amber

by the afternoon sun, and on the surface shadowy undulations—violet

pools in the azure; liquid sapphire spilled upon molten turquoise; and

all exquisite hues melting into an opalescent fusion of water and air.

An arm of lava draws in the harbor on the north and near its end the

rocky ruin of a heiau, undoubtedly of Lonomakahiki, where Captain Cook

was worshipped, lends a befitting sacrificial spell, which the loud and

irreverent mynah does everything in his power to desecrate. We landed on

the broad dark rocks opposite the white concrete monument, which stands

half-way of the little cape. The original memorial was a piece of ship’s

copper, nailed to a coco palm near the site of the present imposing

shaft, which is inclosed in a military square of chain-cable supported

from posts topped by cannon-balls.

When Captain Cook was slain here, in 1779, his body was borne to a

smaller heiau above the pali, where the same night the high priests

performed their funeral rites. The flesh was removed from the skeleton,

and part of it burned; while the bones were cleansed, tied with red

feathers and deified in the temple of Lono. All that the men of his

ship, the _Resolution_, could recover of their commander’s valorous meat

was a few pounds which had been allotted to Kau, chief priest of Lono,

which he and another friendly priest secretly conveyed to them under

cover of darkness. Most of the wan framework, apportioned among the

chiefs according to custom, was eventually restored, and committed with

military honors to the deep.

It has been held that the flesh of Captain Cook was devoured, but this

rumor is disproved by written accounts of officers of the _Resolution_

and the _Discovery_. What probably gave rise to the impression of

gustatory propensities in the Hawaiians at that time is the story that

three hungry youngsters, prowling about during the ghastly ceremonial,

picked up the heart and other organs that had been laid aside, and made

a hearty lunch, taking them to be offal of some sacrificial animal. It

is not recorded whether or not these gruesome giblets were already

roasted! The three children lived to be old men in Lahaina. There seems

to be no proof that the Hawaiians ever were cannibals—with the

exception of the man on Oahu, before mentioned, where he was named

Aikanaka, Man-Eater; whereas there is indisputable evidence that in

extremity many Caucasians have eaten their fellows.

Always a rebellious memory will be mine that I allowed myself to be

dissuaded by the Doctor from climbing the avalanched slope at the base

of the pali in which those canoe-coffined bones of Kealakekua’s dead are

shelved. It is even said that Kekupuohe, wife of Kalaniopuu, who was

king of Hawaii at the time of its discovery by Captain Cook, is interred

here. Such a burial place is rare in the Islands, for more frequently

human relics were secreted beyond discovery, as in the case of the

mighty warrior Kahekili, who died at Waikiki less than twenty years

after Cook’s passing, and whose blanched bones were effectively hidden

in some cave near Kaloko on the North Kona coast. Mine was a perfectly

healthy yearning to brave the face of the cliff and peer into sunless

cobwebby recesses to see what I could see. The open mouths of these

aerie tombs were once barred by upright stakes. The fact that so few are

now thus grated is said to be due to warships having used them as

targets; while sailors rifled the lower caves.

Back on the lava masonry of the steamboat landing at Napoopoo, in the

shade we ate luncheon, dangling our happy heels overside; after which

Mr. Leslie carried us off again to his house, where he showed us the

original Cook “monument,” the slab of vert, sea-worn copper, bearing the

old scratched inscription. A man of deep content is the wealthy Mr.

Leslie, who declares that he prefers life in this dreamy Polynesian

haven, with his tranquil-sweet part-Hawaiian wife, to any place on

earth. Perhaps his philosophy of happiness is somewhat like that of our

Jack, who always comes back to this:

“A man can sleep in but one bed at a time; and he can eat but one meal

at a time. The same with cigarettes, drink, everything. And, best of

all, he can only _love_ one woman at a time ... a long time, if he is

lucky.”

August 26.

Mr. White, debonair and gay, on a nimble cattle pony, led up a

guava-wooded trail that leads to a fair free range of upland, where we

could give rein to the impatient horses, as on the Haleakala

pasture-lands. Higher still, near the edge of the umbrageous woods we

rounded in with a flourish at an inclosure containing a very old frame

house, or connected group of houses of various periods. Here lives Mrs.

Roy, Mrs. White’s part-Hawaiian mother of chiefly lineage.

Never were ranch-house precincts so bewitchingly harmonious. The garden

is terraced shallowly, its grassy divisions hedged with flowering

hibiscus, white and blush, coral, and crimson flame; and all about the

rambling structure, bounded castle-like with a great barrier of

eucalyptus, grows a tended riot of plants—red amaryllis, and glooms of

heliotrope; young bananas, their long leaves like striped ribbons;

tree-ferns in the deep, short-clipped sod; a sober cypress or two; tawny

lilies, with splashes of blood in their hearts; a merry blow of Shirley

poppies, white and crinkly and scarlet-edged like bonbons, and double

rosettes of white and mauve and twilight-purple; steep gables of the

dwelling smothered under climbing roses; and rarest roses blooming about

the steps; flagged walks bordered with violets white and blue,

distilling perfume.

And begonias amazingly everywhere. Begonias big, begonias little;

begonias in sedate rows, pink and white; begonias in groups, and singly;

begonias standing a dozen feet tall swaying like reeds in the wind; why,

the very entrance to the charmed garden is by a gateway of withy

begonias, afire like lanterns dripping carmine; wrist-thick and twenty

feet in length, bent and bound into a triumphal arch of welcome. What

had seemed the enormity of the Molokai begonias receded before these

that were twice their height and girth. And speaking of Molokai reminds

me that a guest at the Whites to-day is a relative of the Myers

family—a magnificent woman, high-featured, high-breasted, with the form

and presence of a goddess and the indefinable Hawaiian hauteur that

dissolves before a smile.

The old house seems made of crannied nooks, and contains curious and

antique furnishings that fared across the Plains or around Cape Horn;

little steps up, little steps down, from room to room; or rooms joined

by short paved walks drifted with flowers.

Later, continuing up Hualalai, we edged along lehua woods that would

make a lumberman dream of untold wealth of sawmills; and I for one

yearned toward the forest primeval of koa, still above, which we had not

time to penetrate. Once this mountain was the property of the Princess

Ruta Keelikolani, granddaughter of Kamehameha.

Native cowboys, with shining eyes and teeth, gay in colored

neckerchiefs, dashed about the pasture, working among the cattle. Upon

the backs of detached ruminating cows sat the ubiquitous and impudent

mynah birds, devouring pestiferous horn-flies. And we malihinis were

amused and edified by the sworn statements of the men of our party, that

the scraggly tails of the Kona horses, which had aroused our polite

curiosity, are shaped by hungry calves patiently chewing this

questionable fodder with scant protest from the larger beasts.

One feature of great human interest is a mammoth wall of large stones,

four feet high, and more than wide enough to accommodate an automobile.

It rose in a single day, by edict of Kamehameha, to inclose four hundred

acres of choice grazing land. The people turned out en masse and toiled

systematically under the genius of organization and the direction of his

lieutenants.

One who has come to believe that the “trade winds make the climate of

Hawaii,” cannot comprehend why, in Kona, lying north and south, where

the trades are cut off by Mauna Loa’s bulk to the east and the dome of

Hualalai to the north, this is the most “abnormally healthy” climate in

the group. Explanation is found in the frequent afternoon and night

rains resulting from the piling up, by a gentle west wind, of banks of

cloud against the high lands. Toward sundown, whatever airs have been

blowing from the west, die out, replaced by an all-night mountain

breeze, chill and refreshing, which makes one draw the blankets close.

August 27.

“The little ship—the little old tub!” Jack fairly crooned, hanging up

the telephone receiver. “It was Captain Warren, and they anchored last

night in Hilo Bay. He says they ran into a stiff gale as soon as they

got out of that Blue Flush calm of yours, and the big schooner that left

Kailua the same day had to double-reef, while our audacious little tub

weathered the big blow under regular working canvas. The captain’s voice

was quite shaky with emotion when he said he was more in love with the

_Snark_ than ever.—Some boat, Mate-Woman, some boat!” And all during

the drive to Kailua to call on Prince and Princess Kalanianaole he kept

bubbling over with his joy in “the little tub.”

Prince Cupid had urged Dr. Goodhue to bring us to the Palace; but the

meeting was doomed through carelessness of a Japanese servant who failed

to deliver the Doctor’s telephoned message; and the couple, to our

disappointment, were absent when we called.

We tied the team in the shade of banyan, and proceeded along the garden

path between white-pillared royal palms to the mauka entrance, where we

knocked again and again. Peering through the ajar door, we saw, at the

farther end of a little reception hall, upon its man-high pedestal the

marble head of King Kalakaua, heroic size, festooned with freshly made

leis of the enamel-green mailé and glowing red roses. What furniture we

could see was of koa and hair-cloth, reminiscent of our grand-parents.

So I was robbed of my opportunity to wander in the square wooden house

of departed as well as deposed Polynesian royalty, that had surperseded

the grass habitations of Hawaii’s undiscovered centuries. It was on the

Kona coast, according to tradition, that the very first white navigators

who flushed these Delectable Isles set their feet—the captain of a

Spanish vessel that was wrecked at Keei, just below Kealakekua Bay. The

only other survivor was his sister, and the natives received them

kindly. Intermarrying, these Castilian castaways became the progenitors

of well-known alii families, one of these being represented by

Kaikioewa, a former governor of Kauai. There is also small doubt that

the Sandwich Islands were discovered also by another Spaniard, Juan

Gaetano, in 1555, since no other Europeans were navigating the Pacific

at that early time.

The Princess’s garden is ravishing—a fragrant crush of heliotrope and

roses and begonias, with shadowy bowers among tall vine-veiled trees.

Our mind’s eye needed only the flower of all—the tropic grace of the

Princess of the Palace.

August 29.

Mr. Tommy White, aided and abetted by Mrs. Tommy, making good the

determination that we should see a real, untarnished-by-haole luau, had

us down once more to the jewel-sanded horseshoe of Keauhou waterside,

and gave us what bids fair to rival all memories of Hawaiian Hawaii that

have yet been ours.

Our one responsibility, at ease on yielding layers of ferns and flowers

and broad ti-leaves that brown hands had spread, was to strike the exact

right human note with the Keauhou dwellers. The essential thing a

foreigner, who would know them, should avoid is the slightest spark of

condescension toward the free, uncapturable spirit-stuff of the race.

Proud, with fine, light scorn of lip and eye, volatile if you will, they

are still unhumiliated by circumstance. Grudges they do not harbor; but

pride bulks large in their natures. Affection spent upon them returns in

tenfold meed of love and confidence that to forfeit would be one of the

few true sins of mankind.

Arriving early to observe the bustle of preparation, we peeped into an

improvised kitchen over by the bank, near which sucking-pigs were

barbecued in native fashion, stuffed with hot stones and wrapped in

ti-leaves and laid among other hot roasting-stones in the ground; and

wahines sat plaiting individual poi-baskets from wide grasses.

The men were approachable, and ready to chat upon the least

encouragement. One in particular was an elegantly mannered man, of fine

form and carriage and handsome face, hair touched with gray at the

temples and corners of eyes sprayed with the kindly wrinkles that come

from much smiling through life. Educated at Punahou College in Honolulu,

he speaks noticeably correct English. Again to-night we observed that

the elderly men are even more distinguished in appearance than their

sons, with unmistakably aristocratic air, something lion-like about

their gray-curled heads, the leonine note softened by smile-wrought

lines and wonderfully sweet expression of large, wide-set, long-lashed

eyes. And in their bearing is a slow stateliness of utter serenity, and

gentlehood, as of souls born to riches of content. Many tend to obesity;

but this superior specimen was slim, and clean-limbed, and muscularly

graceful as a cadet in marching trim.

Mr. Kawewehi, a full-blooded Hawaiian who ran for the Legislature last

year, was cordial as ever and entirely at ease, while his pretty

hapa-paké wife, amiably non-committal at a former meeting, blossomed out

deliciously, talking excellent English and doing much by her unaffected

example to draw the other women from their cool aloofness.

One unforgettable picture I must give: Upon arrival we had observed a

more than ordinarily large and elegant canoe of brilliant black and

yellow, fitted with mast and sail, hauled out upon the sunset-saffron

strand. “The Prince’s canoe,” was the word, and a perfect thing it was

in the semi-torrid scene. And then came Prince Cupid, and we knew, once

and for all, why he was so called. In careless open-breasted fishing

clothes, a faint embarrassment in his otherwise calm expression as he

regretted his absence the day of our call, he was another creature from

the formal Prince of Honolulu. Despite mature years, he looked a

beautiful boy as he stood before us, holding his hat in both tapering

hands, showing a double row of white teeth in a smile that spread like

breaking sunlight to his warm brown eyes. He declined an invitation to

remain to the luau, pleading as excuse his rough attire and that he was

expected home; and by the time we were taking our places around the

feast on the pier, the great barbaric canoe floated alongside and

presently sailed out leisurely, two men resting on the steering-paddles,

their graceful, indolent Prince, crowned with red bugles of stephanotis,

in the stern sheets.

In the past, the physical difference between the nobility—alii—and the

common or laboring people was far more conspicuous than to-day, when

practically all Hawaiians are well nourished. “No aristocracy,” says one

historian, “was ever more distinctly marked by nature.” Death was the

penalty for the most trifling breach of etiquette, such as for a

commoner to remain on his feet at mention of the moi’s (king’s) name, or

even while the royal food or beverage was being carried past. This

stricture was carried even to the extent of punishing by death any

subject who crossed the shadow of the sacred presence or that of his

_halé_, house.

Besides the ordinary household officials, such as wielder of the kahili,

custodian of the cuspidor, masseur (the Hawaiians are famous for their

clever massage, or _lomi-lomi_), as well as chief steward, treasurer,

heralds, and runners, the court of a high chief included priests,

sorcerers, bards and story-tellers, hula dancers, drummers, and even

jesters.

The chiefs were as a rule the only owners of land, appropriating all

that the soil raised, and the fish adjacent to it, to say nothing of the

time and labor of the _makaainana_ (workers) living upon it—a proper

feudal system. The only hold the common people and the petty chiefs had

upon the moi was their freedom to enter, service with some more popular

tyrant; and as wars were frequent, it behooved monarchs not to act too

arbitrarily lest they be caught in a pinch without soldiery.

To dip into the lore of Hawaii, is to be stirred by the tremendous

romance of it all. Visioning the conditions of those days, one sees the

people slaving and sweating for their warlike masters, and, after the

manner of slaves the world over down the past, worshiping the pageantry

supported by their toil, whether of white invention, or that of the most

superb savagery—priceless feather-mantles, ornaments, weapons of

warfare, or red-painted canoes with red sails cleaving the blue of

ocean.

[Illustration: (1) Iao Valley, Island of Maui. (2) Rainbow Falls,

Hawaii.]

Before reclining upon the green-carpeted wharf, we haole guests were

weighted with leis of the starry plumeria, _awapuhi_, in color

deep-cream centered with yellow, in touch like cool, velvety flesh,

clinging caressingly to neck and shoulder. The perfume is not unlike

that of our tuberose, or gardenia, though not quite so heavy.

Half-breathing in the sensuous air, we were conscious of the lapping of

dark waters below, that mirrored the star-lamped zenith.

Our unforced relish of their traditional delicacies had much to do with

the unbending of the natives, both those who sat with us and those who

served. And when we were seen to twirl our fingers deftly in their

beloved poi and absorb it with avidity that was patently honest, the

younger women and girls were captured, ducking behind one another in

giggly flurry at each encounter of smiles and glances. I wonder if they

ever pause to be thankful that they live in the days of _ai noa_, free

eating, as against those of _ai kapu_, tabu eating, which obtained

before the time of Kamehameha II.

The foods were of the finest, and, half-lying, like the Romans, we ate

at our length—and almost consumed our length of the endless variety,

this time without implements of civilized cutlery. We pitied quite

unnecessarily, those who boast that they have lived so-and-so many years

in the Islands and have never even tasted poi—together with most other

good things of the land and sea and air.

Recalling the christening feast at Pearl Lochs, we looked vainly for

some sign of desire on the part of the Hawaiians to dance, and finally

asked Mr. Kawewehi about it. The young people appeared unconquerably

shy, but an old man, grizzled and wrinkled, his dim eyes retrospective

of nearly fourscore years, squatted before us, reenforced with a

rattling dried gourd, and displayed the rather emasculated hula of the

Kalakaua reign—an angular performance of elbows and knees accompanied

by a monotonous, weird chant, the explosive rattling of the gourd

accentuating the high lights. This obliging ancient responded to several

encores; and while the “dance” was different from any we had witnessed,

it seemed a bloodless and decadent example of motion in which was none

of the zest of life that rules the dancing of untrained peoples.

With smiles and imploring looks, and finally, in response to their

tittering protestations of ignorance of the steps, declaring that after

all we believed they did not know the hula, we touched the mettle of

some of the younger maidens. One white-gowned girl of sixteen

disappeared from the line sitting along the stringer-piece of the pier,

and presently, out of the dusk at the land-end, materializing between

the indistinct rows of her people, she undulated to the barbaric

two-step fretting of an old guitar that had strummed throughout.

Directly the social atmosphere underwent a change, vibrating and

warming. Wahines with their sweet consenting faces, and their men,

strong bodies relaxed as they rested among the ferns, jested musically

in speech that has been likened to a gargle of vowels. Another and

younger sprite took form in the shoreward gloom and joined the first,

where the two revolved about each other like a pair of pale moths in the

lantern light. Fluttering before Mrs. Kawewehi, with motions they

invited her to make one of them; but either she could not for

diffidence, or would not, even though her husband sprang into the

charmed space and danced and gestured temptingly before her blushing,

laughing face. A slim old wahine, coaxed by the two girls, whom all the

company seemed eager to exhibit as their choicest exponent of the olden

hula, next stood before us, and held the company breathless with an

amazing and all-too-short dance. Unsmiling, she seemed unconscious of

our presence—twisting and circling, drawing unseen forms to her

withered heart; level eyes and still mouth expressionless, dispassionate

as a mummy’s. She was anything but comely, and far from youthful. But

she could out-dance the best and command the speechless attention of

all.

Came a pause when the guitar trembled on, though it seemed that the

dancing must be done. Just as, reluctantly, we began to gather our leis

and every day senses, in order not to outlive the sumptuous welcome,

into the wavering light there glided a very young girl, slender and

dark, curl-crowned, dainty and lovely as a dryad, who stepped and

postured listlessly with slow and slower passes of slim hands in the

air, as a butterfly opens and shuts its wings on a flower, waiting for

some touch to send it madly wheeling into space.

And he came—the Dancing Faun; I knew him the moment he greeted my eyes.

Black locks curled tightly to his shapely head, his nose was blunt and

broad, eyes wild and wicked-black with fun, and lips full and curled

back from small, regular teeth. I could swear to a pointed ear in his

curls to either side, and that his foot was cloven. I could not see

these things, but knew they must be. His shirt, for even a Faun must

wear a shirt in twentieth century Hawaii, was a frank tatter—a tatter

and nothing more, over his bister, glistening chest. The hands, long and

supple, betokened the getting of an easy livelihood from tropic

branches.

The listless dryad swayed into quickened life, and the last and most

beautiful spectacle of the night was on. I do not try to describe a

hula. To you it may mean one thing, or many; to me, something else, or

many other things. History tells us that the ancient professional

dancers were devotees of a very naughty goddess, Laka. One may read

vulgarity and sordid immorality into it; another infuse it with art and

with poetry. And it is the love-poetry of the Polynesian. A poet sings

because he must. The Hawaiian dances because he cannot refrain from

dancing. Deprived of his mode of motion, he fades away, and in the

process is likely to become immoral where before he was but unmoral, as

a child may be. The page of the history of this people is nearly turned.

Such as they were, they have never really changed—the individuality of

their blood, manifested in their features, their very facial expression,

is not strong enough to persist as a race, but unaltered endures in

proportion to its quantity, largely mixed as it now is with other

strains. The pure-bred Hawaiians are become far-apart and few, dying off

every year with none to fill their gracious places. The page is being

torn off faster and faster, and soon must flutter away.

Holualoa, to Huehue, August 30.

The Doctor, as a final benefaction, waiving inconvenience to himself,

sent us the whole journey to Waimea on the Parker Ranch, in his own

carriage, in charge of the Portuguese coachman.

The first night we were fortunate enough to spend at Huehue, home of the

John Maguires, rich Hawaiian ranchers who had extended the invitation at

the Goodhues’ reception. Lacking such hospitality, the malihini must

travel, either by horse or carriage, or the one automobile stage, a long

distance to any sort of hotel. “They don’t know what they’ve got!” Jack

commented on the ignorance of the American public concerning the

glorious possibilities of this country. “Just watch this land in the

future, when they once wake up!”

Mrs. Maguire, one eighth Hawaiian, is an unmitigated joy, compounded of

sweet dignity and a bubbling vivacity that wipes out all thought of

years and the wavy graying hair that only intensifies the beauty of her

dark eyes—a merry, sympathetic companion, one decides, for all moods

and ages. Her husband is a noble example of the Hawaiian type, like the

descendant of a race of rulers, strong kings, with commanding brow and

eye of eagle, firm mouth, square jaw, and stern aquiline nose, the

lofty-featured countenance gentled by a thatch of thick powder-gray hair

and a benevolent expression.

The Kona Sewing Guild was in full blast when we drew up in the blooming

garden of the rambling house, but I fell napping on a hikiè in the

guest-cottage, tired from a strenuous day of packing, typing—and

traveling, even through such ravishing country, in full view of the

ravishing Blue Flush of sea and sky.

“I hate to wake my poor tired Woman,” Jack’s voice wooed me from sleep

an hour later; “but the most wonderful horse is waiting for you to ride

him.”

“But I’ve no clothes,” as I came back to earth.

“Oh, I’ve got some for you,” he grinned, depositing a scarlet calico

muumuu on the hikiè, “and I’m just dying to see you ride in it!—Mrs.

Maguire has one on, and looks all right.”

Properly adjusted, in a man’s saddle this full garment appears like

bloomers, and I can vouch is most comfortable.

Then to me they led one of Pharaoh’s horses—no other could it be, so

full his eye, so proud his neck, the pricking of his ear so fine; none

but a steed of Pharaoh’s wears quite such flare of nostril, nor looks so

loftily across the plain. Ah, he is something to remember, “Sweet Lei

Lehua,” and I can never forget his brave crest, nor the flick of that

small pointed ear, and the red, red nostril, blowing scented breath of

grass and flowers—sweet as the flower whose name he wears.

Our ride was upon the lava flank of Hualalai and all within the

boundaries of the Maguire possessions, which comprise some 60,000 acres.

My steed, like the Welshman on Haleakala showing yonder above the

clouds, evidenced his sober years only in judgment of head and hoof. We

attacked precarious places of sliding stones and slid down others as

steep and uncertain, brushing lehua and great ferns; into deep,

green-grown blowholes of prehistoric convulsions we peered; and finally,

descending a verdant pinnacle where Mrs. Maguire led for the viewing of

broad downward miles of tumultuous lava to the blue sea, we went

gingerly on a grassy trail beset with snares of slaty lava that tinkled

like glass, over natural bridges of the same brittle-blown substance,

then threaded a sparse lehua wood to the main road.

All the while our hostess, younger hearted than any, was the soul of the

party, a constant incentive to daring climbs or breathless bursts of

speed, just an untired girl in mind and body of her. One could but join

in abandon of enjoyment that comes with swift motion, urging to greater

effort, whirling around curves, going out of the way to leap obstacles.

And which is better, and what constitutes long life: to sit peacefully

with folded hands while the rout goes by a-horseback with laugh and love

and song, walking carefully all one’s days, or to live in heat of blood

and thrill of beauty and every cell of persisting youth, taking high

hazard with sea and sail, mountain and horse, and every adventurous

desire?

Spinning an abrupt curve, our mounts stopped at a gate like shots

against a target, and our gleeful leader spurred at right angles

straight up a four-foot stone wall to the next zigzag of road, we

following willy-nilly in the mad scramble, marveling how we escaped a

spill.

Following the Feast of Horses came the luau—not so-called, for it is

the accustomed dinner of these people who, it seems to me, feed upon

nectar and ambrosia. Fancy the tender fowl, stewed in coconut cream, and

the picked and “lomied” rosy salmon bellies, with rosier fresh tomatoes,

and salmon-pink salt like ground pigeon-blood rubies, and—but the

entirely Hawaiian dinned, served with all the silver and crystal, napery

and formality of a city banquet eludes my pen.

“Do play, Mate,” Jack said in the twilight, where he lounged on the

lanai after dining; “I haven’t heard a grand piano for a long time, in

this lotus loveland of guitars and ukuleles and their delectable airs.”

And so, high upon a sleeping volcano in the Sandwich Isles I sat me down

to Chopin’s and Beethoven’s stately processionals. For once, in this

land of spent fires, we all forewent and forgot the lilt of hulas and

threnodies of dusky love songs, in the brave, deep music of our own

Caucasian blood.

“I haven’t played those things since I studied in Paris,” Mrs. Maguire

said with reminiscence in her sobered eyes; and a “Thank you” came

through the doorway from a visiting clergyman, while a blithe young

judge of the District called for Mendelssohn’s Funeral March while I was

about it.

But Jack, with cigarette dead between his pointed fingers, lay in a long

chair, his wide eyes star-roving in the purple pit of the night sky; for

music always sets him dreaming, and many’s the time I have momentarily

wondered, at concert and opera, if he heard aught but the suggestions of

the opening measures, so busily did he make notes upon whatever those

suggestions had been to his flying brain.

Huehue, to Parker Ranch, August 31.

“The sweetest poi is eaten out of the hau calabash,” “_He mikomiko ka

ai’na oka poi o loko oka umeke hau_,” say the Hawaiians; and our parting

gift from the Maguires was a little calabash of polished, light-golden

wood, out of their cherished hoard.

Then, sped by the warm “Aloha nui oe” we set our faces toward the

expanse of lava that was to be our portion for a day. One’s principal

impression, geographical as well as geological, of the journey, is of

lava, and lava, and more lava—new lava of 1859, old lava, older lava,

oldest lava, and wide waste of inexpressible ruin upon ruin of lava,

lava without end. How present any conception of this resistless,

gigantic fall of molten rock across which, mid-mountain, our road

graded? The general aspect of stilled lava is little different from

photographic portrayal of the living, fluid substance. It cools, and

quickly, in the veriest shapes of its activity, and the traveler who

misses the wonder of a moving mountain-side finds fair representation in

the arrested flood. It needs little imagination to assist the eye to

carry to the brain an illusion of movement in the long red-brown sweep

from mountain top to sea margin. In many places we could see where

hotter, faster streams had cut through slower, wider swaths; and again,

following the line of least resistance, where some swift, deep torrent

had burned its devastating way down between the rocky banks of a gully.

The pahoehoe lava preserves all its swirls and eddies precisely as they

chilled in the long-ago or shorter-ago; while the a-a rears snapping,

flame-like edges against obstructions, or has piled up of its own

coolness in toothed walls. Incalculable, shimmering leagues below,

purple-brown lava rivers lie like ominous shadows of unseen menaces upon

plains of disintegrate eruptive stuff of our starry system that has for

remote ages ceased to resemble lava.

Ribboning this strange, fire-licked landscape our road lay gray-white as

ashes, at times spanning dreadful chasms where once had blown giant

blisters and bubbles. These, chilling too suddenly, had collapsed,

leaving caverns and bridges of material fragile as crystal, layer upon

layer, which at close range looked to be molten metal, shining like

grains of gold and silver mixed with base alloy.

Often our eyes lifted to the azure summer sea with its tracks like

footprints of the winds, or as if the water had been brushed by great

wings. And with that day, meeting the breezes of Windward Hawaii, there

passed my Blue Flush into the limbo of heavenly memories.

Leaving the later flow, we traversed a land of lava so eternally ancient

that it blossoms with fertile growth. Beautiful color of plant life

springs from this seared dust of millenniums—cactus blossoming magenta

and reddish-gold and snow-white; native hibiscus, flaunting tawny flames

on high, scraggly trees of scant foliage; lehua’s crimson-threaded paint

brushes; blue and white morning-glories and patches of crimson flowers,

flung about like velvet rugs. And here one comes upon what remains of a

sandalwood forest that was systematically despoiled by generations of

traders from the time of its discovery somewhere around 1790, according

to Vancouver. By 1816 the ill-considered deforesting of sandalwood had

become an important industry of the Hawaiians, chief and commoner, with

foreigners.

The wood was originally exported to India, though said to be rather

inferior. Then the Canton market claimed the bulk of the aromatic

timber, where it was used for carved furniture, as well as for incense.

Even the roots were grubbed by the avaricious native woodsmen, and trade

flourished until about 1835, when the government awoke to the imminent

extermination of the valuable tree, and put a ban upon the cutting of

the younger growth. But it is not surprising to learn that the tireless

forethought of Kamehameha had long before protested against the

indiscriminate barter, and particularly the sacrifice of the new growth.

The livelong day we had traveled upon privately owned ranches, and at

last found ourselves on Parker Ranch, the largest in the Territory,

approximately 300,000 acres, lying between and on the slopes of the

Kohala Mountains to the north, knobby with spent blowholes, and great

Mauna Kea, reaching into the vague fastnesses of the latter. This grand

estate, estimated at $3,000,000, is the property of one small, slim

descendant of the original John Parker who, with a beautiful Hawaiian

maiden to wife, founded the famous line and the famous ranch, which is a

principality in itself. Perhaps no young Hawaiian beauty, since

Kaiulani, has commanded, however modestly, so conspicuous a place as

that occupied by Thelma Parker.

Although we had gone with humane leisure, the horses fagged as the day

wore. Often we walked to rest them and refresh our own cramped members,

treading rich pasture starred with flowers we did not know, and keeping

an eye to bands of Scotch beef-cattle, some of the 20,000 head with

which little Thelma is credited. After the pampering climate of Kona,

coats and carriage robes were none too warm at the close of day, when we

neared the sizable post-office village of Waimea, headquarters of the

enormous ranch.

Never shall be forgotten that approach to Waimea under Kohala’s

jade-green mountains like California’s in showery springtime; nor the

little craters in plain and valley—red mouths blowing kisses to the

sun; nor yet tenderly painted foothills and sunset cloud-rack, and the

sweet, cool wind and lowing herds.

“It seems like something I have dreamed, long ago,” Jack mused; for,

year in and year out, often in sleep he wanders purposefully in a land

of unconscious mind that his waking eyes have never seen.

Parker Ranch, September 2.

Judging from even our sketchy view of the Parker Ranch, it is reason in

itself for a future visit to Hawaii. The glorious country, with its

invaluable assets, is handled with all the precision of a great

corporation. Through the courtesy of Mr. Thurston, we are enjoying the

hospitality of the manager, Mr. Alfred W. Carter, and his wife, who

dwell in the roomy house of Thelma, now abroad. In our short horseback

ride we saw a few of the fine thoroughbred horses which are raised, one

of the imported stallions being a son of Royal Flush II. Royal Flush II

lives and moves and pursues his golden-chestnut being on the ranch of

Rudolph Spreckles, adjoining our own on Sonoma Mountain.

Louisson Brothers’ Coffee Plantation, Honokaa District, Hawaii,

September 5.

Our next lap was to Honokaa, where we were met by another carriage. The

day’s trip demonstrated a still better realization that the big island

comprises nearly two-thirds of the 6700 square miles of the eight

inhabited islands; as well as the copiously watered fertility of this

windward coast. Leaving Waimea, we continued across the rolling green

plains, whose indefinite borders were lost in Mauna Kea’s misty

foothills. Rain fell soothingly, and often we had glimpses of

fierce-looking, curly-headed Scotch bulls with white faces, vignetted in

breaking Scotch mist into the veriest details of old steel engravings.

Hawaiian cowboys, taking form in the cottony vaporousness, waved and

called to our coachman ere swallowed again.

One cannot encompass Hawaii without stepping upon the feet of one lordly

mountain or another. If it is not the exalted Mauna Kea, it is surely

the hardly less lofty Mauna Loa, or Hualalai.

At any moment in these Islands one may look off to the sea, whether calm

or blue-flushed; or, as here, deep-blue and white-whipped, driven like a

mighty river by the strong and steady trade wind. One never grows fully

accustomed to the startling height of the horizon, which seems always

above eye-level, cradling one’s senses in a vast blue bowl.

At last the road dipped seaward to the bluffs where lies red-roofed,

tree-sheltered Honokaa, headquarters of a great sugar plantation. After

luncheon at the little hotel, we set out upon the almost unbroken climb

of several miles to Louissons’ coffee plantation, where we had been

invited by these two indefatigable brothers. Never have I met but one

man who could surpass in perpetual motion our dear and earnest friend

Alexander Hume Ford, and that man is “Abe” Louisson, who, body and eye

and brain, seems animated by a galvanic battery.

It was a waving, shimmering land of incalculable proportions through

which we ascended, of green so fair that there is no other green like

it—the fabulous sugar-cane so closely standing that it responds to all

moods of the capricious sky, like the pale-green surfaces of mountain

lakes; cane that on the one hand surges out of sight into the mountain

clouds, and on the other floods its fair green clear to the sudden red

verge of cliffs sheering into the blue, high-breasting Pacific. And

every way we turned, there were the sweat-shining, swart foreigners,

Japanese, Portuguese, and what not, in blue-denim livery of labor,

directed by mounted khaki-gaitered _lunas_ (overseers), white or

Hawaiian, or both, under broad sombreros.

We had not been in the high-basemented cottage half an hour, when the

driven enthusiasm of Mr. “Abe” had us out again and among the

magnificent coffee plants; and we learned that a coffee plantation can

be one of the prettiest places under heaven, with its polished

dark-green foliage, head-high and over, crowded with red jewels of

berries, interspersed by an imported shade tree which he calls the

_grevillea_. This tree serves the dual purpose of shading the

plants—which are kept resolutely trimmed to convenient height—and of

fertilizing with its leaves the damp ground under the thick shrubbery.

Nowhere have we seen such luxuriant growth of coffee, and the café noir

was unequaled save for a magic brew we had once drunk in the mountains

of Jamaica.

We were making very jolly over dessert and the thick, black coffee, when

the house seemed seized in an angry grasp and shaken like a gigantic

rat. I never did like earthquakes, and the April eighteenth disaster

which I saw through in California has not strengthened my nerve. Jack,

with expectant face, remained in his seat; but I, as the violence

augmented, stood up and reached for his hand, vaguely wondering why

every one did not run for the outside. The frame building seemed

yielding as a basket—purposely erected that way. At the beginning of

the tremor, the cook and his kokua had come quietly into the room and

held the lamps; and when the second shock was heard grinding through the

mountain Mr. Abe, wishing us to have the full benefit of the harmless

volcanic diversion, rose dramatically, black eyes burning and arms

waving, and cried:

“Here it comes! Listen to it! It’s coming! Hear it! Feel it!”

It was a milder shock, and was followed by a still lighter one,

accompanied by a distant rumbling and grinding in this last living

island of the group.

Of course, our first thought following upon the immediate excitement of

the shake was of the volcanoes. Would Kilauea, which had this long time

dwindled to a breath of smoke, awake? A telephone to Hilo brought no

report of activity. Our first attempts to use the wire were ludicrous

failures, for every Mongolian and Portuguese of the thousands on Hawaii

was yapping and jabbering after his manner, and the effect was as of a

rising and falling murmur of incommunicable human woe, broken here and

there by a sharper or more individual note of trouble. A white man’s

speech carried faintly in the unseen Babel.

Louisson’s to Hilo, September 6.

In the perfumed cool of morning we bade farewell to the hospitable

bachelors, and descended once more from the knees of Mauna Kea to its

feet upon the cliffs. The world was a-sparkle from glinting mountain

brow above purple forest and cloud-ring, down the undulating lap of

rustling cane, to the dimpling sea that ruffled its edges against the

bold coast. Trees, heavy with overnight rain, shook their sun-opals upon

us from leaf and branch, and little rills tinkled across the road. The

air was filled with bird-songs, and in our hearts there was also

something singing for gladness.

Thus far, in our junketing, we have relied for the most part upon saddle

horses and railroad trains, or private conveyances of one sort or

another. Long stretches endured in public vehicles have never tempted.

But to-day’s journeying, in the middle seat of three, luggage strapped

on behind the four-in-hand stage, was a unique experience, and an

excellent chance to observe the labor element. For we traveled in

company with members of its various branches—Hawaiian, Portuguese,

Japanese, and many another breed.

The overcrowding was ludicrous. At some stop on the way, a bevy of

Japanese would swarm into the stage without first a “look-see” to find

if it was already full, literally piling themselves upon us. Jack,

determinedly extricating them and holding firmly to his seat, would say

with laughing eyes and smiling-set lips, while he thrust his big

shoulders this way and that: “I like to look at them, but they’d _camp_

on us if we’d let them!”

The only compromise we made with the overreaching coolie tide was to

take into our seat a sad little Porto Rican cripple, a mere child with

aged and painwrought face, whom the passengers, of whatsoever

nationality, shunned because of the bad repute of his blood in the

Islands; and also a sunny small daughter of Portugal, glorious-eyed and

bashfully friendly. When presented with a big round dollar, she answered

maturely, to his query as to how she would squander it, a laconic:

“School shoes.”

Shades of striped candy! How did her mother accomplish it? Now, the

shrinking Porto Rican lad hobbled straight into a fruit store at the

next halt, reappeared laden with red-cheeked imported apples, and with

transfigured face of gratitude, held up his treasure for us to share.

Jack, with moist eyes, bit his lip. So much for one Porto Rican in

Hawaii. One would like to know _his_ mother, too.

Isabella Bird Bishop has painted a thrilling word-picture of the gulches

of Windward Hawaii in the Hilo District—giant erosions of age-old

cloud-bursts, their precipitous sides hidden in a savage wealth of

vegetation, heavy with tropic perfume. And this day, swinging through

and beyond the coffee and cane of the Hamakua District that adjoins the

Kona, following the patient grades along the faces of stupendous

ravines, descending to bridges over rapturous streams that began and

ended in waterfalls, we remembered how she, long before any bridging, at

the risk of her precious life, forded on horseback these same turbulent

water courses, swollen by freshets. For she was possessed of that same

joy in existence that I know so well, and which, unescorted in a period

when few women braved traveling alone, led her to venture ocean and

island and foreign continent, writing as vividly as she lived.

Only fleeting glimpses we had of the coast—sheer green capes overflung

with bursting waterfalls that dropped rainbow fringes to meet the

blue-and-white frills of surf. “Bearded with falls,” to quote Robert

Louis Stevenson, is this bluffwise coast of the Big Island, and we

envied the _Snark’s_ crew who from seaward had viewed the complete

glory, from surf to mountain head.

Laupahoehoe, “leaf of lava,” was the simple poesy of the

ancient-Hawaiian who named a long, low outthrust at the mouth of a wide

ravine. Weather-softened old houses as well as grass huts stray its

dreamy length, under coco palms etched against the horizon; and the

natives seem to have no business but to bask beneath the blue-and-gold

sky. One lovely thumb-sketch we glimpsed, where a river frolicked past a

thatched hut beneath a leaning coco palm, near which a living bronze

stood motionless—a rare picture in modern Hawaii.

Laupahoehoe, Hakalau, Onomea, each representing a sugar plantation—we

passed them all, and toward the end of day our absurd four-in-hand of

gritty little mules trotted into a fine red boulevard. Just as we had

settled our cramped limbs to enjoy the unwonted evenness of surface, the

driver pulled up in Wainaku, a section of suburban Hilo, before a

seaward-sloping greensward terrace fanned by a “Travelers’ palm,” under

which grazed a golden-coated mare. Here, upon a word sent ahead by

mutual friends in the adorable way of the land, we were again to know

the welcome of perfect strangers—an unequalled hospitality combined of

European and Polynesian ideals by the white peoples who have made this

country their own.

On the steps of an inviting lanai room stood a blue-eyed lady-woman,

sweet and cool and solicitous, with three lovely children grouped about

her slender, blue-Princess-gowned form—Mrs. William T. Balding, whose

husband is connected with the Hilo Sugar Company. Its mill purrs all

hours at Wainaku by the sea.

Refreshed by a bath, and arrayed in preposterously wrinkled ducks and

holoku out of our suit cases, we dined exquisitely with the young couple

in an exquisite dining room hung with fern baskets, the table sparkling

with its perfect appointment, in contrast with the natural wildness of

tropical growth seen through the wide windows.

Shipmans’ Volcano Home, Hawaii, September 7.

Away back in 1790 or thereabout, an American fur-trader named Metcalf,

commanding the snow _Eleanor_, visited the Sandwich Islands on his way

to the Orient, his son, eighteen years of age, being master of a small

schooner, _Fair American_, which had been detained by the Spaniards at

Nootka Sound.

A plot was hatched by some of the chiefs to capture the _Eleanor_, which

was frustrated by Kamehameha, who himself boarded her and ordered the

treacherous chiefs ashore. Following this, a high alii of Kona was

insulted and thrashed with a rope’s-end by Captain Metcalf for some

trifling offense, and vowed vengeance upon the next vessel that should

come within his reach.

The little snow crossed Hawaii Channel to Honuaula, Maui, where a chief

of Olowalu with his men one night stole a boat and killed the sailor

asleep in it, afterward breaking up the boat for the nails. Metcalf set

sail for Olowalu, where, under mask of trading with the natives, he

turned loose a broadside of cannon into the flock of peaceful canoes

surrounding the _Eleanor_, strewing the water with dead and dying.

After this wanton massacre of innocent islanders, Metcalf returned to

Hawaii and lay on and off Kealakekua Bay waiting for the _Fair

American_, which had by now arrived off Kawaihae, the seaport of the

present Parker Ranch, which we had seen when we passed through.

Chief Kameeiamoku went out with a fleet of canoes as if to trade, and

when the eighteen-year-old skipper of the schooner was off guard, threw

him outboard and dispatched the crew with the exception of Isaac Davis,

the mate.

Simultaneously, John Young, the original of the Youngs of Hawaii, found

himself detained ashore, and all canoes under tabu by orders of

Kamehameha, in order that Metcalf should not hear of the loss of his son

and the schooner. The _Eleanor_ continued lying off and on, firing

signals, for a couple of days, and finally sailed for China.

John Young and Isaac Davis were eventually raised by Kamehameha to the

rank of chiefs, endowed with valuable tracts of land; and they in turn

lent the great moi their service of brain and hand in council and war,

though carefully guarded for years whenever a foreign keel hove in

sight.

Small cannon, looted from the _Fair American_ as well as from other

vessels which had been “cut out,” were of priceless worth in the

experienced hands of the white men in enabling Kamehameha eventually to

win his war of conquest, especially over the Maui armies under the sons

of Kahekili.

All of which is preamble to the pleasant fact that we are enviable

guests of Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Shipman, of Hilo, at their volcano

residence, Mrs. Shipman being the granddaughter of the gallant Isaac

Davis. Also we find she is half-sister to our friend Mrs. Tommy White.

Such a healthy, breezy household it is; and such a wholesome, handsome

brood of young folk, under the keen though indulgent eye of this

motherly deep-bosomed woman. Her three fourths British ancestry keeps

firm vigilance against undue demonstration of the ease-loving strain of

wayward sunny Polynesian blood she has brought to their dowry.

The tropic wine in her veins has preserved her from all age and decay of

spirit. During this day and evening I have more than once failed to

resist my desire to lay my tired head upon her breast, where it has been

made amply welcome.

A social and domestic queen is Mrs. Shipman, and right sovranly she

reigns over her quiet, resourceful Scotch spouse, in whose contented

blue eye twinkles pride in her efficient handling of their family.

Although models of discipline and courtesy, their offspring are brimming

with hilarious humor, while ofttimes their mother’s stately,

silken-holokued figure is the maypole of a dancing, prancing romp. Those

holokus are the care of the two elder daughters, who never tire of

planning variations of pattern and richness, with wondrous garniture of

lace and embroidery.

Mrs. Shipman—and again we are in Kakina’s debt—had telephoned our

latest hostess to extend an invitation to this suburban home; and

according to arrangement Jack and I met her on the up-mountain train

from Hilo to the terminal station, whence the Shipman carriage carried

us ten miles farther to this high house in a garden smothered in

tree-ferns.

Today we had our first glimpse of Hilo, the second city of the

Territory, on its matchless site at the feet of Mauna Loa, divided by

two rivers, the Wailuku tearing its way down a deep and tortuous gorge.

Nothing could be more impressive than the pretty town’s background of

steadily rising mountain of sugar cane and forest and twisted lava-flow.

The rivers are spanned by steel bridges, the main streets broad and

clean and shaded by enormous trees, with many branching lanes

over-arched by blossoming foliage and hedged with vines and shrubbery.

Hilo Harbor was once called after Lord Byron, cousin of the poet, who

nearly a century ago dropped the anchor of his frigate _Blonde_ in the

offing, and surveyed the bay as well as the Volcano Kilauea. Captain

Vancouver, that thoroughgoing benefactor of Polynesia, saw the

possibilities of this port, for he wrote:

“Byron Bay will no doubt become the site of the capital of the

island. The fertility of the district of Hilo, ... the excellent

water, and abundant fish pools which surround it, the easy

access it has to the sandalwood district, and also to the

sulphur, which will doubtless soon become an object of commerce,

and the facilities it affords for refitting vessels, render it a

place of great importance.”

It was the _Blonde_ which brought back in that year of 1825, to his

native land the remains of Kamehameha II, Liholiho, and his queen,

Kamamalu, from England, where they had been made much of at court. Both

fell victims to measles—always one of the deadliest of diseases to

islanders throughout the South Seas.

Poor things! Three years before, this favorite queen of Liholiho,

Kamamalu, on the last day of a long revel, had been the most gorgeous

object ever described by a reverend missionary:

“The _car of state_ in which she joined the processions passing in

different directions consisted of an elegantly modeled whaleboat

fastened firmly to a platform of wicker work thirty feet long by twelve

wide, and borne on the heads of seventy men. The boat was lined, and the

whole platform covered, first with imported broadcloth, and then with

beautiful patterns of tapa or native cloth of a variety of figures and

rich colors. The men supporting the whole were formed into a solid body

so that the outer rows only at the sides and ends were seen; and all

forming these wore the splendid scarlet and yellow feather cloaks and

helmets of which you have read accounts; and than which, scarce anything

can appear more superb. The only dress of the queen was a scarlet silk

_pa’u_ or native petticoat, and a coronet of feathers. She was seated in

the middle of the boat and screened from the sun by an immense Chinese

umbrella of scarlet damask, richly ornamented with gilding, fringe and

tassels, and supported by a chief standing behind her, in a scarlet

_malo_ or girdle, and feather helmet. On one quarter of the boat stood

Karimoku (Kalaimoku) the Prime Minister, and on the other Naihe, the

national orator, both also in malos of scarlet silk and helmets of

feathers, and each bearing a kahili or feathered staff of state near

thirty feet in height. The upper parts of these kahilis were of scarlet

feathers so ingeniously and beautifully arranged on artificial branches

attached to the staff as to form cylinders fifteen or eighteen inches in

diameter and twelve to fourteen feet long; the lower parts or handles

were covered with alternate rings of tortoise shell and ivory of the

neatest workmanship and highest polish.”

King Liholiho had a very engaging streak of recklessness that more than

once spread consternation amongst his following. As once in 1821, when

he left Honolulu in an open boat for a short trip to Ewa. The boat was

crowded with thirty attendants, including two women. But when off

Puuloa, he refused to put in to the lagoon, and kept on into the very

lively water around Barber’s Point. Then, with royal disregard of the

fear and protests of his entourage, without water or provisions, he set

the course for Kauai, ninety miles of strong head wind and sea.

“Here is your compass!” he cried to the helmsman, flinging up his right

hand, the fingers spread. “Steer by this!—And if you return with the

boat, I shall swim to Kauai, alone!”

Good seamanship and luck vindicated him, and they arrived safely off

Waimea, Kauai, after a night of peril. And to think that the _measles_

should have had their way with such a prince as that!

From the second station out of Hilo, moored near the main wharf, we

could make out the dear little _Snark_.

The observation car was filled with well-to-do Hilo residents bound for

the week-end at their volcano lodges, and I could see Jack planning two

more island homes.

To Kilauea, at last, at last—my first volcano, albeit a more or less

disappointing Kilauea these days, without visible fire, the pit,

Halemaumau, only vouchsafing an exhibition of sulphurous smoke and

fumes. But living volcano it is, and much alive or little, does not

greatly matter. Besides, one may always hope for the maximum since

Kilauea is notoriously capricious.

For eighteen miles the track up from Hilo slants almost imperceptibly,

so gradual is the ascent through dense forest, largely of tree ferns,

and, latterly, dead lehua overspread sumptuously with parasitic ferns

and creepers. There seems no beginning nor end to the monster island.

Despite the calm, vast beauty of many of its phases, one cannot help

thinking of it as something sentient and threatening; of the time when

it first heaved its colossal back out of the primordial slime. And it is

still an island in the making.

The carriage, sent up the day before from Hilo, was driven by one Jimmy,

a part-Hawaiian, part-Marquesan grandson of Kakela, a Hawaiian

missionary to the Marquesas group, whose intervention saved Mr. Whalon,

mate of an American vessel, from being roasted and eaten by the

cannibals of Hiva-oa. Jimmy’s grandfather was rewarded by the personal

gift of a gold watch from Abraham Lincoln, in addition to a sum of money

from the American Government. “And don’t forget, Mate,” Jack reminded

me, “your boat is next bound to the Marquesas!”

It was a hearty crowd that sat at dinner; and imagine our smacking

delight in a boundless stack of ripe sweet corn-on-the-cob mid-center of

the bountiful table! Among all manner of Hawaiian staples and

delicacies, rendered up by sea and shore, we found one new to us—stewed

ferns. Not the fronds, mind, but the stalks and stems and midribs.

Served hot, the slippery, succulent lengths are not unlike fresh

asparagus. The fern is also prepared cold, dressed as a salad.

The father of his flock rode in late from one of the headquarters of his

own great cattle ranch, PuuOO, on Mauna Kea. These estates, in the royal

manner of the land, often extend from half the colossal height of one or

the other of the mountains, bending across the great valley to the

nether slope of the sister mount, in a strip the senses can hardly

credit, to the sea. This enables a family to enjoy homes from high

altitudes, variously down to the seaside.

The flock as well as its maternal head rose as one to make their good

man comfortable after his long rough miles in the saddle. In a crisp

twilight, the men smoked on the high lanai, and the rest of us breathed

the invigorating mountain air. It was hard to realize the nearness of

this greatest of living volcanoes. Presently Jack and I became conscious

of an ineffably faint yet close sound like “the tiny horns of Elfland

blowing.” Crickets, we thought, although puzzled by an unwontedly

sustained and resonant note in the diminutive bugling. And we were

informed, whether seriously I know not, that the fairy music proceeded

from landshells (Achatinella), which grow on leaves and bark of trees,

some 800 species being known. Certainly there _are_ more things in earth

and heaven—and these harmonious pixie conches, granting it was they,

connoted the loftier origin. Jack’s eyes and mouth were dubious:

“I ha’e ma doots,” he softly warned; “but I hope it _is_ a landshell

orchestra, because the fancy gives you so much pleasure.”

September 8.

Kilauea, “The Only,” has a just right to this distinguished

interpretation of its name, for it conforms to no preconceived idea of

what a volcano should be. Not by any stretch of imagination is it

conical; and it fails by some nine thousand feet of being, compared with

the thirteen-odd-thousand-foot peak on the side of which it lies, a

mountain summit; its crater is not a bowl of whatsoever oval or circle;

nor has it ever, but once, to human knowledge, belched stone and

ashes—a hundred and fifty years ago when it wiped out the bulk of a

hostile army moving against Kamehameha’s hordes, thus proving to the

all-conquering chief that the Goddess Pélé, who dwells in the House of

Everlasting Fire, Halemaumau, was on his side.

Different from Mauna Loa’s own skyey crater, which has inundated Hawaii

in nearly every direction, Kilauea, never overflows, but holds within

itself its content of molten rock. It has, however, been known to break

out from underneath. The vertical sides, from 100 to 700 feet high,

inclose nearly eight miles of flat, collapsed floor containing 2650

acres, while the active pit, a great well some 1000 feet in diameter, is

sunk in this main level.

In the forenoon we visited the Volcano House on the yawning lip of the

big crater, and sat before a roomy stone fireplace in the older section,

where Isabella Bird and many another wayfarer, including Mark Twain,

once toasted their toes of a nipping night.

From the hotel lanai we looked a couple of miles or so across the sunken

lava pan to Halemaumau, from which a column of slow, silent, white vapor

rose like a genie out of underworld Arabian Nights, and floated off in

the light air currents. No fire, no glow—only the ghostly, thin smoke.

And this inexorable if evanescent breath of the sleeping mountain has

abundant company in myriad lesser banners from hot fissures over all the

surrounding red-brown basin, while the higher country, variously green

or arid, shows many a pale spiral of steam.

Rheumatic invalids should thrive at the Volcano House, for this natural

steam is diverted through pipes to a bath-house where they may luxuriate

as in a Turkish establishment; and there is nothing to prevent them from

lying all hours near some chosen hot crack in the brilliant red earth

that sulphurous exudation has incrusted with sparkling yellow and white

crystals.

Having arranged with Mr. Demosthenes, Greek proprietor of this house as

well as the pretty Hilo Hotel, for a guide to the pit later on, Mrs.

Shipman directed her coachman farther up Mauna Loa—the “up” being

hardly noticeable—to see thriving as well as dead koa forest, and also

the famous “tree molds.” A prehistoric lava-flow annihilated the big

growth, root and branch, cooling rapidly as it piled around the trees,

leaving these hollow shafts that are faithful molds of the consumed

trunks.

The fading slopes of Mauna Loa, whose far from moribund crater is second

in size only to Kilauea’s, beckoned alluringly to us lovers of saddle

and wilderness. One cannot urge too insistently the delusive eye-snare

of Hawaii’s heights, because an elastic fancy, continuously on the

stretch, is needful to realize the true proportions. Today, only by

measuring the countless distant and more distant forest belts and other

notable features on the incredible mountain side could we gain any

conception of its soaring vastitude.

For a time the road winds through rolling plains of pasture studded with

gray shapes of large, dead trees, and then comes to the sawmills of the

Hawaii Mahogany Company. Here we went on foot among noble living

specimens of the giant koa, which range from sixty to eighty feet, their

diameters a tenth of their height, with wide-spreading limbs—beautiful

trees of laurel-green foliage with moon-shaped, leaf-like bracts. It was

in royal canoes of this acacia, often seventy feet in length, hollowed

whole out of the mighty boles, that Kamehameha made his conquest of the

group, and by means of which his empire-dreaming mind planned to subdue

Tahiti and the rest of the Society Group. As a by-product, the koa

furnishes bark excellent for tanning purposes.

[Illustration: (1) Alika Lava Flow, 1919. (2) Pit of Halemanman.]

Great logs, hugely pathetic in the relentless clutch of machinery, were

being dragged out by steel cable and donkey-engine, and piled in

enormous and increasing heaps. Jack, who is inordinately fond of fine

woods if they are cut unshammingly thick, left an order for certain

generous table-top slabs to be seasoned from logs which we chose for

their magnificent grain and texture.

In addition to their flourishing koa business, these mills are turning

out five hundred ohia lehua railroad ties per day, and filling orders

from the States. But one can easily predict a barren future for the

forests of Hawaii if no restraint, as now, is enforced in the selection

of trees.

In the bright afternoon, horseback, with a Hawaiian guide, we made

descent into Kilauea.

The morning’s cursory view had been no preparation for the beautiful

trail, on which we were obliged to brush aside tree-branches and ferns

and berry bushes in order to see the cracking desolation of the basin.

Abruptly enough, however, we debouched upon its floor, under the stiff

wall we had descended, now hundreds of feet overhead. Before us lay a

crusted field of copperish dull-gold, where whiffs and plumes of white

rose near and far from awesome fissures—a comfortless waste without

promise of security, a treacherous valley of fear, of lurking hurt, of

extermination should a foot slip.

On a well-worn pathway, blazed in the least dangerous places, we

traversed the strange, hot earth-substance. The horses, warily sniffing,

seemed to know every yard of the way as accurately as the tiny Hawaiian

guide. But I recalled Christian in the Valley of the Shadow, for at

every hand yawned pitfalls large and small and most fantastic—devilish

cracks issuing ceaseless scalding menace, broken crusts of cooled

lava-bubble of metallic dark opalescence; jagged rents over which we

hurried to avoid the hot, gaseous breath of hissing subterranean

furnaces.

Now and then the guide requested us to dismount, and then led, crawling,

into caverns of unearthly writhen forms of pahoehoe lava, weirdly

beautiful interiors—bubbles that had burst redly in the latest overflow

of Halemaumau into the main crater. On through the uncanny, distorted

lavascape cautiously we fared under a cloud-rifted sky, and finally left

the horses in a corral of quarried lava, thence proceeding afoot to the

House of Fire.

Perched on the ultimate, toothed edge, we peered into a baleful gulf of

pestilent vapors rising, forever rising, light and fine, impalpable as

nightmare mists from out a pit of destruction. Only seldom, when the

slight breeze stirred and parted the everlasting, unbottled vapors, were

we granted a fleeting glimpse, many hundreds of feet below on the bottom

of the well, of the plummetless hole that spills upward its poisonous

breath. If the frail-seeming ledge on which we hung had caved, not one

of us could have reached bottom alive—the deadly fumes would have done

for us far short of that.

A long silent space we watched the phenomenon, thought robbed of

definiteness by our abrupt and absolute removal from the blooming,

springing, established world above the encircling palisade of dead and

dying planetary matter. Jack’s comment, if inelegant, was fit, and

without intentional levity:

“A hell of a hole,” he pronounced.

Pélé, Goddess of Volcanoes, with her family, constituted a separate

class of deities, believed to have emigrated from Samoa in ancient days,

and taken up their abode in Moanalua, Oahu. Their next reputed move was

to Kalaupapa, Molokai, thence to Haleakala, finally coming to rest on

the Big Island. In Halemaumau they made their home, although stirring up

the furies in Mauna Loa and Hualalai on occasion, as in 1801, when

unconsidered largess of hogs and sacrifices was vainly thrown into the

fiery flood to appease the _huhu_ (angry) goddess. Only the sacrifice of

a part of Kamehameha’s sacred hair could stay her wrath, which cooled

within a day or two.

Many, doubtless, have there been of great men and women in the

Polynesian race; but the fairest complement to the greatest, Kamehameha,

seems to have been that flower of spiritual bravery, Kapiolani. A high

princess of Hawaii, she performed what is accounted one of the greatest

acts of moral courage ever known—equal to and even surpassing that of

Martin Luther. Woman of lawless temperament, her imperious mind became

interested in the tenets of Christianity, and swiftly she blossomed into

a paragon of virtue and refinement, excelling all the sisterhood in her

intelligent adoption of European habits of thought and living.

Brooding over the unshakable spell of Pélé upon her people, in defiance

of their dangerous opposition, as well as that of her husband, Naihe,

the national orator, she determined to court the wrath of the Fire

Goddess in one sweeping denunciation and renunciation. We have it,

however, that Naihe later cultivated an aloha for the missionaries, and

was buried where are now only the ruined foundations of the first

mission station, established by Ely and Ruggles in 1824 and 1828, mauka

of Cook Monument.

It was almost within our own time, in 1824, when she set out on foot

from Kaawaloa on Kealakekua Bay, a weary hundred and fifty miles, to

Hilo. Word of the pilgrimage was heralded abroad, so that when she came

to Kilauea, one of the pioneer missionaries, Mr. Goodrich, was already

there to greet her. But first the inspired princess was halted by the

priestess of Pélé, Who entreated her not to go near the crater,

prophesying certain death should she violate the tabus. Kapiolani met

all argument with the Scripture, silencing the priestess, who confessed

that _ke akua_, the deity, had deserted her.

Kapiolani proceeded to Halemaumau. There in an improvised hut she spent

the prayerful night; and in the morning, undeserted by her faithful

train of some fourscore persons, descended over half a thousand feet to

the “Black Ledge,” where, in full view and heat of the grand and awful

spectacle of superstitious veneration, unflinchingly she ate of the

votive berries consecrate to the dread deity. Casting outraging stones

into the burning lake, she fearlessly chanted:

“Jehovah is my God!

He kindled these fires!

I fear thee not, Pélé!

If I perish by the anger of Pélé,

Then Pélé may you fear!

But if I trust in Jehovah, who is my God,

And he preserve me when violating the tabus of Pélé,

Him alone must you fear and serve!”

Vision how this truly glorious soul then knelt, surrounded by the bowed

company of the faithful, in adoration of the Living God, while their

mellow voices, solemn with supreme exaltation, rose in praise. One

cannot help wondering if Mr. Goodrich, fortunate enough to experience

such epochal event, was able, over and above its moral and religious

significance, to sense the tremendous romance of it.

Scarcely less illuminating, was the conversion of that remarkable woman,

Kaahumanu, favorite wife of Kamehameha, to whom I have already referred

as one of the most vital feminine figures in Polynesian annals. Far

superior in intellect to most of the chiefs, she had been created regent

upon the demise of her husband, ruling with an iron will, haughty and

overbearing.

At first disdainful of the missionaries, finally her interest was

enlisted in educational matters, whereupon with characteristic abandon

she threw herself into the learning of the written word as well as the

spoken. An extremist by nature, born again if ever was human soul, from

1825 to her death in Manoa Valley, Honolulu, in June of 1832, she held

herself dedicate to the task of personally spreading virtue and industry

throughout the Islands. Her last voyage was to pay a visit to Kapiolani,

after which she lived to receive the fourth re-enforcement of American

missionaries, who arrived in the _Averick_ a month before her passing.

The crowning triumph of her dying hours was to hold in her fingers the

first complete copy of the New Testament in the Hawaiian tongue.

Alexander writes:

“... Her place could not be filled, and the events of the next

few years (of reaction, uncertainty, and disorder in internal

affairs) showed the greatness of the loss which the nation had

sustained. The ‘days of Kaahumanu’ were long remembered as days

of progress and prosperity.”

And yet, according to all research, the ancient Hawaiians were

essentially a religious people according to their lights. As already

said, almost every important undertaking was led by prayer to widely

diverse gods, unfortunately not all beneficent. The “witch doctor,” or

_kahuna_, exerting a disastrous influence in all phases of racial

development, has not to this day entirely ceased to blight the minds, to

the actual death, of certain classes. “Praying to death” is the most

potent principle of kahunaism, and in the past played an important part

in holding down the population of this never-too-prolific race. One

prayer alone, related at length by J. S. Emerson, enumerates eleven

methods of causing death to any subject selected, and illustrates the

unsleeping brain and artistry of the sorcerers, “assassins by prayer,”

who invented it. Still, kahunas were not an altogether enviable faction

in the past, since on occasion they employed their own mental medicine

against one another. A certain class of these metaphysicians bore a

reputation of being more like evil spirits than human beings, so feared

and hated that their practices constituted a boomerang, resulting in

themselves being stoned to death.

All the foregoing, and more, we lazily discussed at length on the

precarious shelf in Pélé’s mansion, though often speech was interrupted

by sulphur fumes that blinded and suffocated. Once more in the pure air,

we agreed that even in the quiescent mood of its least spectacular

aspect, Kilauea is more than well worth a long voyage.

At the Volcano House, Mr. Demosthenes led the way to his guest book in

the long glass sun-room, and showed many celebrated autographs, reaching

back into the years. Jack, upon request, added his own sprawling,

legible signature that always seems so at variance with his small hand.

With a friend, our joint contribution was as follows, Jack leading off:

“‘It is the pit of hell,’ I said.

“‘Yes,’ said Cartwright (another guest). ‘It is the pit of hell. Let us

go down.’

“‘And where Jack goes, there go I.’ So I followed them down.”

Next Day.

This bright, blue and crystal morning, despite the bustle of packing for

the return to Hilo, Mrs. Shipman was found seated amidst cut flowers of

her own tender care, weaving crisp leis for our shoulders and hats. That

in itself was not surprising; but in view of the fact that she was to

accompany us, it seemed the very acme and overflow of hospitality. Jack,

gazing upon this mother-of-many, his eyes brimming with appreciation,

broke out: “To me, Mother Shipman is the First Lady of Hawaii!”

To the garlands were added necklaces of strung berries, bright blue and

hard as enamel, and strands of tiny round rosebuds, exquisite as pale

corals from Naples. It was a custom in less strenuous years to present

these plant-gems laid in jewel cases of fresh banana bark split

lengthwise, the inside of which resembles nothing so well as

mother-of-pearl.

And so, wreathed in color and perfume, we rumbled down the fragrant

mountain, ourselves a moving part of the prevalent luxuriance of flower

and fern and vine. One mile is as another for unspoiled beauty, though

turns in the magical pathway open up pictures that surpass beauty if

this may be. Great trees, living or dead, their weird roots half above

ground, form hanging gardens of strange blooms and tendrilly creepers

imagined of other planets or the pale dead moon. Giant ferns, their

artificial-looking pedestals set inches-deep in moss on fallen trunks,

crowd the impenetrable, dank undergrowth. Climbing-palms net the forest

high and low with fantastic festoons, and star the glistening wildwood

with point-petaled waxen blossoms of burnt-orange luster, while the

decorative _ie-ie_ sets its rust-colored candelabra on twisted trunk and

limb. If you never beheld else in all Hawaii Nei, the Volcano Road would

impress a memory of one of the most marvelous journeys of a lifetime. Of

the thirty miles, the twenty nearest to Hilo wind through this virgin

forest garden, into the picturesque outskirting lanes of the old town.

If I mistake not, Kakina, when Minister of the Interior, was the pioneer

road-builder of this region. Before that, men and women made their way

on foot or horseback; and Mrs. Shipman relates how she carried her

babies on the saddle before her.

When the carriage left the bridge that crosses Wailuku’s roaring gorge

into the Shipmans’ driveway to their castle-white house overlooking

Hilo, a pair of white-gowned daughters, brunette Clara, and Caroline

tawny-blonde, ran to meet mother and father and younger ones as if from

long absence, and lo, also Mary, now Mrs. English, who proved to be an

old classmate of Jack’s in the Oakland High School. Behind them, Uncle

Alec, another hale example of Hawaii’s beneficence to the old, stood

apple-cheeked and smiling under his thatch of vital, frosty hair, and

joined in a welcome that seemed to seal us forever their very own.

Wainaku, September 15.

As often happens, one of our giddiest experiences came through a

remembered suggestion of Mr. Ford, who has long wished to coast the

cane-flumes of the Big Island. Jack made a tentative bid to the Baldings

for this rather startling entertainment, and the pair entered into the

spirit of the idea, which, however, was not altogether new to them.

One of the flimsy aqueducts runs just beyond their rear fence, on the

seaward slope; and any week-day we can follow with our eyes the loose

green faggots slipping noiselessly toward the toothed maw of the sugar

mill, the whistle of which measures the working hours of its employees.

To the right is a gulch, crossed, perhaps two hundred feet in air, by

the flume’s airy trestle; and over this, in swimming-suits, a merry

party of us essayed the narrow footboard that accompanies the flume

elbow high at one’s side.

Each had his or her own method of preserving balance, mental and bodily,

above the unsettling depths. Jack sustained his confidence by letting

one hand slide lightly along the edge of the flume, with the result that

his palm, still calloused from the _Snark’s_ ropes, picked up an

unnoticed harvest of finest splinters that gave us an hour’s work to

extract. My system was first deliberately to train my eyes on the

receding downward lines to the tumbling gulch-stream, and at intervals,

as I walked, to touch hand momentarily to the flume. Martin, of the

_Snark_, debonair stranger to system of any sort under any

circumstances, paced undaunted halfway across, and suddenly fell

exceeding sick, grasping the waterway with both hands until the color

flowed back into his ashen face.

The wooden ditch is just wide enough in which to sit with elbows close,

and the water flows rapidly on the gentle incline. If one does not sit

very straight, he will progress on one hip, and probably get to laughing

beyond all hope of righting himself. With several persons seated a

hundred yards apart, the water is backed up by each so that its speed is

much decreased, and there is little difficulty in regulating one’s

movements and whatever speed is to be had—and mind the nails! Supine,

feet-foremost, arms-under-head, the maximum is obtained; sit up, and it

slackens.

It was capital fun, and, safely on the ground once more at our starting

point, Jack was so possessed with the sport that he telephoned to Hilo

for “hacks” to convey us a mile or so up the road to a point where the

flume crosses. A laughable party were we: the men, collarless, with

overcoats on top of their dripping suits, the women also in wet garments

under dry ulsters.

In a sweltering canefield we were directed how to build small, flat

bundles of the sweet-smelling sugar stems; then still with the fear of

nails, however smoothed and flattened, strong upon us, remembering

tragical cellar-doors of childhood, we embarked upon our sappy green

rafts.

Picture lying on your back, the hour near sunset, in a tepid stream of

clear mountain water, slipping along under the bluest of blue skies with

golden-shadowed clouds, breathing the sun-drenched air; then lifting

slowly to glance, still moving and strangely detached, over the edge, to

canefields far beneath and stretching from timber line to sea rim;

picking out rocky water-courses, toy bridges and houses, and Lilliputian

people going about their business on the verdant face of earth; while

not far distant a gray-and-gold shower-curtain rainbow-tapestried, blows

steadily to meet you in midair, tempering the vivid peacock hues of sea

and sky and shore. In the void betwixt ourselves and the shimmering

green earth, ragged bundles of cane, attached to invisible wires, drawn

as by a spell toward the humming mill at sea-rim, looked for all the

world like fleeing witches on broomsticks, with weird tattered garments

straight behind. You glide in an atmosphere of fantasy, “so various, so

beautiful, so new,” in which every least lovely happening is the most

right and natural, no matter how unguessed before.

Over-edge and on the ground again, at exactly the proper spot to obviate

feeding one’s shrinking toes into the cane grinder, one can only think

of a longer ride next time—perhaps with a ten-mile-away start.

Belike our latest skipper is a better man at sea than ashore. Certain

rumors lead us to this hazard. Perhaps a professional sailor is always

“a sailor ashore”; and doubtless the captain has by now read my

easy-going husband well enough to know that he will not be left to

settle the personal bills incurred in Hilo over and above his salary.

Hilo, October 7.

Tomorrow the dream-freighted _Snark_, carrying only three of her initial

adventurers, Jack, Martin Johnson, and myself, sails from Hilo for the

Marquesas Islands lying under the Line, toward which Jack’s sea-roving

spirit has yearned from boyhood, since first he devoured Melville’s

tale, “Typee,” of months guarded in the cannibal valley on Nuka-Hiva. I,

even, have early memories of the same incomparable record. And soon, by

the favor of wind and current, we shall drop our modern patent hook in

Melville’s very anchorage at Taiohae Bay, which was also that of Robert

Louis Stevenson’s _Casco_ in later years; and together we shall quest

inland to Typee Vai.

Besides the captain, there is a new Dutch sailor, Herrmann de Visser,

delft-blue of eye, and of a fair white-and-pinkness of skin that no

lifetime of sea-exposure has tarnished. The berth of the sorely

regretted Tochigi, who could never outlive seasickness, is occupied by a

brown manling of eighteen, Yoshimatsu Nakata, a moon-faced subject of

the Mikado, who speaks, and kens not, but one single word of English,

same being the much overtaxed Yes; but his blithe eagerness to cover all

branches of the expected service promises well. Martin has been

graduated from galley into engine-room; and Wada, a Japanese chef of

parts, bored with routine of schooner schedule between San Francisco and

Hilo, is in charge of our “Shipmate” range and perquisites in the tiny,

below-deck galley.

We had confidently assumed, after four months’ repairing in Honolulu,

that the new break in the seventy-horse-power engine could easily be

mended, and that in a week or ten days at most we might resume the

voyage. But alas, as fast as one weakness was dealt with another

appeared, until even that long-suffering patience which Jack displays in

the larger issues, was worn to a thread. At times I could see that he

was restless and unhappy, though he worked doggedly at his novel.

Among other exasperating discoveries, the cause of a hitherto

unaccountable pounding of the engine was found to lie in an awryness of

the bronze propeller blades, probably caused at the time the yacht was

allowed to fall through the inadequate ways in the shipyard at San

Francisco. This corrected, something else would go wrong, until we

became soul-sick of sailing dates and hope deferred.

One day, packed and ready for an early departure, Jack, who had answered

the telephone ring, called that the captain wanted to talk to me. As I

passed Jack whimsically remarked: “I hope it isn’t something so bad he

doesn’t want to break it to _me_!”

It was precisely that, and the captain’s opening words made me swallow

hard and brace for the worst.

Some day I may learn that in _Snark_ affairs nothing is too dreadfully

absurd nor absurdly dreadful to occur. This time the five-horse-power

engine that runs the lights had fractured its bedplate, and the repairs

would hold the _Snark_ in port at least a week longer. This engine and

the big one are of different makes, built in different parts of the

United States; and yet each had been set in a flawed bedplate! Jack was

forced to laugh. “I see these things happen, but I don’t believe them!”

he repeated an old remark. We named no more sailing dates for a

while—until to-day, when _almost_ we believe we shall get away

to-morrow at two o’clock. In our cool bathroom lie the farewell leis, of

roses, and violets, mailé and ginger, that the Shipman girls, entirely

undiscouraged by the remembrance of more than one withered supply, have

already woven.

In face of _Snark_ annoyance, our more than kind friends have seemed to

redouble their efforts to beguile us from the not unreasonable fear of

outstaying our welcome. Always the carriage is at our disposal, and

beautiful saddlers.

One day the girls have taken us horseback to see where the latest

lava-flow encroached to within five miles of the town, threatening to

engulf it. This having been in 1881, the inhabitants probably thought

Mother Shipton’s notorious prophecy was coming to pass.

Another fine afternoon, to Rainbow Falls we rode, to which no

photograph, nor even painting, can do justice, because the approach is

impossible to the use of lens or brush. One rides peacefully along a

branch trail from the road, when unexpectedly, into a scene that has

hinted no chasm or stream, there bursts a cataract of the Wailuku,

eighty feet, into a green shaft lined with nodding ferns, where the

fall, on a rainless day, sprays its deep pool with rainbows. Farther up

the Wailuku, reached on foot from the main drive through cane fields,

there is a succession of pools in the lava river-bed, known as the

Boiling Pots from the wild swirling of cascading waters. They form a

close rival to the beauty of Rainbow Falls.

One favorite spot to me will always remain the boat landing at Waiakea

village, at the mouth of the Waiakea river, on Hilo’s southwestern edge.

This little settlement in 1877 was washed away by a wave caused by an

earthquake in Peru. It is an essentially oriental picture, except for

haoles and Hawaiians arriving or departing in ship’s boats. It is a

sequestered nook of Nippon; from the sea approached under a bridge, and

partially bounded by rickety, balconied houses, hung with colorful

Japanese signs and flags and rags. Down the marshy little river, after

turbulent weather, come the most fairy-like floating islets, forested in

miniature with lilac-tinted lilies. Past the bannered buildings and the

brilliantly painted sampans, under the bridge they move in the

unhurrying flood, on and out to sea; to me, following their course,

freighted with dreams.

There came a day of “Hilo rain,” when Mrs. Shipman tucked us into the

curtained rig and haled us about town to observe an example of what the

burdened sky can do in this section. Since Hiloites must endure the

violent threshing of crystal plummets from their overburdened sky, they

wisely make of it an asset. The annual rainfall is 150 inches against

Honolulu’s 35 on the lee side of Oahu. And we must see Rainbow Fall, now

an incredibly swollen, sounding young Niagara born of the hour. Chaney

wrote: “It rains more easily in Hilo than anywhere else in the known

world.... We no longer demurred about the story of the Flood.... Let no

man be kept from Hilo by the stories he may hear about its rainfall.

Doubtless they are all true; but the natural inference of people

accustomed to rain in other places is far from true. There is something

exceptional in this rain of Hilo. It is never cold, hardly damp even.

They do say that clothes will dry in it. It is liquid sunshine, coming

down in drops instead of atmospheric waves.... Laugh if you will, and

beg to be excused, and you will miss the sweetest spot on earth if you

do not go there.” And that is Hilo.

Aboard the _Snark_, October 7.

Half-past one, and early aboard. With the help of moon-faced, smiling

Nakata, all luggage has been stowed shipshape in our wee staterooms, and

we await a few belated deliveries from the uptown shops, and the friends

who are to see us off.

Frankly, I am nervous. All forenoon, doing final packing, I have

startled at every ring of the telephone, apprehensive of some new

message of the Inconceivable and Monstrous quivering on the wire. And

Jack—has done his thousand words as usual on the novel, _Martin Eden_.

He now stands about the shining, holystoned deck, unconsciously lighting

cigarettes without number, and as unconsciously dropping them overboard

half-smoked or dead full-length. He is not talking much, but nothing of

the spic-and-span condition of his boat escapes his pleased blue sailor

eye. And he hums a little air. Over and above the antic luck that has

stalked her since the laying of her iron keel, the _Snark_ indubitably

remains, as Jack again assures, “the strongest boat of her size ever

built”; and we both love her every pine plank, and rib of oak, and

stitch of finest canvas.

* * * * *

Later: We got over the good-byes somehow—even the Shipmans’ Uncle Alec

came to see us off. I hope nothing better than to have a kiss of welcome

from the old, old man years hence when we come again to beautiful Hilo,

which means “New Moon,” fading yonder against the vast green mountain in

a silver rain.

“And there isn’t one of them ever expects to lay eyes on us again,” Jack

laughed low to me as the captain pulled the bell to the engine-room for

Martin to start the bronze propeller, and the little white yacht began

to stand out from the wharf on her outrageous voyage. They tried their

best to look cheerful, dear friends all, and Mrs. Balding’s “Do you

_really_ think you’ll ever come back alive?” would have been funny but

for the unshed tears in her violet eyes. Little convinced was she, or

any soul of them, by Jack’s vivid disquisition on this “safest voyage in

the world.”

Waving our hands and calling last good-byes, we made our way out through

no floating isles of amethyst lilies from the Waiakea River’s marshes,

for Hilo Bay lies clear and blue, in a fair afternoon that gives herald

of a starry night. The captain of the Bark _Annie Johnson_, in port, a

favorite poker antagonist of Jack’s the past week, accompanied us a

distance in the Iron Works engineer’s launch, and the big

American-Hawaiian freighter, _Arizonan_, unloading in the stream, with a

Gargantuan sonorous throat saluted the tiny _Snark_, who answered with

three distinct if small toots of her steam-whistle.

A westering sun floods with golden light the city brightening from a

silver shower, and we know that some at least of her thoughts are with

us happy estrays on the “white-speck boat” adventuring the pathless

ocean.

And one beside me in a hushed voice repeats:

“‘The Lord knows what we may find, dear lass,

And the deuce knows what we may do—

But we’re back once more on the old trail, our own trail, the out

trail

We’re down, hull down on the long Trail—the trail that is always

new!’”

Thus, on our Golden Adventure, we set out to sea once more, answering

its clear call; and it is Good-by Hawaii—Hawaii of love and

unquestioning friendship without parallel. Her sons and daughters, they

have been kind beyond measure.

Great love to you, Hawaii—“until we meet again,” the words of your

sweetest song of parting grief and joyful welcome:

“Aloha oe.”

-----

[2] In 1921—114,879.

[3] One statesman of the old régime, however, tells me this: “But for

her determination to ‘rule’ instead of ‘reign’ as a constitutional

sovereign, Liliuokalani might have lived and died a queen, with no

stronger support than those who deposed her.”

[4] In 1916 a specimen of the yellow-fin tuna sold in the Honolulu

market weighing 287 pounds. The record yellow-fin tuna at Santa Catalina

Island, California, was 51 pounds.

[5] A few weeks after our ascent, one of the Japanese laborers fell 1500

feet in the clear.

[6] Another way has been devised for the traveler who would see the

Ditch Trail: by automobile from Wailuku to Pogue’s, thence on foot

(stopping overnight at a rest house in Keanae Valley), to Nahiku on the

coast, where a steamer calls. It is possible to travel by rail from

Wailuku to Haiku, about nine miles from Pogue’s, and begin the “hike” at

Haiku. The railway terminus is the home-steading settlement, and the

railway ride is of unique interest.

[7] Ours was the last party that ever crossed this bridge. A new one was

hung shortly afterward.

[8] Burned in 1920.

[9] In a late _Pacific Commercial Advertiser_, I notice the following

cable:

“Washington, August 13, 1917.

Favorable report was made to the Senate to-day on the bill to empower

the Hawaiian Legislature to extend suffrage to women and submit the

question to voters of the territory.”