1893.]

THE NATIVE AT HOME.

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The servants and officials about the house were about as heterogeneous a company as could have been mustered. The proprietor was English; the manager an Englishman, a graduate of Oxford; the day clerk was a Portuguese, married to a Japanese lady; the night clerk a Chinaman; the head steward was an Alsatian, married to a Parisian woman; the cook was a Greek; the barber a German; one of the bell boys came from the Canary Islands, and the others from the Azores. At the various tables were American and European tourists, and occasionally officers from the Japanese war-ship, with the diplomatic representatives of various countries.

After luncheon Miss Knapp took me for a drive out to Waikiki and Diamond Head. I had my first glimpse of the native at home as we passed a house crowded with idle, dirty women, squatting on the ground smoking. The furniture was scanty and dilapidated; the hut was dirty and disorderly in the extreme; there were numbers of cats; and the progress of civilisation was exemplified in a kerosene lamp and a small sewing machine worked by hand. By the roadside were groves of old cocoa palms bending their plumy heads toward the sea, young forests of graceful algarobas, and there were flowers, flowers everywhere. Clouds came drifting down the valleys along the mountain sides, soft as spun wool and as white. There is nothing so profoundly solemn in nature as this slow movement of

clouds; they are so wraith-like, so impalpable, passing, fading, dissolving. There was an historical fishpond stocked with venerable gold-fish, that had gone on multiplying undisturbed, no matter what revolution might be on foot, and the water swarmed with them.

It was arranged that the cast with which my foot was still cumbered should be removed that afternoon. I must be indulged in this final mention of the hateful impediment, which will then disappear from this chronicle. On a former occasion, when a similar appliance had been taken off, after I had lugged it about for six weeks, I found myself able to walk, and I had looked forward eagerly to a similar recovery now. It was very warm, and the operation took something over an hour and a half. with a huge knife cut away the solid mass, the perspiration streaming down his face. At last the remnant of the shell dropped off, and I felt as light and untrammelled as a newly hatched chicken.

Dr. S

I rose with trepidation and essayed a step, hoping and believing that I could walk as well as ever. Vain expectation! The useless foot, to quote the graphic description of a friend, "shut up like a razor." Except that the load which I had carried for five weeks was gone, I was no better off than I was before. It was the third bitterest disappointment I had ever had, and the good doctor, sympathising with me in it, patted me indulgently on the shoulder, and there was nothing to do but make

1893.] A BITTER DISAPPOINTMENT.

83

the best of it, and arrange for the difficult work I should have to do as best I could.

There was an

In the evening many callers came. open-air concert on the lawn by a substitute for the Queen's band, which refused to play after her overthrow, and the grounds and verandahs of the hotel were crowded with people. We had another drive in the moonlight. The air was steeped in the fragrance of jasmine and orange blossom, the streets brilliantly lighted, with shadowy gardens echoing with the notes of the guitar and mandolin, and with the soft pensive music of Hawaiian voices.

I went to bed at midnight, but I could not sleep. At two in the morning, when silence had fallen at last, I rose, wrapped myself in a rug, went out, and sat in my steamer chair in the verandah, watching the stars. How low they hung; how luminous, how large they were! The night wind stirred the boughs of the mango-trees; now and then a bird chirped in its sleep; far off I could hear the lowing of cows and the barking of dogs; footsteps came approaching out of the silence and then vanished. It was inexpressibly peaceful; it was beautiful beyond the power of words to describe; but there had been with it all that deep, indefinable melancholy which tinges our profoundest happiness.

CHAPTER V.

IN HONOLULU.

EFORE arriving in Honolulu I frankly confess

BEEC

At

that my sympathies were wholly with the natives; I took the view-so easy to acquire from books and from other sentimentalists like myself— that the natives were being robbed of their birthright by the relentless whites, who, in their greed and with their superior cunning, had seized and held the balance of power. It was a fixed hallucination which it took some time to clear away; and during the educating process the only judicious course to pursue was to listen, and observe much and say little. the end of a fortnight the question ceased to be one of sentiment; it became simply, stripped of all its verbiage and local colour-of which there was a great deal, and a variety of shades one more. ethnological illustration of that relentless law, the survival of the fittest. The complication could be compared only to a temperance campaign in Indiana, where the feeling ranges through all varieties of belief-high licence, prohibition, and no licence; and

84

1893.]

A COSMOPOLITAN SOCIETY.

85

Indiana is named because there, as in the Hawaiian Islands, politics are the native element of the inhabitants. Never were there so many prejudices and suggestions projected upon which the unwary might tread. To think thrice before speaking once, was the mildest and most inadequate advice. One finally wondered if it were prudent to speak at all.

an

Society was a curious network. All Americans, most of the English and Germans, and some of the best of the natives and half-castes, favoured annexation to the United States - annexation pure and simple, as they put it. There were with these influential constituency-the adherents of the Queen, who believed that she had been cruelly wronged; the missionaries, who to a great extent control social affairs and constitute that dominating power supposed to be vested in the oldest families; last of all, there were prospective capitalists - Americans and English who might have rendered substantial aid in developing the resources of the Islands. Besides these there were numbers of secret annexationists, waiting to find out which would be the popular and winning side, with some hundreds of Hawaiians bitterly opposed to the ex-Queen, and justly blaming her for the trouble she had brought upon the country. All, however, royalists and annexationists, were united in a desire for peace and for a stable form of government.

The times were exceptionally hard; money was