 This is Section 47 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 47 of the Sacramento Daily Union, April 1864, Part 1. The Sacramento Daily Union, April 16, 1864, on board Steamer Ajax, Honolulu, Hawaii, March 18. Climatic. We arrived here today at noon, and while I spent an hour or so talking, the other passengers exhausted all the lodging accommodations of Honolulu, so I must remain on board the ship tonight. It is very warm in the stateroom. No air enters the ports. Therefore, I have dressed in a way which seems best calculated to suit the exigencies of the case. A description of this dress is not necessary. I may observe, however, that I bought the chief article of it at Wards. There are a good many mosquitoes around tonight, and they are rather troublesome, but it is a source of unalloyed satisfaction to me to know that the two millions I sat down on a minute ago will never sing again. See-going outfit. I will bunch the first four or five days of my log of this voyage and make up a few paragraphs therefrom. We backed out from San Francisco at 4 p.m. all full. Some full of tender regrets for severed associations, others full of buoyant anticipations of a pleasant voyage and a revivifying change of seam, and yet others full of schemes for extending their business relations and making larger profits. The balance were full of whiskey—all except brown. Brown had had a couple of peanuts for lunch, and therefore one could not say he was full of whiskey solely, without shamefully transcending the limits of truth. Our little band of passengers were well and thoughtfully cared for by the friends they left weeping upon the wharf, as ever were any similar party of pilgrims. The travelling outfit conferred upon me began with a naval uniform, continued with a case of wine, a small assortment of medicinal liquors and brandy, several boxes of cigars, a bunch of matches, a fine tooth-comb and a cake of soap, and ended with a pair of socks. Note Bene, I gave the soap to Brown, who bit into it, and then shook his head and said that, as a general thing, he liked to prospect curious foreign dishes and find out what they were like, but he couldn't go that, and threw it overboard. This outfit is a fair sample of what our friends did for all of us. Three of our passengers—old sea-captains, whalers—Captain Cuttle, Captain Phelps, and Captain Fitch—fictitious names—had bought eight gallons of whiskey, and their friends sent them eleven gallons more. Note Bene, owing to headwinds and a rough sea, this outfit did not hold out. The nineteen gallons were ample for the proposed eight-day voyage, but we were out upwards of ten days, you see. The whalers were all dry and unhappy this morning. Making sail. Leaving all care and trouble and business behind in the city, now swinging gently around the hills and passing house by house and street by street out of view, we swept down through the Golden Gate and stretched away toward the shoreless horizon. It was a pleasant, breezy afternoon, and a strange new sense of entire and perfect emancipation from labor and responsibility coming strong upon me. I went up on the hurricane-deck, so that I could have room to enjoy it. I sat down on a bench, and for an hour I took a tranquil delight in that kind of labor, which is such a luxury to the enlightened Christian. To it, the labor of other people. Captain Godfrey was making sail, and he was moving the men around briskly. He made short work of the job, and his orders were marked by a felicity of language which challenged my admiration. Said he— Let go of the main hatch! Belay! Hall away on your topsel-jib! Belay! Clue up your top-gallonsel spanker boom-hallyards! Belay! Port your gaff-topsel skyscrapers! Belay! Lively you lovers! Take a reef in the lee scuppers! Belay! Mr. Baxter—and it's coming on to blow at about four bells in the hog-watch—have everything taught and trimmed for it! Belay! The ship was rolling fearfully. At this point I got up and started over to ask the captain if it wouldn't be a good idea to belay a little for a change, but I fell down. I then resumed my former seat. For twenty minutes after this I took careful note of how the captain leaned his body to port when the ship lurched to starboard, and hired to larboard when she lurched to port, and then got up to practice a little. I only met with moderate success, though, and after a few extraordinary evolutions fetched up against the main mast. The concussion did not injure the mast perceptibly, but if it had been a brick house the case might have been very different. I proceeded below, rather discouraged. Several effects of the turbulent sea. I found twenty-two passengers leaning over bulwarks, vomiting and remarking, oh my God, and then vomiting again. Brown was there, ever kind and thoughtful, passing from one to another and saying, that's all right, that's all right, you know, it'll clean you out like a jug, and then you won't feel so onery and smell so ridiculous. The sea was very rough for several days and nights, and the vessel rolled and pitched heavily. All but six or eight of us took their meals in bed constantly, and remained shut up in the state room day and night. The saloons and decks looked deserted and lonesome, but gradually the seasick unfortunates convalesced until our dinner complement was augmented to fifteen or twenty. There were frames or racks on the tables to keep the dishes in their places, but they did not all would succeed in doing it. An occasional heavy lurch would hoist out a dozen and start them prospecting for the deck. Brown was bitterly opposed to the racks and said he wasn't raised to eat out of them brick molds. No rack would answer for soup. The soup plate had to be held in the hand and nicely tilted from side to side to accommodate the fluid to the pitching of the ship. The chairs were not fastened to the floor, and it was fun to see a procession of gentlemen go sliding backwards to the bulkhead, holding their soup plates on the level with their breasts, and giving their whole attention to preventing the contents from splashing out. They would come back with a flow-tide and sail away again on the ebb. It would not do to set a glass of water down. The attentive waiters kept bringing water to Brown, who was always talking and would not see the glass set down in time to make his remark heard, Frank, don't bring me any water. Have to drink it at a gulp to keep it from spilling, and I've had more and enough already. And yet about once every two minutes some passenger opposite would put up his hands and shrink behind them and exclaim, Your water, Mr. Brown! Your water! Look out for your water! And lo! the suffering Brown would find his glass once more replenished and canting dangerously to Leward. It would be instantly seized and emptied. At the end of a quarter of an hour Brown had accomplished nothing in the way of dinner on account of these incessant watery interruptions. The boy Frank brought another glass of water and said, Will you have some beef steak, Mr. Brown? Take that water and go to blazes with it. Beef steak? No! I've drank eleven gallons of water in fifteen minutes, and there ain't room enough in me for a sirloin steak off in a sand fly! Journal. Heaving my log, I find the following entries on my tablets. Wednesday, 7th, left San Francisco at 4 p.m., rough night. Thursday, weather still rough, passengers nearly all sick, only half a dozen at breakfast out of thirty. Friday, strong gale all night, heavy sea on this evening, black overhead. Saturday, weather same, or more so. You can rake that four days dose of your infamous Pacific, Mr. Balboa, and digest it, and you may consider it well for your reputation in California that we had pretty fair weather the balance of the voyage. If we hadn't, I would have given you a blast in this letter that would have made your old dry bones rattle in your coffin, you shameless old foreign humbug. Mark Twain. The San Francisco Daily Union, April 17, 1866. Honolulu, March 19, 1866. The Ajax voyage continued. The Old Norwest swell. On the Sunday following our departure we had a fine day and no wind scarcely, yet the sea ran high and the ship rolled a good deal. Upon inquiry I learned that this was caused by the Old Norwest swell, which resembles any Broadway swell in that it puts on a good many airs, and conducts itself pretentiously, even when it is not able to raise the wind. The Old Norwest swell, produced by the prevailing wind from that quarter, is always present in these seas, ever drifting on its eternal journey across the waters of the Pacific year after year and century after century as well, no doubt, and piling its billows aloft careless, whether it be storm or calm. The wind and the swell both die out just above the equator. Another wind and another swell come up around Cape Horn from the opposite direction, and these die out just below the equator, so that a windless, waveless belt is left at the center of the earth, which marks the equator as distinctly as does the little black line on the map. Ships drift idly on that glassy sea, under the flaming sun of the tropics, for weeks together, without a breath of wind to flutter the drooping sails, or fan the sweltering and blasphemous sailors. A blast for Balboa, the discoverer! We hear all our lives about the gentle, stormless Pacific, and about the smooth and delightful route to the Sandwich Islands, and about the steady, blowing trades that never vary, never change, never chop around, and all the days of our boyhood we read how that infatuated old-ass Balboa looked out from the top of a high rock upon a broad sea as calm and peaceful. He was as peaceful as a sylvan lake, and went into ecstasy of delight, like any other greaser over any other trifle, and shouted in his foreign tongue and waved his country's banner, and named his great discovery Pacific, thus uttering a lie which will go on deceiving generation after generation of students while the old ocean lasts. If I had been there, with my experience, I would have said to this man Balboa, now, if you think you have made a sufficient display of yourself, cavorting around on this conspicuous rock, you had better fold up your old rag and get back into the woods again, because you have jumped to a conclusion and christened this sleeping boy baby by a girl's name, without stopping to inquire into the sacks of it. For all I can discover if this foreign person had named this ocean the Four Months Pacific, he would have come nearer the mark. My information is to the effect that the summer months give fine weather, smooth seas, and steady winds, with a month and a few days good weather at the fag end of spring and the beginning of autumn. And that for the other seven or eight months of the year, one can calculate pretty regularly on head winds and stern winds, and winds on the quarter, and winds several points above the beam, and winds that blow straight up from the bottom, and still other winds that come so straight down from above, at the four-stunsel spanker jib-boom makes a hole through them as clean as a telescope, and to see rolls and leaps and chops and surges, thought ships, and up and down and four-and-aft by turns when the gales are blowing. And when they die out, the old Norwest swell comes in and takes a hand, and stands a watch, and keeps up the marine earthquake until the winds are rested and ready to make trouble again. In a word, the Pacific is rough for seven or eight months in the year. Not stormy, understand me. Not what one could justly call stormy, but contrary, baffling and very rough. Therefore, if that Balboa Constrictor had constructed a name for it that had wild or untamed to it, there would have been a majority of two months in the year in favor and in support of it. A word to the commercially wise. If the Pacific were always Pacific, and its trades blew steadily in the year around, there would never be any necessity for steamers between Honolulu and San Francisco. But, as it is, a trade is building up between the two ports, a considerable share of which is going to consist of fast freight and passengers, and only steamers can extend and develop this and conduct it successfully. You see, we plowed through the tangled seas and against the headwinds this trip in a fraction over ten days, arriving a day after one of the fast clippers which left San Francisco a matter of three weeks before. The passage back at this rate is about five to seven days longer for the clipper, but not more than a day and a half or two days longer for the Ajax. You can rest assured that in the tremendous trade that is to spring up between California and the islands during the next few years, the fast freight and passengers must be carried by steamers for seven or eight months in the year. I will remark here that my information about the character of this ocean route is obtained from old ship captains, one of whom has commanded in the packet trade for many years, and who has sailed these seas, wailing and otherwise, for forty-six years. But the main argument in favour of a line of fast steamers is this. They would soon populate these islands with Americans and loosen that French and English grip which is gradually closing around them, and which will result in a contest before many years as to which of the two shall seize and hold them. I leave America out of this contest, for her influence and her share in it have fallen gradually away until she is out in the cold now, and does not even play third fiddle to this European element. But if California can send capitalists down here in seven or eight days' time and take them back in nine or ten, she can fill these islands full of Americans and regain her lost foothold. Hawaii is too far away now, though, when it takes a man twenty days to come here, and twenty-five or thirty to get back again in a sailing vessel. The steamer line ought to be established, even if it should lose money for two years. Your state has never paid one single dollar of profit to the United States. You are nothing but a burden and an expense to the country. But the Kingdom of Hawaii, without costing the United States a cent, has paid her in customs four hundred thousand dollars in a single year. California's profits from this section can be made greater and far more lasting than those from Montana. Therefore, let your merchants exchange look after the former just as earnestly as they are doing with the latter. Passing away the weary time. In writing about sea voyages it is customary to state with the blandest air of conveying information of rare freshness and originality that anything, however trivial, that promises to spice the weary monotony of the voyage with a new sensation, is eagerly seized upon and the most made of it by the passengers. I decline to insult your intelligence by making this threadbare statement, preferring to believe you would easily divine the existence of the fact without having to be told it. We had a bullock tied up on the folk-soul, and a box nearby with two sheep and a pig in it. These animals afforded a trifling amusement for us on our fair days, and when the opportunity offered we used to go forward and worry them. The bullock was always down on his beam ends, and if he ever dared to get up on his feet for a second in a stormy weather the next lurch of the ship would snatch him bald-headed, as Mr. Brown expressed it, and flop him flat on the deck, and in fair weather he was seldom able to get up on account of his sore bones acquired through the bangs and bruises of his foul weather experiences. So the bullock lay down pretty much all the time from San Francisco to Honolulu, and ever as his wandering gaze rested upon reeling men and plunging ship and towering billow his eloquent eye damned the weather. Said Mr. Brown once, Let's go forward and twist the captain's tail. Who? Captain Godfrey? Thunder. No. Captain Gordon. Who? Why, the bullock, Captain Gordon. We call him Captain Gordon because he lays down so much. I recognize the point of Mr. Brown's facetiousness then. Captain Gordon, a not undistinguished officer of the Eastern armies, had kept his room all the way, but as he was unwell enough to prefer that course to staggering about the tossing decks and had a right to do as he pleased anyway, I reprimanded Brown on the spot for his inconsiderate levity. The pig was pulled and hauled and cuffed for the amusement of the idle passengers, but unknown to himself he had his revenge, for he imparted such a villainous odor of the sty to the hands and clothing of any man who meddled with him that that man could never drift to winward of a lady passenger without suffering disgrace and humiliation under the rebuke of her offended, upturned nose. The pig had no name. This was a source of ceaseless regret to Mr. Brown, and he often spoke of it. At last one of the sailors named it, and Brown happened to be passing by and overheard him. The sailor was feeding the animals, and the pig kept crowding the sheep away and monopolizing the slopp pale. The sailor wrapped him on the nose and said, Oh, go away with your Dennis! To have heard the passengers go into explosions of laughter when Brown rushed in in a state of wild excitement and related this circumstance, one might have supposed that this ship had been sailing round and round the world for dreary ages, and that this was the first funny circumstance that had ever blessed with a gleam of cheerfulness the dismal voyage. But, as other writers have said before, even so diluted a thing as this can send a thrill of delight through minds and bodies growing torpid under the dull sameness of a long sea voyage. From that day forward it was Dennis here and Dennis there and Dennis everywhere. Dennis was in everybody's mouth. Dennis was mentioned twice where the everlasting wonder how many miles we made yesterday was expressed once. A stranger's curiosity would have been excited to the last degree to know who this rival to General Grant in Notariad he was that had so suddenly sprung up this so thoroughly canvassed, disgust, and popular Dennis. But on the sixteenth of March Dennis was secretly executed by order of the steward, and Brown said that when the fact became generally known there was not a dry eye in the ship. He fully believed what he said too. He has a generous heart and a fervent imagination and a capacity for creating impossible facts and then implicitly believing them himself, which is perfectly marvellous. Dennis was served up on the seventeenth for our St. Patrick's dinner and gave me a stomach ache that lasted twenty-four hours. In life he was lovely, and behold he was powerful in death. Peace to his ashes. The most steady-going amusement the gentleman had on the trip was Euker, and the most steady-going the ladies had was being seasick. For days and nights together we used to sit in the smoking-room and play Euker on the same table so sacredly devoted to seven up by the livelier set of passengers who travelled last voyage in the Ajax. It took me some little time to learn to play Euker with those old sea-captains because they brought in so many terms that are neither in Hoyle nor the dictionary. Here how they talked. Captain Fitch. Who hoved that ace on there? Captain Phelps. Why, I did. Captain Cuddle. No, you didn't either. I hovered myself. Captain Phelps. You didn't, by the eternal. You hoved the king. Captain Fitch. Well now, that's just the way always joing about who hoved this and who hoved that. Always sailing on a taut bowling. Why can't you go slow? You keep heaving on him down so fast that a man can't tell nothing about it. Captain Phelps. Well, I don't care. Let it go. I can stand it. I call late. Here goes for Euker. Here the captain played an odd suit ace. Swing your bower if you've got it, but I'll take them three last tricks or break a rope-yarn. I, as partner to Captain Phelps, got bewildered and made a bad play. Captain Phelps. Now, what did you trump my ace for? That ain't any way to do. You're always a-sailing too close to the wind. In a moment or two I make another bad play. Captain Phelps. Great Scotland! What in the nation you dump in that blubber at such a time is this for? Rip, I noted. Took with a nine-spot. Royals, stuntsles, everything gone to smash, and nobody Eukered. It is necessary to explain that those ancient, incomprehensible whalers always called worthless odd-suit cards blubber. At home. We passengers are all at home now, taking meals at the American hotel and sleeping in neat white cottages, buried in noble shade-trees and enchanting tropical flowers and shrubbery. Mark Twain. End of Section 47 This is Section 48 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain, Section 48, The Sacramento Daily Union, April 1866, Part 2. The Sacramento Daily Union, April 18th, 1866. Honolulu, March 1866. Still at sea. I have been here a day or two now, but I do not know enough concerning the country yet to commence writing about it with confidence, so I will drift back to sea again. The Ajax, her officers. The Ajax is a two-thousand-ton propeller, and one of the strongest bulk-vessels afloat. All her timber-work is very heavy and fastened and bolted together as if to hold for a century. She was intended for a warship, and this accounts for her extraordinary strength. She has excellent cabin accommodations for sixty passengers without crowding and bunks for forty more. She has room for over twelve hundred tons of freight after her coal and stores for the round-tripper all-in, and when a coal depot is established for her hereafter at Honolulu so that she need carry-only fuel enough for half the voyage, she can take two or three hundred tons more. Her principal officers all served in the war. Captain Godfrey and the chief mate Baxter were both in our navy, and Sanford, the chief engineer, has seen a great deal of service. He held his commission as chief engineer in the navy for sixteen years, and was in seven battles in the Mexican war, and six during the rebellion—a very good record. Height, the purser, served under General Sherman in the paymaster's department with the rank of captain. The steamer's engines. The Ajax has a harp engine laid horizontally, so as to be entirely below the waterline, a judicious arrangement in view of the ship's intended duty originally, in a service where cannonballs and shells would pelter instead of the rain showers of the Pacific. The horizontal engine takes up much less room than when placed in an upright position. It packs as closely as sardines in a box, and gives the ship a good deal of extra space for freight and passengers. Every portion of the Ajax engine and fire-rooms is kept in perfect neatness and good order by the chief's crew of eighteen men. In this place I would drop a hint of caution to all romantic young people who yearn to become bold sailor-boys and ship as firemen on a steamer. Such a berth has its little drawbacks in conveniences, which not all the romance in the world can reconcile one to. The principle of these is the sultry temperature of the furnace-room, where the fireman, far below the surface of the sea and away from the fresh air and the light of day, stands in a narrow space between two rows of furnaces that flame and glare like the fires of hell, and shovels coal four hours at a stretch in an unvarying temperature of one hundred and forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, and yet how the people of Honolulu growl and sweat on an uncommonly warm day with the mercury at eighty-two degrees in the shade and somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred degrees in the sun. Steamer firemen do not live, on average, over five years. The importance of the Hawaiian trade. It is a matter of the utmost importance to the United States that her trade with these islands should be carefully fostered and augmented, because it pays. There can be no better reason than that. In actual revenue, California is a burden to the country. She always falls behind. She always leaves a deficit at the end of the year to be made up by the nation. She never yields revenue enough to support the government establishments within her borders. In contrast with this, the sandwich islands which cost the United States but little have paid her in customs as high as four hundred thousand dollars in gold coin in a single year. Duties paid upon sugar, et cetera, received in American ports and subtracted from the profits of the producer here. I will give the figures. They were compiled by the late N. Lombard Ingalls, Secretary of the San Francisco Board of Brokers, regarded as one of the best accountants and financial statisticians that ever visited these islands. The following estimate is for eighteen sixty-four. Coffee, fourteen thousand eight hundred and fifty-four pounds, duty five cents per pound, seven hundred and forty-two dollars and seventy cents. Malasses, two hundred and fifty-nine thousand four hundred and sixty-nine gallons, duty eight cents per gallon, twenty-three thousand seven hundred and fifty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents. Poulou, six hundred and sixty-four thousand six hundred pounds at seven cents per pound, forty-six thousand five hundred and twenty-two dollars at twenty percent nine thousand three hundred and four dollars and forty cents. Salt, three hundred and eight thousand pounds at eighteen cents per one hundred pounds five hundred and fifty-four dollars and forty cents. sugar, 885,957 pounds, at 3 cents average duty, $265,558.71. Rice, 337,978 pounds, at 2.5 cents per pound, $9,449.45. Unenumerated, at least, $2,000. Making for San Francisco alone fully, $311,367.18. Mr. Ingalls then adds sugar and molasses sent to Portland, Oregon, the same year, on which $40,000 duties were paid, making over $350,000 paid in revenues to the United States for Sandwich Island products on the Pacific Coast alone. Mr. Ingalls then says, the eastern vessel's cargoes consist mostly of oil trans shipped from American whalers, and therefore duty-free. The balance of their cargoes are hides, wool, and sundries. I think it would be safe to estimate that the whole of them did not pay over $50,000 to the Custom House. You will acknowledge that a trade which pays so well, albeit with no risk and small expense to the United States, ought to be encouraged, extended, and irrevocably secured. There are two ways of doing this. Let Congress moderate the high duties somewhat. Secondly, let the islands be populated with Americans. To accomplish the latter, a steamer is indispensable. The sailing vessels can carry freight easily enough, but they are too slow and uncertain to build up the passenger trade from which immigration and permanent settlement here must naturally result. In California, people are always pressed for time. It is only a few scattering idlers and pleasure-seekers who can look serenely upon such an appalling sacrifice of precious hours as a tedious voyage of three weeks hither in the baffled and buffeted sailing vessel, and a return trip occupying four or five weeks. But businessmen and capitalists would run down here by the steamer when they knew the sea voyage could be ciphered down to days and hours before starting, and a short number of days at that, and with the influx of capital would come population, and then I could not ride over mile after mile of fertile soil, as I did yesterday, without seeing half a dozen human habitations. How our trade must be extended, if it is done at all? An important question to be considered is how a steamer is to be made to pay during the year or two that she is populating the islands, doubling their productions, and establishing a profitable trade for herself, for more than one-half of the export trade is now in the hands of the sailing vessels, secured to them by joint ownership in ships and plantations, by long contracts for transportation, and by advance money to planters, and will remain so for some time. The legitimate way to establish a steamer on a paying basis from the first is to give her a government subsidy of fifty or a hundred thousand dollars a year for carrying the mails, and subtract it from the five hundred thousand dollars a year appropriated for the China Mail Company, which is to begin business the first of next January. The latter company will either let a subcontract to the Ajax, or else put a small steamer of their own into the Honolulu trade, probably the former. The China steamer will be a five thousand ton vessel. The Ajax is two thousand tons burden. Neither of them can enter here except in broad daylight, so narrow and crooked and shallow as the channel. The harbour is so small that it cannot accommodate more than two hundred vessels comfortably, and so narrow that a large ship cannot be handled freely in it. It is not much wider than the river at Sacramento. A section of your river a mile and a half long opposite Sacramento would afford an ampler harbour than this. For half a mile a ship coming in winds about through a channel as crooked as a dog's hind leg, and marked by long lines of upright posts on either side, and in this channel there is not good room enough for two ships to pass abreast. The great China mail steamer cannot enter this port. She will draw too much water. There is only about twenty-two feet on the bar. If she arrived here at dusk she would have to lie at anchor outside the harbour all night and exchange mails by small boats in the morning, that is, in fair weather. In the stormy season, in the season of the terrible Kona, she might have to lie there for five or six days. The China mail steamer will be at sea from thirty-five to forty days on a round trip. With her provisions and sixty or seventy tons of coal a day and other expenses, if she gets off with an outlay of one thousand five hundred dollars a day while under way, she will do well. Honolulu is clear out of her way, both going and coming. Leaving San Francisco she would naturally come down until a little below the thirtieth parallel to get the benefit of the trades, but from thence to Honolulu, nine degrees further south, would be all lost time to her. Returning she would leave Shanghai and bend around north, till above the fortieth parallel, to get the west winds, and then if she had no destination but San Francisco, she could go straight across with a spanking breeze all the way. But that not being the case, she would make use of the west wind a great part of the voyage, I suppose, and then take in a lot of no longer useful canvas and come straight down south a matter of twenty degrees, land at Honolulu, and then sail north again about seventeen to get to San Francisco. Thus you see she will come out of her course, outward bound, over five hundred miles to strike Honolulu. Returning she will come out of her course one thousand two hundred altogether, for one thousand seven hundred miles every trip more than she would have to make if she left the islands out of her voyage. The Ajax is considered fast. The greatest days run she made this trip, with the wind exactly right, and every rag of canvas set and drawing, was about three hundred miles. On several other occasions she did not make over two hundred. So to follow the China ship, the very liberal average speed of two hundred and seventy-five miles a day, two hundred and fifty would be near right, she must lose over six days every voyage if she comes to Honolulu. She will fool away at least one day here each way, eight days altogether, expense for a year one hundred and forty-four thousand dollars. It cannot be done any cheaper by the China mail steamer. The Ajax can do it for a great deal less, and the China company would make money by subletting the contract to her. The China steamer will certainly never perform the sandwich island part of her contract with the government, that portion will unquestionably be executed by some other steamer. And so why not turn it over to the Ajax, and thus secure to the country the benefits that must accrue to it from the permanent establishment of a San Francisco and Honolulu steamship line. I am not particular whether the Ajax owners continue her in this trade or not, but I would like to see some steamer line established on this route, and I only speak of the Ajax in this connection because she has already gained a good footing, and because she is owned by a company which has the confidence of the public, and is financially able to carry out a project of this kind in a good and satisfactory manner, and because further, if the China company put a small steamer of their own in this trade, they will not be likely to do it for a year to come, and a twelve-month is a good deal of time to lose, Mark Twain. San Francisco Daily Union, April 19, 1866. Honolulu, March 1866. Our arrival elaborated a little more. We came in sight of two of this group of islands, Oahu and Molokai, pronounced Oahu and Molokai, on the morning of the eighteenth, and soon exchanged the dark blue waters of the deep sea for the brilliant light blue of sounding. The fat, ugly birds, said to be a species of albatross, which had skimmed after us on tireless wings clear across the ocean, left us, and an occasional flying fish went skimming over the water in their stead. Oahu loomed high, rugged, useless, barren, black and dreary out of the sea, and in the distance Molokai lay like a homely sway-backed whale on the water. The Hawaiian flag. As we rounded the promontory of Diamond Head, bringing into view a grove of coconut trees, first ocular proof that we were in the tropics, we ran up the stars and stripes at the main Spencer gaff, and the Hawaiian flag at the fore. The latter is suggestive of the prominent political elements of the islands. It is part French, part English, part American, and is Hawaiian in general. The Union is the English Cross. The remainder of the flag, horizontal stripes, looks American, but has a blue-French stripe in addition to our red and white ones. The flag was gotten up by foreign legations in council with the Hawaiian government. The eight stripes refer to the eight islands which are inhabited. The other four are barren rocks incapable of supporting a population. Reflections. As we came in sight we fired a gun, and a good part of Honolulu turned out to welcome the steamer. It was Sunday morning and about church time, and we steamed through the narrow channel to the music of six different church bells, which sent their mellow tones far and wide over hills and valleys, which were peopled by naked, savage, thundering barbarians only fifty years ago. Six Christian churches within five miles of the ruins of a pagan temple, where human sacrifices were daily offered up to hideous idols in the last century. We were within pistol shot of one of a group of islands whose ferocious inhabitants closed in upon the doomed and helpless Captain Cook and murdered him eighty-seven years ago, and lo, their descendants were at church. Behold what the missionaries have wrought. The Crowd on the Pier. By the time we had worked our slow way up to the wharf, under the guidance of McIntyre, the pilot, a mixed crowd of four or five hundred people had assembled. China men, in the costume of their country, foreigners and the better class of natives, and half-whites, in carriages and dressed in Sacramento's summer fashion. Other native men on foot, some in the cast-off clothing of white folks, and a few wearing a battered hat, an old ragged vest, and nothing else, at least nothing but an unnecessarily slender rag passed between the legs. Native women clad in a single garment, a bright-colored robe or wrapper as voluminous as a balloon, with full sleeves. This robe is gathered from shoulder to shoulder, before and behind, and then descends in ample folds to the feet, seldom a chemise or any other undergarment. Fits like a circus tent fits the tent pole, and no hoops. These robes were bright yellow or bright crimson, or pure black occasionally, or gleaming white, but solid colors and stunning ones were the rule. They wore little hats, such as the sex wear in your cities, and some of the younger women had very pretty faces and splendid black eyes and heavy masses of long black hair occasionally put up in a net. Some of these dark, ginger-bread-colored beauties were on foot, generally on barefoot, I may add, and others were on horseback, astral. They never ride any other way, and they ought to know which way is best, for there are no more accomplished horsewomen in the world, it is said. The balance of the crowd consisted chiefly of little half-naked native boys and girls, all were chattering in the chatty, chopped-up Kanaka language. But what they were chattering about will always remain a mystery to me. THE KING Captain Fits said, There's the king! That's him in the buggy! I know him as far as I can see him. I had never seen a king in my life, and I naturally took out my notebook and put him down. Tall, slender, dark, full-bearded, green frock-coat with lapels and collar bordered with gold band an inch wide, plug-hat, broad gold band around it, royal costume looks too much like a livery. This man isn't as fleshy as I thought he was. I had just got these notes entered when Captain Fits discovered that he had got hold of the wrong king, or, rather, that he had got hold of the king's driver, or a carriage-driver of one of the nobility. The king was not present at all. It was a great disappointment to me. I heard afterward that the comfortable, easy-going king Kamehameha, pronounced Kamehameha, the fifth, had been seen sitting on a barrel on the wharf the day before, fishing. But there was no consolation in that. That did not restore to me my lost king. Honolulu. The town of Honolulu, said to contain between 12,000 and 15,000 inhabitants, is spread over a dead level. As streets from 20 to 30 feet wide, solid and level as a floor, most of them straight as a line and a few as crooked as a corkscrew. Houses, one and two storeys high, built of wood, straw, dobies, and dull, cream- colored pebble and shell conglomerated coral, cut into oblong square blocks and laid in cement, but no brick houses. There are great yards, more like plazas, about a large number of the dwelling houses, and these are carpeted with bright green grass into which your foot sinks out of sight. And they are ornamented by a hundred species of beautiful flowers and blossoming shrubs, and shaded by noble tamarin trees, and the pride of India with its fragrant flower, and by the umbrella tree, and I do not know how many more. I had rather smell Honolulu at sunset than the old police court room in San Francisco. Almost a king. I had not shaved since I left San Francisco, ten days. As soon as I got ashore I hunted for a striped pole and shortly found one. I always had a yearning to be a king. This may never be, I suppose, but at any rate it will always be a satisfaction to me to know that if I am not a king I am the next thing to it. I have been shaved by the king's barber. Landsmen on sea-legs. Walking about on shore was very uncomfortable at first. There was no spring to the solid ground, and I missed the heaving and rolling of the ship's deck. It was unpleasant to lean unconsciously to an anticipated lurch of the world and find that the world did not lurch as it should have done. And there was something else missed, something gone, something wanting. I could not tell what, a dismal vacuum of some kind or other, a sense of emptiness. But I found out what it was presently. It was the absence of the ceaseless dull hum of beating waves and whipping sails and fluttering of the propeller and creaking of the ship. As I had become so accustomed to that I had ceased to notice them and had become unaware of their existence until the deep Sunday stillness on shore made me vaguely conscious that a familiar spirit of some kind or other was gone from me. Walking on the solid earth with legs used to the giving of the decks under his tread made Brown sick, and he went off to bed and left me to wander alone about this odd-looking city of the tropics. New scenes and strong contrasts. The further I travelled through the town, the better I liked it. Every step revealed a new contrast, disclosed something I was unaccustomed to. In place of the grand, mud-colored brown stone fronts of San Francisco I saw neat white cottages with green window shutters. In place of front yards like a billiard table with iron fences around them I saw those cottages surrounded by ample yards about like Portsmouth Square, as to size, thickly clad with green grass and shaded by tall trees, through whose dense foliage the sun could scarcely penetrate. In place of the customary infernal geranium, languishing in dust and general debility on tin-roofed rear additions, or in bedroom windows, I saw luxurious banks and thickets of flowers, fresh as a meadow after a rain, and glowing with the richest dyes. In place of the dingy horrors of the willows and the painful, sharp-pointed shrubbery of that funny caricature of nature which they call South Park, I saw huge bodied, widespreading forest trees with strange names and stranger appearance, trees that cast a shadow like a thunder-cloud, and were able to stand alone without being tied to green poles. In place of those vile, tiresome, stupid, everlasting goldfish wiggling around in glass globes and assuming all shades and degrees of distortion through the magnifying and diminishing qualities of their transparent prison-houses, I saw cats, Tomcats, Marianne cats, Long-tailed cats, Bobtail cats, Blind cats, One-eyed cats, Wall-eyed cats, Cross-eyed cats, Gray cats, Black cats, White cats, Yellow cats, Striped cats, Spotted cats, Tamed cats, Wild cats, Singed cats, Individual cats, Groups of cats, Platoons of cats, Companies of cats, Regiments of cats, Armies of cats, Multitudes of cats, Millions of cats, and all of them, Sleek, fat, lazy, and sound asleep. In place of ruffs and rowdies staring and blackguarding on the corners, I saw long-haired, saddle-colored, sandwich-island maidens sitting on the ground in the shade of the corner houses, gazing indolently at whatever or whoever happened along. Instead of that wretched cobblestone pavement nuisance, I walked on a firm foundation of coral, built up from the bottom of the sea by the absurd but persevering insect of that name, with a light layer of lava and cinders overlying the coral, belched up out of fathomless hell long ago through the seared and blackened crater that stands dead and cold and harmless yonder in the distance now. Instead of cramped and crowded street cars, I met dusky native women sweeping by, free as the wind, on fleet horses and a straddle, with gaudy riding sashes streaming like banners behind them. Instead of the combined stenches of Sacramento Street, Chinatown, and Brannon Street slaughter-houses, I breathed the balmy fragrance of Jasmine, Oleander, and the pride of India. Instead of the hurry and bustle and noisy confusion of San Francisco, I moved in the midst of a summa calm as tranquil as dawn in the Garden of Eden. In place of our familiar skirting sand-hills and the placid bay, I saw on the one side a framework of tall, precipitous mountains close at hand, clad in refreshing green, and cleft by deep, cool, chasm-like valleys, and in front of the grand sweep of the ocean. A brilliant transparent green near the shore, bound and bordered by a long white line of foamy spray dashing against the reef, and further out, the dead blue water of the deep sea, flecked with whitecaps, and in far horizon a single lonely sail. At this moment this man brown, who has no better manners than to read over one's shoulder, observes, yes, and hot, oh, I reckon not, only eighty-two in the shade. Go on now and put it all down, now that you've begun, just say, and more santa-peeds, and cockroaches, and fleas, and lizards, and red ants, and scorpions, and spiders, and mosquitoes, and missionaries. Oh, blame my cats if I'd live here two months, not if I was high you mucka-muckan king of Wahoo, and had a harem full of hyenas. Wahine, most generally pronounced Wahini, seems to answer for wife, woman, and female of questionable character, indifferently. I never can get this man brown to understand that hyena is not the proper pronunciation. He says, it ain't any odds, it describes some of them anyway. I remarked, but Mr. Brown, these are trifles. Trifles be blowed. You get nipped by one of them scorpions once, and see how you like it. There was Mrs. Jones swabbing her face with a sponge. She felt something grab her cheek. She dropped the sponge, and out-popped a scorpion an inch and a half long. Well, she got up and danced the highland fling for two hours and a half, and yell, why, you could have heard her from lo-how to hula-hula with a wind-fair, and for three days she soaked her cheek in brandy and salt and it swelled up as big as your two fists. And you want to know what made me light out of bed so sudden last night? Only a satipede? Nothing, only a satipede, with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a hole through a rawhide. Don't you know one of them things grabbed Mrs. Boone's foot when she was riding one day? He was hid in the stirrup, and just clamped himself round her foot and sunk his fangs plumb through her shoe, and she just throwed her whole soul into one war-woop and then hinted, and she didn't get out of bed nor set that foot on the floor again for three weeks. And how did Captain Godfrey always get off so easy? Why, because he always carried a bottle full of scorpions and satipedes soaked in alcohol, and whenever he got bit he bathed the place with that devilish mixture or took a drink out of it, I don't recollect which. And how did he have to do once when he had in his bottle long? He had to cut off the bite with his knife and fill up the hole with arnica, and then prop his mouth open with a bootjack to keep from getting the lockjaw. Oh, fill me up about this lovely country. You can go on writing that slop about balmy breezes and fragrant flowers and all that sort of truck, but you're not going to leave out them satipedes and things for want of being reminded of it, you know? I said mildly. But, Mr. Brown, these are the Mere—Mere, your grandmother! They ain't the Mere anything! What's the use of you telling me they're the Mere—Mere, whatever it was you was going to call it? You look at them raw splotches all over my face, all over my arms, all over my body! Mosquito bites! Don't tell me about Mere—Mere things! You can't get around them mosquito bites! I took and brushed out my bar—mosquito net—good night before last and tucked it in all around, and before morning I was eternally chawed up anyhow. And the night before I fastened her up all right and got in bed and smoked that old strong pipe until I got strangled and smothered and couldn't get out, and then they swarmed in there and jammed their bills through my shirt and sucked me as dry as a life-preserver before I got my breath again. And how did that deadfall work? I was two days making it, and sweated two buckets full of brine, and blamed the mosquito ever went under it, and sloshing around in my sleep I catched my foot in it and got it flattened out so that it wouldn't go into a green turtle-shell forty-four inches across the back. Jim Ehr's grinding out seven double verses of poetry about wow, who, and crying about leaving the blasted place in the last two verses. And you slobbering here about, well, there you are. Now, what do you say? That yellow spider could straddle over a saucer just like nothing, and if I hadn't been here to set that spittoon on him, he would have been between your sheets in a minute. He was travelling straight for your bed. He had his eye on it. Just pull that web that he's been stringing after him, pretty near as hard to break as sewing silk, and look at his feet sticking out all around the spittoon. Oh, confound wow, who! I am glad Brown has got disgusted at that murdered spider and gone. I don't like to be interrupted when I'm writing, especially by Brown, who is one of those men who always looks at the unpleasant side of everything, and I seldom do. Mark Twain End of Section 48 This is Section 49 of Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Newspaper Articles by Mark Twain. Section 49 The Sacramento Daily Union, April 1866, Part 3 The San Francisco Daily Union, April 20, 1866 Honolulu, March 1866 Board and lodging secured I did not expect to find as comfortable a hotel as the American, with its large, airy, well furnished rooms, distinguished by perfect neatness and cleanliness, its cool, commodious verandas, its excellent table, its ample front yard, carpeted with grass and adorned with shrubbery, etc., and so I was agreeably disappointed. One of our lady passengers from San Francisco, who brings high recommendations, has purchased a half interest in the hotel, and she shows such a determination to earn success that I heartily wish she may achieve it, and the more so because she is an American, and if common remark can be depended upon, the foreign element here will not allow an American to succeed if a good strong struggle can prevent it. Several of us have taken rooms in a cottage in the center of town, and are well satisfied with our quarters. There is a grassy yard as large as Platt's Hall on each of the three sides of the premises, a number of great Tamarin, and Algaroba trees tower above us, and their dense, wide-spreading foliage casts a shade that pauls our verandas with a sort of solemn twilight, even at noonday. If I were not so fond of looking into the rich masses of green leaves that sway the stately Tamarin right before my door, I would idle less and write more, I think. The leaf of this tree is of the size and shape of that of our sickly, homely locust in the States, but the Tamarin, as as much more superb a tree than the locust, as a beautiful white woman is more lovely than a digger squaw who may chance to generally resemble her in shape and size. The Algaroba, my spelling is guesswork, has a gnarled and twisted trunk, as thick as a barrel, far-reaching crooked branches and a delicate feathery foliage, which would be much better suited to a garden shrub than to so large a tree. We have got some handsome mango trees about us, also, with dark green leaves, as long as a goose quill, and not more than twice as broad. The trunk of this tree is about six inches through, and is very straight and smooth. Five feet from the ground it divides into three branches of equal size, which bend out with a graceful curve and then assume an upright position, from these numerous smaller branches spout. The main branches are not always three in number, I believe, but ours have this characteristic at any rate. We pay from five to seven dollars a week for furnished rooms and ten dollars for board. Further particulars in this connection. Mr. Lawler, an American and well-spoken of, keeps a restaurant where meals can be had at all hours, so you see that folks of both regular and eccentric habits can be accommodated in Honolulu. Washing is done chiefly by the natives, price, a dollar, a dozen. If you are not watchful, though, your shirt won't stand more than one washing, because Kanaka Artists work by a most destructive method. They use only cold water, sit down by a brook, soap the garment, lay it on one rock, and pound it with another. This gives a shirt a handsome fringe around its borders, but it is ruinous on buttons. If your washerwoman knows you will not put up with this sort of thing, however, she will do her pounding with a bottle or else rub your clothes clean with her hands. After the garments are washed, the artist spreads them on the green grass, and the flaming sun and the winds soon bleach them as whitest snow. They are then ironed on a cocoa leaf mat spread on the ground, and the job is finished. I cannot discover that anything of the nature of starch is used. Bored, lodging, clean clothes, furnished room, coal oil or whale oil lamp, dingy greasy villainous. Next you want water, fruit, tobacco, and cigars, and possibly wines and liquors, and then you are fixed and ready to live in Honolulu. Water. The water is pure, sweet, cool, clear as crystal, and comes from a spring in the mountains, and is distributed all over the town through leaden pipes. You can find a hydrant spiriting away at the bases of three or four trees in a single yard sometimes, so plenty and cheap is this excellent water. Only twenty-four dollars a year supplies a whole household with a limitless quantity of it. Fruit. You must have fruit. You feel the want of it here, at any rate I do, though I cared nothing whatever for it in San Francisco. You pay about twenty-five cents, two reales in the language of the country borrowed from Mexico, where a good deal of their silver money comes from, a dozen for oranges, and so delicious are they that some people frequently eat a good many at luncheon. I sell to meet more than ten or fifteen at a sitting, however, because I despise to see anybody gourmandize. Even fifteen is a little surprising to me, though, for two or three oranges in succession were about as much as I could ever relish at home. Bananas are worth about a bit a dozen, enough for that rather overrated fruit. Strawberries are plenty and as cheap as the bananas. Those which are carefully cultivated here have a far finer flavor than the California article. They are in season a good part of the year. I have a kind of general idea that the tamarins are rather sour this year. I had a curiosity to taste these things, and I knocked half a dozen off the tree and ate them the other day. They sharpened my teeth up like a razor and put a wire edge on them that I think likely will wear off when the enamel does. My judgment now is that when it comes to sublimated sourness, persimmons will have to take a back seat and let the tamarins come to the front. They are shaped and colored like a peanut, and about three times as large. The seeds inside of the thin pot are covered with that sour, gluey substance which I experimented on. They say tamarins make excellent preserves, and by a wise provision of providence they are generally placed in sugar-growing countries, and also that a few of them placed in impure water at sea will render it palatable. Mangos and guavas are plenty. I do not like them. The limes are excellent, but not very plenty. Most of the apples brought to this market are imported from Oregon. Those I have eaten were as good as bad turnips, but not better. They claim to raise good apples and peaches on some of these islands. I have not seen any grapes or pears or melons here. They may be out of season, but I keep thinking it is dead summer time now. Cigars. The only cigars smoked here are those trifling and sippid, tasteless, flavorless things they call manillas, ten for twenty-five cents, and it would take a thousand to be worth half the money. After you have smoked about thirty-five dollars worth of them in a forenoon you feel nothing but a desperate yearning to go out somewhere and take a smoke. They say high duties and a sparse population render it unprofitable to import good cigars, but I do not see why some enterprising citizen does not manufacture them from the native tobacco. A canaca gave me some Oahu tobacco yesterday, a fine texture, pretty good flavor, and so strong that one pipeful of it satisfied me for several hours. This man Brown has just come in and said he has bought a couple of tons of manillas to smoke to-night. Wines and Liquors. Wines and liquors can be had in abundance, but not of the very best quality. The duty on brandy and whiskey amounts to about three dollars a gallon, and on wines from thirty to sixty cents a bottle, according to market value. And just here I would caution Californians who design visiting these islands against bringing wines or liquors with their baggage lest they provoke the confiscation of the latter. They will be told that to uncork the bottles and take a little of the contents out will compass the disabilities of the law, but they may find it dangerous to act upon such a suggestion, which is nothing but an unworthy evasion of the law at best. It is incumbent upon the custom officers to open trunks and search for contraband articles, and although I think the spirit of the law means to permit foreigners to bring a little wine or liquor ashore for private use, I know the letter of it allows nothing of the kind. In addition to searching a passenger's baggage, the Custom House Officer makes him swear that he has got nothing contraband with him. I will also mention, as a matter of information, that a small sum, two dollars for each person, is exacted for permission to land baggage, and this goes to the support of the hospitals. I have said that the wines and liquors sold here are not of the best quality. It could not well be otherwise, as I can show. There seem to be no hard regular drinkers in this town, or at least very few. You perceive that the duties are high. Saloon keepers pay a license of a thousand dollars a year. They must close up at ten o'clock at night and not open again before daylight the next morning. They are not allowed to open on Sunday at all. These laws are very strict and are rigidly obeyed. WATER AGAIN I must come back to water again, though I thought I had exhausted the subject, as no ice is kept here, and as the notion that snow is brought to Honolulu from the prodigious mountains on the island of Hawaii as a happy fiction of some imaginative writer, the water used for drinking is usually kept cool by putting it into monkeys and placing those animals in open windows, where the breezes of heaven may blow upon them. Monkeys are slender-necked, large-bodied, gorge-shaped earthenware vessels, manufactured in Germany, and are popularly supposed to keep water very cool and fresh, but I cannot endorse that supposition. If a wet blanket were wrapped around the monkey I think the evaporation would cool the water within, but nobody seems to consider it worthwhile to go to that trouble, and I include myself among this number. Ice is worth a hundred dollars a ton in San Francisco, and five or six hundred here, and if the steamer continues to run a profitable trade may possibly be driven in the article hereafter. It does not pay to bring it from Sitka in sailing vessels, though, it has been tried. It proved a mutinous and demoralizing cargo, too, for the sailors drank the melted freight and got so high-toned that they refused ever afterwards to go to sea unless the captains would guarantee them ice-water on the voyage. Brown got the latter fact from Captain Phelps, and says he coppered it in consideration of the source. To copper a thing, he informs me, is to bet against it. Etiquette. If you get into conversation with a stranger in Honolulu and experience that natural desire to know what sort of ground you are treading on by finding out what manner of man your stranger is, make out boldly and address him as Captain. Watch him narrowly, and if you see by his countenance that you are on the wrong tack, ask him where he preaches. It is a safe bet that he is either a missionary or captain of a whaler. I am now personally acquainted with seventy- two captains and ninety-six missionaries. The captains and ministers form one half of the population. The third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile foreigners and their families, and the final fourth is made up of high officers of the Hawaiian government, and there are just about cats enough for three a piece all around. A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs yesterday and said, Good morning, your reverence! Preach in the stone church yonder, no doubt? No, I don't. I'm not a preacher. Really! I beg your pardon, Captain. I trust you had a good season. How much oil—oil? Why, what do you take me for? I'm not a whaler. Oh, I beg a thousand pardons, your Excellency. Major General and the household troops, no doubt. Minister of the Interior likely. Secretary of War? First gentleman of the bed-chamber. Commissioner of the Royal? Stuff, man. I'm no official. I'm not connected in any way with the government. Bless my life, then who the mischief are you? What the mischief are you? And how the mischief did you get here? And where in thunder did you come from? I'm only a private personage, an unassuming stranger lately arrived from America. No. Not a missionary. Not a whaler. Not a member of His Majesty's government. Not even Secretary of the Navy. Heaven! It is too blissful to be true. Alas, I do but dream. And yet that noble, honest countenance, those oblique, ingenuous eyes, that massive head incapable of—of—anything. Your hand, give me your hand, bright waif. Excuse these tears. For sixteen weary years I have yearned for a moment like this, and—here his feelings were too much for him and he swooned away. I pitted this poor creature from the bottom of my heart. I was deeply moved. I shed a few tears on him and kissed him for his mother. I then took what small change he had and shoved. Mark Twain. The Sacramento Daily Union. April 21, 1866. Honolulu, March, 1866. Coming home from prison. I am probably the most sensitive man in the kingdom of Hawaii tonight, especially about sitting down in the presence of my betters. I have ridden fifteen or twenty miles on horseback since five p.m. and to tell the honest truth I have a delicacy about sitting down at all. I am one of the poorest horsemen in the world, and I never mount a horse without experiencing a sort of dread that I may be setting out on that last, mysterious journey which all of us must take sooner or later, and I never come back in safety from a horseback trip without thinking of my latter end for two or three days afterward. This same old regular devotional sentiment began just as soon as I sat down here five minutes ago. An excursion to Diamond Head and the King's Coconut Grove was planned to-day. Time, 4.30 p.m. The party to consist of half a dozen gentlemen and three ladies. They all started at the appointed hour except myself. I was at the government prison, and got so interested in its examination that I did not notice how quickly the time was passing. Somebody remarked that it was twenty minutes past five o'clock, and that woke me up. It was a fortunate circumstance that Captain Phillips was there with his turn out, as he calls a top buggy that Captain Cook brought here in 1778, and a horse that was here when Captain Cook came. Captain Phillips takes a just pride in his driving and in the speed of his horse, and to his passion for displaying them, I owe it that we were only sixteen minutes coming from the prison to the American Hotel, a distance which has been estimated to be over half a mile. But it took some awful driving. The Captain's whip came down fast, and the blows started so much dust out of the horse's hide that during the last half of the journey we rode through an impenetrable fog and ran by a pocket compass in the hands of Captain Fish, a whaler-captain of twenty-six years' experience, who sat there through that perilous voyage as self-possessed as if he had been on the Euker Deck of his own ship, and calmly said, Port your helm, port, from time to time, and hold her a little free-steady, so, and luff hard down to Starboard, and never once lost his presence of mind or betrayed the least anxiety by voice or manner. When we came to anchor at last and Captain Phillips looked at his watch and said, Sixteen minutes! I told you it was in her! That's over three miles an hour!" I could see he felt entitled to a compliment, and so I said I had never seen lightning go like that horse, and I never had. The Steed Oahu. The landlord of the American said the party had been gone nearly an hour, but that he could give me my choice of several horses that could easily overtake them. I said never mind, I preferred a safe horse to a fast one. I would like to have an excessively gentle horse, a horse with no spirit whatever—a lame one, if he had such a thing. Inside a five minutes I was mounted and perfectly satisfied with my outfit. I had no time to label him this is a horse, and so if the public took him for a sheep I cannot help it. I was satisfied, and that was the main thing. I could see that he had as many fine points as any man's horse, and I just hung my hat on one of them, behind the saddle, and swabbed the perspiration from my face, and started. I named him after this island, Oahu, pronounced O-WOW-HOO. The first gate he came to he started in. I had neither whip nor spur, and so I simply argued the case with him. He firmly resisted argument, but ultimately yielded to insult and abuse. He backed out of that gate and steered for another one on the other side of the street. I triumphed by my former process. Within the next six hundred yards he crossed the street fourteen times and attempted thirteen gates, and in the meantime the tropical sun was beating down and threatening to cave the top of my head in, and I was literally dripping with perspiration and profanity. I am only human, and I was sorely aggravated. I shall behave better next time. He quit the gate business after that and went along peaceably enough, but absorbed in meditation. I noticed this latter circumstance, and it soon began to fill me with the gravest apprehension. I said to myself, this malignant brute is planning some new outrage, some fresh devil-tree or other. No horse ever thought over a subject so profoundly as this one is doing just for nothing. The more this thing preyed upon my mind, the more uneasy I became. Until at last the suspense became unbeatable, and I dismounted to see if there was anything wild in his eye. For I had heard that the eye of this noblest of our domestic animals is very expressive. I cannot describe what a load of anxiety was lifted from my mind when I found out that he was only asleep. I woke him up and started him into a faster walk, and then the inborn villainy of his nature came out again. He tried to climb over a stone wall five or six feet high. I saw that I must apply force to this horse, and that I might as well begin first as last. I plucked a stout switch from a tamarin tree, and the moment he saw it he gave in. He broke into a convulsive sort of a canter, which had three short steps in it and one long one, and reminded me alternately of the clattering shake of the great earthquake and the sweeping plunging of the Ajax in a storm. Out of prison, but in the stocks. And now it occurs to me that there can be no fitter occasion in the present to pronounce a fervent curse upon the man who invented the American saddle. There is no seat to speak of about it. One might as well sit in a shovel. And the stirrups are nothing but an ornamental nuisance. If I were to write down here all the abuse I expended on those stirrups, it would make a large book, even without pictures. Sometimes I got one foot so far through that the stirrup partook of the nature of an anklet. Sometimes both feet were through, and I was handcuffed by the legs, and sometimes my feet got clear out, and left the stirrups wildly dangling about my shins. Even when I was in proper position and carefully balanced upon the balls of my feet, there was no comfort in it, on account of my nervous dread that they were going to slip one away or the other in a moment. But the subject is too exasperating to write about. About Horses and Kanaka Shrewdness. This is a good time to drop in a paragraph of information. There is no regular livery stable in Honolulu, or indeed in any part of the kingdom of Hawaii. Therefore, unless you are acquainted with wealthy residents, who all have good horses, you must hire animals of the vilest description from the Kanakas. Any horse you hire, even though it be from a white man, is not often of much account, because it will be brought in for you from some ranch, and has necessarily been leading a hard life. If the Kanakas who have been caring for him, in veteran riders they are, have not ridden him half to death every day themselves, you can depend upon it. They have been doing the same thing by proxy, by clandestinely hiring him out. At least, so I am informed. The result is that no horse has a chance to eat, drink, rest, recuperate, or look well or feel well, and so strangers go about in the islands mounted as I was to-day. In hiring a horse from a Kanaka you must have all your eyes about you, because you can rest satisfied that you are dealing with as Shrewd Eraskel as ever patronized at penitentiary. You may leave your door open and your trunk unlocked as long as you please, and he will not meddle with your property. He has no important vices, and no inclination to commit robbery on a large scale. But if he can get ahead of you in the horse business, he will take a genuine delight in doing it. This trait is characteristic of horse-jockeys the world over, is it not? He will overcharge you if he can. He will hire you with a fine-looking horse at night—anybody's, maybe the king's, if the royal steed be in convenient view—and bring you the mate to my Oahu in the morning, and contend that it is the same animal. If you raise a row—he will get out by saying it was not himself who made the bargain with you, but his brother, who went out in the country this morning—they have always got a brother to shift the responsibility upon. A victim said to one of these fellows one day, but I know I hired the horse of you, because I noticed that scar on your cheek. Their reply was not bad. Oh, yes, yes, my brother all same. We twins! A friend of mine, J. Smith, hired a horse yesterday, the Kanaka warranting him to be in excellent condition. Smith had a saddle and blanket of his own, and he ordered the Kanakas to put these on the horse. The Kanaka protested that he was perfectly willing to trust the gentleman with the saddle that was already on the animal, but Smith refused to use it. The change was made, then Smith noticed that the Kanaka had only changed the saddles, and had left the original blanket on the horse. He said he forgot to change the blankets, and so, to cut the bother short, Smith mounted and rode away. The horse went lame a mile from town, and afterward got to cutting up some extraordinary capers. Smith got down and took off the saddle, but the blanket stuck fast to the horse, glued to a procession of raw sores. The Kanaka's mysterious conduct stood explained. Another friend of mine bought a pretty good horse from a native a day or two ago, after a tolerably thorough examination of the animal. He discovered today that the horse was as blind as about in one eye. He meant to have examined that eye and came home with a general notion that he had done it, but he remembers now that every time he made the attempt his attention was called to something else by his victimizer. One more yarn and then I will pass to something else. I am informed that when Leyland was here he bought a pair of very respectable looking match horses from a native. They were in a little stable with a partition through the middle of it, one horse in each apartment. Leyland examined one of them critically through a window, the Kanaka's brother having gone to the country with the key, and then went around the house and examined the other through a window on the other side. He said it was the neatest match he had ever seen, and paid for the horses on the spot, whereupon the Kanaka departed to join his brother in the country. The scoundrel had shamefully swindled Leyland. There was only one match horse and he had examined his starboard side through one window and his port side through another. I declined to believe this story, but I give it because it is worth something as a fanciful illustration of a fixed fact, namely that the Kanaka horse jockey is fertile in invention and elastic in conscience. Honolulu Prices for Horse Flesh You can buy a pretty good horse for forty or fifty dollars and a good enough horse for all practical purposes for two dollars and a half. I estimate Oahu to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five cents. A good deal better animal than he is was sold here a day before yesterday for a dollar and six bits, and sold again today for two dollars and twenty-five cents. Brown bought a handsome and lively little pony yesterday for ten dollars and about the best common horse on the island, and he is a really good one, sold yesterday with good Mexican saddle and bridle for seventy dollars. A horse which is well and widely known and greatly respected for his speed, good disposition, and everlasting bottom. You give your horse a little grain once a day. It comes from San Francisco and is worth about two cents a pound, and you give him as much hay as he wants. It is cut and brought to the market by natives and is not very good. It is bailed into long round bundles about the size of a large man. One of them is stuck by the middle on each end of a six-foot pole, and the Kanaka shoulders the pole and walks about the streets between the upright bales in search of customers. These hay bales, thus carried, have a general resemblance to a colossal capital H. These hay bundles cost twenty-five cents a piece, and one will last a horse about a day. You can get a horse for a song, a week's hay for another song, and you can turn your animal loose among the luxuriant grass in your neighbor's broad front yard without a song at all. You do it at midnight and stable the beast again before morning. You have been at no expense thus far, but when you come to buy a saddle and bridle they will cost you from twenty dollars to thirty-five dollars. You can hire a horse, saddle and bridle, at from seven dollars to ten dollars a week, and the owner will take care of them at his own expense. Well, Oahu worried along over a smooth, hard road bordered on either side by cottages at intervals, pooloo swamps at intervals, fishponds at intervals, but through a dead-level country all the time, and no trees to hide the wide Pacific Ocean on the right or the rugged towering rampart of solid rock called Diamond Head or Diamond Point straight ahead. The King's Grove Waikiki. A mile and a half from town I came to a grove of tall coconut trees with clean, branchless stems reaching straight up sixty or seventy feet and topped with a spray of green foliage sheltering clusters of coconuts. Not more picturesque than the forest of colossal ragged parasols with bunches of magnified grapes under them would be. About a dozen cottages, some frame and the others, of native grass, nestled sleepily in the shade here and there. The grass cabins are of a grayish color, are shaped much like our own cottages, only with higher and steeper roofs usually, and are made of some kind of weed strongly bound together in bundles. The roofs are very thick, and so are the walls. The latter have square holes in them for windows. At a little distance these cabins have a furry appearance as if they might be made of bear skins. They are very cool and pleasant inside. The King's flag was flying from the roof of one of the cottages, and his majesty was probably within. He owns the whole concern thereabouts, and passes his time there frequently on sultry days, laying off. The spot is called The King's Grove. Ruins of an Ancient Heathen Temple. Nearby is an interesting ruin. The meager remains of an ancient heathen temple, a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old bygone days when the simple child of nature, yielding momentarily to sin when sorely tempted, acknowledged his error when calm reflection had shown it to him, and came forward with noble frankness and offered up his grandmother as an atoning sacrifice, in those old days when the luckless sinner could keep on cleansing his conscience and achieving periodical happiness as long as his relations held out. Long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there, and showed the poor native how dreary a place perdition is, and what unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it, showed him how, in his ignorance, he had gone and fooled away all his kinfolks to no purpose, showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for past time, and lolling in the shade through eternal summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but nature. How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell! And it inclines right-thinking people to weep rather than to laugh when he reflects how surprised they must have been when they got there. This ancient temple was built of rough blocks of lava, and was simply a roofless enclosure, a hundred and thirty feet long and seventy wide, nothing but naked walls, very thick but not much higher than a man's head. They will last for ages, no doubt, if left unmolested. Its three altars and other sacred appurtenances have crumbled and passed away years ago. It is said that in the old times thousands of human beings were slaughtered here in the presence of multitudes of naked, whooping and howling savages. If these mute stones could speak, what tales they could tell, what pictures they could describe of fettered victims writhing and shrieking under the knife, of dense masses of dusky form straining forward out of the gloom, with eager and ferocious faces lit up with a weird light of sacrificial fires, of the vague background of ghostly trees, of the mournful sea washing the dim shore, of the dark pyramid of Diamondhead standing sentinel over the dismal scene, and the peaceful moon looking calmly down upon it through rifts in the drifting clouds. When Kamea-Maea, pronounced ka-me-ha-may-ah, the great, who was a very Napoleon in military genius and uniform success, invaded this island of Oahu three quarters of a century ago, and exterminated the army sent to oppose him, and took full and final possession of the country, he searched out the dead body of the king of Oahu, and those of the principal chiefs, and impaled their heads upon the walls of this temple. Those were savage times when this old slaughter-house was in its time. The king and the chiefs ruled the common herd with a rod of iron, made them gather all the provisions the masters needed, built all the houses and temples, stand all the expenses of whatever kind, take kicks and cuffs for thanks, drag out lives well-flavored with misery, and then suffer death for trifling offenses, or yield up their lives on the sacrificial altars to purchase favors from the gods for their hard rulers. The missionaries have clothed them, educated them, broken up the tyrannous authority of their chiefs, and given them freedom and the right to enjoy whatever the labor of their hand and brain produces, with equal laws for all, and punishment for all alike who transgress them. The contrast is so strong, the wonderful benefit conferred upon this people by the missionaries is so prominent, so palpable, and so unquestionable, that the frankest compliment I can pay them, and the best, is simply to point to the condition of the sandwich islanders of Captain Cook's time and their condition today. Their work speaks for itself. The little collection of cottages, of which I was speaking a while ago, under the coconut trees, is a historical point. It is the village of Waikiki, usually pronounced Waikikai, once the capital of the kingdom and the abode of the great Kamehameha of the First. In 1801, while he lay encamped at this place with seven thousand men, preparing to invade the island of Kauai, he had previously captured and subdued the seven other inhabited islands of the group, one after another. A pestilence broke out in Oahu, and raged with great virulence. It attacked the King's army and made great havoc in it. It is said that three hundred bodies were washed out to sea in one day. There is an opening in the coral reef at this point, and an anchorage inside for a small number of vessels, though one accustomed to the great bay of San Francisco would never take this little belt of smooth water with its border of foaming surf to be a harbour, save for white-haul boats or something of that kind. But harbours are scarce in these islands. Open roadsteads are the rule here. The harbour of Waikiki was discovered in 1786, seven or eight years after Captain Cook's murder, by Captains Portlock and Dixon in the ships King George and Queen Charlotte, the first English vessels that visited the islands after that unhappy occurrence. This little bathing tub of smooth water possesses some further historical interest as being the spot where the distinguished navigator, Vancouver, landed when he came here in 1792. In a conversation with a gentleman today about the scarcity of harbours among the islands, and in all the islands of the South Pacific, he said the natives of Tahiti have a theory that the reason why there are harbours wherever fresh water streams empty into the sea, and none elsewhere, is that the fresh water kills the coral insect or so discomodes or disgusts it that it will not build its stony wall in its vicinity, and instanced what is claimed as fact, these, but the break in the reef is always found where the fresh water passes over it in support of this theory. This notable equestrian excursion will be concluded in my next, if nothing happens, Mark Twain. The Sacramento Daily Union, April 24, 1866, Honolulu, March 1866. The equestrian excursion concluded, I wandered along the sea beach on my steed Oahu, around the base of the extinct crater of Leahi, or Diamondhead, and a quarter of a mile beyond the point I overtook the party of ladies and gentlemen, and assumed my proper place, that is, in the rear, for the horse I ride always persists in remaining in the rear in spite of kicks, cuffs, and curses. I was satisfied as long as I could keep Oahu within hailing distance of the cavalcade. I knew I could accomplish nothing better, even if Oahu were Norfolk himself. We went on, on, on, a great deal too far, I thought, for people who were unaccustomed to riding on horseback, and who must expect to suffer on the morrow if they indulge too freely in this sort of exercise. Finally we got to a point, which we were expecting to go around in order to strike an easy road home, but we were too late. It was full tide, and the sea had closed in on the shore. Young Henry McFarlane said he knew a nice comfortable route over the hill, a shortcut, and the crowd dropped into his wake. We climbed a hill a hundred and fifty feet high, and about as straight up and down as the side of a house, and as full of rough lava blocks as it could stick, not as wide perhaps as the broad road that leads to destruction, but nearly as dangerous to travel, and apparently leading in the same general direction. I felt for the ladies, but I had no time to speak any words of sympathy by reason of my attention being so much occupied by Oahu. The place was so steep that at times he stood straight up on his tip toes and clung by his forward toenails, with his back to the Pacific Ocean and his nose close to the moon, and thus situated we formed an equestrian picture which was as uncomfortable to me as it may have been picturesque to the spectators. You may think I was afraid, but I was not. I knew I could stay on him as long as his ears did not pull out. It was a great relief to me to know that we were all safe and sound on the summit at last, because the sun was just disappearing in the waves, night was abroad in the land. Candles and lamps were already twinkling in the distant town, and we gratefully reflected that Henry had saved us from having to go back around the rocky sandy beach. But a new trouble arose while the party were admiring the rising moon and the cool, balmy night breeze, with its odor of countless flowers, for it was discovered that we had got into a place we could not get out of. We were apparently surrounded by precipices. Our pilot's chart was at fault, and he could not extricate us, and so we had the prospect before us of either spending the night in the admired night breeze under the admired moon, or of clambering down the way we came in the dark. However, a Kanaka came along presently, and found a first-rate road for us down an almost imperceptible decline, and the party set out on a cheerful gallop again, and Oahu struck up his miraculous canter once more. The moon rose up, and flooded mountain and valley and ocean with silvery light, and I was not sorry we had lately been in trouble, because the consciousness of being safe again raised our spirits and made us more capable of enjoying the beautiful scene than we would have been otherwise. I never breathed such a soft, delicious atmosphere before, nor one freighted with such rich fragrance. A barbershop is nothing to it. And whose history is forgotten. Daily laughing and talking, the party galloped on, and with set teeth and bouncing body I clung to the pommel and cantored after. Presently we came to a place where no grass grew, a wide expanse of deep sand. They said it was an old battleground. All around, everywhere, not three feet apart, the bleached bones of men gleamed white in the moonlight. We picked up a lot of them for mementos. I got quite a number of arm bones and leg bones, of great chiefs, maybe, who had fought savagely in that fearful battle in the old days when blood flowed like wine where we now stood, and wore the choicest of them out on Oahu afterward, trying to make him go. All sorts of bones could be found except skulls, but a citizen said irreverently that there had been an unusual number of skull hunters there lately, a species of sportsman I had never heard of before. The conversation at this point took a unique and ghastly turn. A gentleman said, Give me some of your bones, Miss Blank. I'll carry them for you. Another said, You haven't got bones enough, Mrs. Blank. Here's a good shin bone if you want it. Such observations as these fell from the lips of ladies with reference to their queer, newly acquired property. Mr. Brown, will you please hold some of my bones for me a minute? And Mr. Smith, you have got some of my bones, and you have got one too, Mr. Jones, and you have got my spine, Mr. Twain. Now don't any of you gentlemen get my bones all mixed up with yours, so that you can't tell them apart? These remarks look very irreverent on paper, but they did not sound so, being used merely in a business way, and with no intention of making sport of the remains. I did not think it was just right to carry off any of these bones, but we did it anyhow. We considered that it was at least as right as it is for the Hawaiian government and the city of Honolulu, which is the most excessively moral and religious town that can be found on the map of the world, to permit those remains to lie decade after decade to bleach and rot in sun and wind and suffer desecration by careless strangers and by the beasts of the field unprotected by even a worm-fence. Call us hard names, if you will, you statesmen and missionaries, but I say shame upon you that after raising a nation from idolatry to Christianity and from barbarism to civilization, you have not taught it the comment—sick of respect for the dead—your work is incomplete. Legendary. Nothing whatever is known about this place, its story is a secret that will never be revealed. The oldest natives make no pretense of being possessed of its history. They say these bones were here when they were children. They were here when their grandfathers were children, and how they came here they can only conjecture. Many people believe this spot to be an ancient battleground, and it is usual to call it so, and they believe that these skeletons have lain for ages just where their proprietors fell in the great fight. Other people believe that Kamehameha I fought his first battle here. On this point I have heard a story which may have been taken from one of the numerous books which have been written concerning these islands. I do not know where the narrator got it. He said that when Kamehameha, who was at first merely a subordinate chief on the island of Hawaii, landed here, he brought a large army with him, and encamped at Waikiki. The Oahuans marched against him, and so confident were they of success that they readily acceded to a demand of their priests, that they should draw a line where their bones now lie, and take an oath that, if forced to retreat at all, they would never retreat beyond this boundary. The priests told them that death and everlasting punishment would overtake any who violated the oath, and the march was resumed. Kamehameha drove them back step by step. The priests fought in the front rank, and exhorted them both by voice and inspired example to remember their oath, to die if need be, but never cross the fatal line. The struggle was manfully maintained, but alas the chief priest fell, pierced to the heart with a spear, and the unlucky omen fell like a blight upon the brave souls at his back. With a triumphant shout the invaders pressed forward, the line was lost. The offended gods deserted the despairing army, and accepting the doom their perjury had brought upon them. They broke and fled over the plain where Honolulu stands now. Up the beautiful Nuanu Valley paused a moment, and in by precipitous mountains on either hand, and the frightful precipice of the Pali, pronounced Pali, intelligent natives claimed that there is no R in the Kanaka alphabet, in front, and then were driven over, a sheer plunge of six hundred feet. The story is pretty enough, but Mr. Jarvis's excellent history says that the Oahuans were entrenched in Nuanu Valley, that Kamehameha ousted them, routed them, pursued them up the valley, and drove them over the precipice. He makes no mention of our boneyard at all in his book. There was a terrible pestilence here in 1804 which killed great numbers of the inhabitants, and the natives have legends of others that swept the islands long before that. And therefore many persons now believe that these bones belong to victims of one of these epidemics who were hastily buried in a great pit. It is by far the most reasonable conjecture, because Jarvis says that the weapons of the islanders were so rude and inefficient that their battles were not often very bloody. If this was a battle it was astonishingly deadly, for in spite of the depredations of skull-hunters we rode a considerable distance over ground so thickly strewn with human bones that the horse's feet crushed them, not occasionally, but at every step. Sentiment. Impressed by the profound silence and repose that rested over the beautiful landscape, and being as usual in the rear, I gave voice to my thought. I said, What a picture is here slumbering in the solemn glory of the moon! How strong the rugged outlines of the dead volcano stand out against the clear sky! What a snowy fringe marks the bursting of the surf over the long curved reef! How calmly the dim city sleeps yonder in the plain! How soft the shadows lie upon the stately mountains that border the dream-haunted Manoa Valley! What a grand pyramid of billowy clouds towers above the storied Pali! How the grim warriors of the past seem flocking in ghostly squadrons to their ancient battlefield again! How the wails of the dying well up from the—at this point the horse called Oahu deliberately sat down in the sand—sat down to listen, I suppose, never mind what he heard. I stopped apostrophizing, and convinced him that I was not a man to allow contempt of court on the part of a horse. I broke the backbone of a chief over his rump, and set out to join the convocate again. Very considerably fagged out we arrived in town at nine o'clock at night, myself in the lead, for when my horse finally came to understand that he was homeward bound and hadn't far to go, he threw his legs wildly out before and behind him, depressed his head and laid his ears back, and flew by the admiring company like a telegram. In five minutes he was far away ahead of everybody. We stopped in front of a private residence, Brown and I did, to wait for the rest and see that none were lost. I soon saw that I had attracted the attention of a comely young girl, and I felt duly flattered, perhaps thought I, she admires my horsemanship, and I made a savage jerk of the bridle and said, Ho! Will you! To show how fierce and unmanageable the beast was, though to say truly he was leaning up against a hitching-post peaceably enough at the time. I stirred Oahu up and moved him about, and went up the street a short distance to look for the party, and lopped gallantly back again, all the while making a pretense of being unconscious that I was an object of interest. I then addressed a few pert remarks to Brown, to give the young lady a chance to admire my style of conversation, and was gratified to see her step up and whisper to Brown, and glance furtively at me at the same time. I could see that her gentle face bore an expression of the most kindly and earnest solicitude, and I was shocked and angered to hear Brown burst into a fit of brutal laughter. As soon as we started home I asked with a fair show of indifference what she had been saying. Brown laughed again, and said, She thought from the slouchy way you rode, and the way you drawled out your words, that she was drunk. She said, Why don't you take the poor creature home, Mr. Brown? It makes me nervous to see him galloping that horse and just hanging on that way, and he so drunk—I laughed very loudly at the joke, but it was a sort of hollow, sepulchral laugh, after all. And then I took it out of Oahu. An Old Acquaintance I have found an old acquaintance here, Reverend Franklin S. Rising, of the Episcopal Minister, who has had charge of a church in Virginia, Nevada, for several years, and who is well known in Sacramento and San Francisco. He sprained his knee in September last, and is here for his health. He thinks he has made no progress worth mentioning towards regaining it, but I think differently. He can ride on horseback and is able to walk a few steps without his crutches—things he could not do a week ago. While we were marching through Georgia. The popular song nuisance follows us here, in San Francisco it used to be, just before the battle, mother, every night and all night long. Then it was, when Johnny comes marching home. After that it was, Weren of the Green, and last and most dreadful of all came that calamity of, when we were marching through Georgia. It was the last thing I heard when the ship sailed, and it gratified me to think I should hear it no more for months, and now, here at dead of night, at the very outpost and fag end of the world, on a little rock in the middle of a limitless ocean, a pack of dark-skinned savages are tramping down the street, singing it with a vim and an energy that make my hair rise, singing it in their own barbarous tongue. They have got the tune to perfection, otherwise I never would have suspected that. Waikiki Lantani Oikai Holy Holy Wahoo means, when we were marching through Georgia. If it would have been all the same to General Sherman, I wish he had gone around, by the way, of the Gulf of Mexico, instead of marching through Georgia.