 59. For a time I wrote literary screeds for the Golden Era. C. H. Webb had established a very excellent literary weekly called The Californian, but high merit was no guarantee of success. It languished, and he sold out to three printers, and Bret Hart became editor at twenty dollars a week, and I was employed to contribute an article a week at twelve dollars. But the journal still languished, and the printers sold out to Captain Ogden, a rich man and a pleasant gentleman who chose to amuse himself with such an expensive luxury without much caring about the cost of it. When he grew tired of the novelty, he resold to the printers. The paper presently died a peaceful death, and I was out of work again. I would not mention these things, but for the fact that they so aptly illustrate the ups and downs that characterize life on the Pacific coast. A man could hardly stumble into such a variety of queer vicissitudes in any other country. For two months my sole occupation was avoiding acquaintances. For during that time I did not earn a penny, or buy an article of any kind, or pay my board. I became a very adept at slinking. I slunk from backstreet to backstreet. I slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar. I slunk to my meals, ate them humbly and with a mute apology for every mouthful I robbed my generous landlady of, and at midnight, after wanderings that were but slinkings away from cheerfulness and light, I slunk to my bed. I felt meaner and lowlier and more despicable than the worms. During all this time I had but one piece of money, a silver ten-cent piece, and I held to it and would not spend it on any account, lest the consciousness coming strong upon me that I was entirely penniless might suggest suicide. I had pawned everything but the clothes I had on, so I clung to my dime desperately till it was smooth with handling. However, I am forgetting. I did have one other occupation beside that of slinking. It was the entertaining of a collector, and being entertained by him, who had in his hands the Virginia banker's bill for forty-six dollars which I had loaned my schoolmate, the prodigal. This man used to call regularly once a week and done me, and sometimes oftener. He did it from sheer force of habit, for he knew he could get nothing. He would get out his bill, calculate the interest for me at five percent a month, and show me clearly that there was no attempt at fraud in it, and no mistakes, and then plead and argue and done with all his might for any sum, any little trifle, even a dollar, even half a dollar on account. Then his duty was accomplished and his conscience free. He immediately dropped the subject there always, got out a couple of cigars and divided, put his feet in the window, and then we would have a long, luxurious talk about everything and everybody, and he would furnish me a world of curious dunning adventures out of the ample store in his memory. By and by he would clap his hat on his head, shake hands, and say briskly, Well, business is business, can't stay with you always, and was off in a second. The idea of pining for a dun. And yet I used to long for him to come, and would get as uneasy as any mother if the day went by without his visit when I was expecting him. But he never collected that bill, at last nor any part of it. I lived to pay it to the banker myself. Misery loves company. Now and then at night in, out of the way, dimly lighted places, I found myself happening on another child of misfortune. He looked so seedy and forlorn, so homeless and friendless and forsaken, that I yearned toward him as a brother. I wanted to claim kinship with him, and go about and enjoy our wretchedness together. The drawing toward each other must have been mutual. At any rate we got to falling together oftener, though still seemingly by accident, and although we did not speak or evince any recognition, I think the dull anxiety passed out of both of us when we saw each other, and then for several hours we would idle along contentedly, wide apart, and glancing furtively at home lights and fireside gatherings, out of the night shadows, and very much enjoying our dumb companionship. Finally we spoke, and were inseparable after that, for our woes were identical almost. He had been a reporter too, and lost his birth, and this was his experience as nearly as I can recollect it. After losing his birth he had gone down, down, down with never a halt, from a boarding-house on Russian Hill, to a boarding-house in Cuney Street, from thence to Dupont, from thence to a low sailor den, and from thence to lodgings in good boxes and empty hogsheads near the wharves. Then, for a while, he had gained a meager living by sowing up bursted sacks of grain on the piers. When that failed he had found food here and there as chance threw it in his way. He had ceased to show his face in daylight now, for a reporter knows everybody, rich and poor, high and low, and cannot well avoid familiar faces in the broad light of day. This mendicant blueker, I call him that for convenience, was a splendid creature. He was full of hope, pluck, and philosophy. He was well-read, and a man of cultivated taste. He had a bright wit, and was a master of satire. His kindliness and his generous spirit made him royal in my eyes, and changed his curb-stone seat to a throne, and his damaged hat to a crown. He had an adventure once, which sticks fast in my memory as the most pleasantly grotesque that ever touched my sympathies. He had been without a penny for two months. He had shirked about obscure streets, among friendly dim lights, till the thing had become second nature to him, but at last he was driven abroad in daylight. The cause was sufficient. He had not tasted food for forty-eight hours, and he could not endure the misery of his hunger in idle hiding. He came along a back street, glowering at the loaves and bake-shop windows, and feeling that he could trade his life away for a morsel to eat. The sight of the bread doubled his hunger, but it was good to look at it anyhow, and imagine what one might do if one only had it. Presently in the middle of the street he saw a shining spot, looked again, did not and could not believe his eyes, turned away to try them, then looked again. It was a verity, no vain hunger-inspired delusion. It was a silver dime. He snatched it, gloated over it, doubted it, bit it, found it genuine, choked his heart down and smothered a hallelujah. Then he looked around, saw that nobody was looking at him, threw the dime down where it was before, walked away a few steps, and approached again, pretending he did not know it was there, so that he could re-enjoy the luxury of finding it. He walked around it, viewing it from different points, then sauntered about with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the signs and now and then glancing at it and feeling the old thrill again. Finally he took it up and went away, fondling it in his pocket. He idled through unfrequented streets, stopping in doorways and corners to take it out and look at it. By and by he went home to his lodgings, an empty queen's-ware hog's-head, and employed himself till night trying to make up his mind what to buy with it. But it was hard to do. To get the most for it was the idea. He knew that at the miner's restaurant he could get a plate of beans and a piece of bread for ten cents, or a fish-ball and some few trifles, but they gave no bread with one fish-ball there. At French Pete's he could get a veal cutlet, plain, and some radishes and bread for ten cents, or a cup of coffee, a pint at least, and a slice of bread, but the slice was not thick enough by the eighth of an inch, and sometimes they were still more criminal than that in the cutting of it. At seven o'clock his hunger was wolfish, and still his mind was not made up. He turned out and went up Merchant Street, still ciphering, and chewing a bit of stick, as is the way of starving men. He passed before the lights of Martin's restaurant, the most aristocratic in the city, and stopped. It was a place where he had often dined in better days, and Martin knew him well. Standing aside just out of the range of the light he worshipped the quails and stakes in the show window, and imagined that maybe the fairy times were not gone yet, and some prince in disguise would come along presently and tell him to go in there and take whatever he wanted. He chewed his stick with a hungry interest as he warmed to his subject. Just at this juncture he was conscious of someone at his side, sure enough, and then a finger touched his arm. He looked up over his shoulder and saw an apparition, a very allegory of hunger. It was a man six feet high, gaunt, unshaven, hung with rags, with a haggard face and sunken cheeks, and eyes that pleaded piteously. This phantom said, Come with me, please. He locked his arm in blueker's, and walked up the street to where the passengers were few, and the light not strong, and then, facing about, put out his hands in a beseeching way, and said, Friend, stranger, look at me. Life is easy to you. You go about, placid and content, as I did once, in my day. You have been there, and eaten your sumptuous supper, and picked your teeth, and hummed your tune, and thought your pleasant thoughts, and said to yourself, It is a good world, but you've never suffered. You don't know what trouble is. You don't know what misery is. Nor hunger. Look at me. Stranger have pity on a poor, friendless, homeless dog. As God is my judge, I have not tasted food for eight and forty hours. Look at my eyes and see if I lie. Give me the least trifle in the world to keep me from starving, anything, twenty-five cents. Do it, stranger. Do it, please. It will be nothing to you, but life to me. Do it, and I will go down on my knees and lick the dust before you. I will kiss your footprints. I will worship the very ground you walk on. Only twenty-five cents. I am famishing, perishing, starving by inches. For God's sake, don't desert me." Blucher was bewildered and touched, too, stirred to the depths. He reflected, thought again. Then an idea struck him, and he said, Come with me. He took the outcast's arm, walked him down to Martin's restaurant, seated him at a marble table, placed the bill of fare before him, and said, Order what you want, friend. Charge it to me, Mr. Martin. All right, Mr. Blucher, said Martin. Then Blucher stepped back and leaned against the counter and watched the man stow away cargo after cargo of buckwheat cakes at seventy-five cents a plate, cup after cup of coffee, and porter house steaks worth two dollars a piece, and when six dollars and a half worth of destruction had been accomplished and the stranger's hunger appeased, Blucher went down to French Peets, bought a veal cutlet plain, a slice of bread, and three radishes with his dime, and set to and feasted like a king. Take the episode all around. It was as odd as any that can be culled from the myriad curiosities of Californian life, perhaps. End of Chapter 59 This is Chapter 60 of Roughing It. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Roughing It by Mark Twain, Chapter 60 By and by, an old friend of mine, a miner, came down from one of the decayed mining camps of Tuolumne, California, and I went back with him. We lived in a small cabin on a verdant hillside, and there were not five other cabins in view over the wide expanse of hill and forest. Yet a flourishing city of two or three thousand population had occupied this grassy dead solitude during the flush times of twelve or fifteen years ago, and where our cabin stood had once been the heart of the teeming hive, the center of the city. When the mines gave out, the town fell into decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared. Streets, dwellings, shops, everything, and left no sign. The grassy slopes were as green and smooth and desolate of life as if they had never been disturbed. The mere handful of miners still remaining had seen the town spring up, spread, grow and flourish in its pride, and they had seen it sicken and die, and pass away like a dream. With it their hopes had died and their zest of life. They had long ago resigned themselves to their exile and ceased to correspond with their distant friends or turned longing eyes toward their early homes. They had accepted banishment, forgotten the world and been forgotten of the world. They were far from telegraphs and railroads, and they stood, as it were, in a living grave, dead to the events that stirred the globe's great populations, dead to the common interests of men, isolated and outcast from brotherhood with their kind. It was the most singular and almost the most touching and melancholy exile that fancy can imagine. One of my associates in this locality, for two or three months, was a man who had had a university education, but now, for eighteen years, he had decayed there by inches, a bearded, roughclad, clay stained minor, and at times, among his sighings and soliloquizing, he unconsciously interjected vaguely remembered Latin and Greek sentences. Dead and musty tongues, meat vehicles for the thoughts of one whose dreams were all of the past, whose life was a failure, a tired man burdened with the present and indifferent to the future, a man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for the rest, and the end. In that one little corner of California is found a species of mining which is seldom or never mentioned in print. It is called pocket-mining, and I am not aware that any of it is done outside of that little corner. The gold is not evenly distributed through the surface dirt, as in ordinary placer mines, but is collected in little spots, and they are very wide apart and exceedingly hard to find, but when you do find one you reap a rich and sudden harvest. There are not now more than twenty pocket miners in that entire little region. I think I know every one of them personally. I have known one of them to hunt patiently about the hillsides every day for eight months without finding gold enough to make a snuff-box, his grocery-bill running up relentlessly all the time, and then find a pocket and take out of it two thousand dollars in two dips of his shovel. I have known him to take out three thousand dollars in two hours, and go and pay up every cent of his indebtedness, then enter on a dazzling spree that finished the last of his treasure before the night was gone, and the next day he bought his groceries on credit as usual, and shouldered his pan and shovel, and went off to the hills hunting pockets again happy and content. This is the most fascinating of all the different kinds of mining, and furnishes a very handsome percentage of victims to the lunatic asylum. Pocket hunting is an ingenious process. You take a spade full of earth from the hillside, and put it in a large tin pan, and dissolve and wash it gradually away till nothing is left but a teaspoonful of fine sediment. Whatever gold was in that earth has remained because, being the heaviest, it has sought the bottom. Among the sediments you will find half a dozen yellow particles no larger than pinheads. You are delighted. You move off to one side and wash another pan. You find gold again. You move to one side further and wash a third pan. If you find no gold this time, you are delighted again, because you know you are on the right scent. You lay an imaginary plan shaped like a fan with its handle up the hill, for just where the end of the handle is, you argue that the rich deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant grains of gold have escaped and been washed down the hill, spreading farther and farther apart as they wandered. And so you proceed up the hill, washing the earth and narrowing your lines every time the absence of gold in the pan shows that you are outside the spread of the fan. And at last, twenty yards up the hill, your lines have converged to a point. A single foot from that point you cannot find any gold. Your breath comes short and quick. You are feverish with excitement. The dinner bell may ring its clapper off. You pay no attention. Friends may die. Weddings transpire. Houses burn down. They are nothing to you. You sweat and dig and delve with a frantic interest. And all at once you strike it. Up comes a spadeful of earth and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of gold. Sometimes that one spadeful is all. Five hundred dollars. And sometimes the nest contains ten thousand dollars. And it takes you three or four days to get it all out. The pocket miners tell of one nest that yielded sixty thousand dollars, and two men exhausted it in two weeks, and then sold the ground for ten thousand dollars to a party who never got three hundred dollars out of it afterward. The hogs are good pocket hunters. All the summer they root around the bushes and turn up a thousand little piles of dirt. And then the miners long for the rains. For the rains beat upon these little piles and wash them down and expose the gold, possibly right over a pocket. Two pockets were found in this way by the same man in one day. One had five thousand dollars in it and the other eight thousand dollars. That man could appreciate it, for he hadn't had a cent for about a year. In Tuolumne lived two miners who used to go to the neighbouring village in the afternoon and return every night with household supplies. Part of the distance they traversed a trail and nearly all was sat down to rest on a great boulder that lay beside the path. In the course of thirteen years they had worn that boulder tolerably smooth sitting on it. By and by two vagrant Mexicans came along and occupied the seat. They began to amuse themselves by chipping off flakes from the boulder with a sledge hammer. They examined one of these flakes and found it rich with gold. That boulder paid them eight hundred dollars afterward. But the aggravating circumstance was that these greasers knew that there must be more gold where that boulder came from and so they went panning up the hill and found what was probably the richest pocket that region has yet produced. It took three months to exhaust it and it yielded a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The two American miners who used to sit on the boulder are poor yet and they take turnabout in getting up early in the morning to curse those Mexicans. And when it comes down to pure ornamental cursing the Native American is gifted above the sons of men. I have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket mining because it is a subject that is seldom referred to in print, and therefore I judged that it would have for the reader that interest which naturally attaches to novelty. One of the gentlest spirits that ever bore its patient cross in a weary exile. Grave and simple dick-baker pocket miner of dead house gulch. He was forty-six, grey as a rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed, and clay soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever brought to light than any indeed that ever was mined or minted. Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own, for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must love something. And he always spoke of the strange sagacity of that cat with the air of a man who believed in his secret heart that there was something human about it, maybe even supernatural. I heard him talking about this animal once. He said, Gentlemen, I used to have a cat here by the name of Tom Quartz, which you took an interest in, I reckon. Most anybody would. I had him here eight years, and he was the remarkableest cat I ever see. He was a large, grey one of the Tom species, and he had more hard, natural sense than any man in this camp. And the power of dignity. He wouldn't let the Governor of California be familiar with him. He never catched a rat in his life, peered to be above it. He never cared for nothing but mining. He knowed more about mining that cat did than any man I ever ever see. You couldn't tell him nothing about placer-digons, and as for pocket-mining, why, he was just born for it. He would dig out after me and Jim, when we went over the hills prospecting, and he would trot along behind us for as much as five miles, if we went so far. And he had the best judgment about mining-ground. Why, you never see anything like it. When we went to work, he'd scatter a glance around, and if he didn't think much of the indications, he would give a look as much to say, Well, I'll have to get you to excuse me. And without another word, he'd heist his nose into the air and shove for home. But if the ground suited him, he would lay low and keep dark till the first pan was washed, and then he would sidle up and take a look. And if there was about six or seven grains of gold, he was satisfied. He didn't want no better prospect than that. And then he would lie down on our coats and snore like a steamboat till we'd struck the pocket, and then get up and superintend. He was nearly lightening on superintending. Well, by and by, up comes this year Quartz's excitement. Everybody was into it. Everybody was picking and blasting instead of shoveling dirt on the hillside. Everybody was putting down a shaft instead of scraping the surface. Nothing would do, Jim, but we must tackle the ledges too, and so we did. We commenced putting down a shaft, and Tom Quartz, he began to wonder what in the dickens it was all about. He hadn't ever seen any mining like that before, and he was all upset, as you may say. He couldn't come to a right understanding of it in no way. It was too many for him. He was down on it too. You bet you he was down on it powerful, and always appeared to consider it the cusset as foolishness out. But that cat, you know, was always again new fangled arrangements. Somehow he never could abide them. You know how it is with old habits. But by and by, Tom Quartz began to get sort of reconciled a little, though he never could all together understand that eternal sinken of a shaft and never panning out anything. At last he got to coming down in the shaft himself to try to cipher it out. And when he'd get the blues and feel kind of scruffy and aggravated and disgusted, known as he did, that the bills was running up all the time, and we weren't making a scent, he would curl up on a gunny sack in the corner and go to sleep. Well, one day when the shaft was down about eight foot, the rock got so hard that we had to put in a blast, the first blasting we'd ever done since Tom Quartz was born. And then we lit the fuse and clumped out and got off about fifty yards and forgotten left Tom Quartz sound asleep on the gunny sack. In about a minute we seen a puff of smoke burst up out of the hole and then everything let go with an awful crash, and about four million ton of rocks and dirt and smoke and the splinters shot up about a mile and a half into the air. And by George, right in the dead center of it was old Tom Quartz, a going end over end and a snorting and a sneezing and a clawing and a reaching for things like all possessed. But it weren't no use, you know, it weren't no use. And that was the last we see of him for about two minutes and a half. And then all of a sudden it began to rain rocks and rubbish and directly he come down K'wah, about ten foot off where we stood. Well, I reckon he was perhaps the ornest looking beast you ever see. One ear was sought back on his neck and his tail was stove up and his eye winkers was swinged off and he was all blacked up with powder and smoke and all sloppy with mud and slush from one end to the other. Well, sir, it weren't no use to try to apologize, we couldn't say a word. He took a sort of a disgusted look at himself and then he looked at us and it was just exactly the same as if he had said, gents, maybe you think it's smart to take advantage of a cat that ain't had no experience of Quartz mining, but I think different. Then he turned on his heel and marched off home without ever saying another word. That was just his style. And maybe you won't believe it. But after that you never see a cat so prejudiced again Quartz mining as what he was. And by and by when he did get to going down in the shaft again you'd have been astonished at his sagacity. The minute we'd touch off a blast and the fuse begin to sizzle he'd give a look as much to say, well, I'll have to get you to excuse me. And it was surprising the way he'd shin out of that hole and go for a tree. Sagacity. It ain't no name for it. It was inspiration. I said, well, Mr. Baker, his prejudice against Quartz mining was remarkable considering how he came by it. Couldn't you ever cure him of it? Cure him? No. When Tom Quartz was sought once he was always sought. And you might have blowed him up as much as three million times and you'd never have broken him of his cussed prejudice again Quartz mining. The affection and the pride that lit up Baker's face when he delivered this tribute to the firmness of his humble friend of other days will always be a vivid memory with me. At the end of two months we had never struck a pocket. We had panned up and down the hillsides till they looked plowed like a field. We could have put in a crop of grain then but there would have been no way to get to market. We got many good prospects but when the gold gave out in the pan and we dug down hoping and longing we found only emptiness. The pocket that should have been there was as barren as our own. At last we shouldered our pans and shovels and struck out over the hills to try new localities. We prospected around Angel's Camp in Calaveras County during three weeks but had no success. Then we wandered on foot among the mountains, sleeping under the trees at night for the weather was mild but still we remained as sinthless as the last rows of summer. That is a poor joke but it is in pathetic harmony with the circumstances since we were so poor ourselves. In accordance with the custom of the country our door had always stood open and our board welcomed to tramping miners. They drifted along nearly every day and jumped their paused shovel by the threshold and took potluck with us. And now on our own tramp we never found cold hospitality. Our wanderings were wide and in many directions and now I could give the reader a vivid description of the big trees and the marvels of Yo Semity. But what has this reader done to me that I should persecute him? I will deliver him into the hands of less conscientious tourists and take his blessing. Let me be charitable though I fail in all virtues else. Note some of the phrases in the above are mining technicalities purely and may be a little obscure to the general reader. In placer diggings the gold is scattered all through the surface dirt. In pocket diggings it is concentrated in one little spot. In quartz the gold is in a solid continuous vein of rock enclosed between distinct walls of some other kind of stone and this is the most laborious and expensive of all the different kinds of mining. Prospecting is hunting for a placer. Indications are signs of its presence. Panning out refers to the washing process by which the grains of gold are separated from the dirt. A prospect is what one finds in the first pan full of dirt, and its value determines whether it is a good or a bad prospect, and whether it is worthwhile to tarry there or seek further. After a three-month absence I found myself in San Francisco again without assent. When my credit was about exhausted, for I had become too mean and lazy now to work on a morning paper and there were no vacancies on the evening journals, I was created San Francisco correspondent of the Enterprise, and at the end of five months I was out of debt, but my interest in my work was gone. For my correspondence being a daily one without rest or respite, I got unspeakably tired of it. I wanted another change. The vagabond instinct was strong upon me, fortune favoured, and I got a new birth and a delightful one. It was to go down to the Sandwich Islands and write some letters for the Sacramento Union, an excellent journal and liberal with employees. We sailed in the propeller Ajax, in the middle of winter. The almanac called it winter, distinctly enough, but the weather was a compromise between spring and summer. Six days out of port it became summer altogether. We had some thirty passengers, among them a cheerful soul by the name of Williams, and three seaworn old whaleship captains going down to join their vessels. These latter played yuker in the smoking-room day and night, drank astonishing quantities of raw whiskey without being in the least affected by it, and were the happiest people I think I ever saw. And then there was the old admiral, a retired whale-man. He was a roaring, terrific combination of wind and lightning and thunder, and earnest, whole-sold profanity. But, nevertheless, he was tender-hearted as a girl. He was a raving, deafening, devastating typhoon, laying waste, the cowering seas, but with an unvexed refuge in the center where all comers were safe and at rest. Nobody could know the admiral without liking him, and in a sudden and dire emergency I think no friend of his would know which to choose—to be cursed by him, or prayed for by a less efficient person. His title of admiral was more strictly official than any ever worn by a naval officer before or since, perhaps, for it was the voluntary offering of a whole nation, and came direct from the people themselves without any intermediate red tape, the people of the Sandwich Islands. It was a title that came to him freighted with affection and honor and appreciation of his unpretending merit, and in testimony of the genuineness of the title it was publicly ordained that an exclusive flag should be devised for him, and used solely to welcome his coming, and wave him Godspeed in his going. From that time forth, whenever his ship was signalled in the offering, or he catted his anchor and stood out to sea, that ensign streamed from the royal halyards on the Parliament House, and the nation lifted their hats to it with spontaneous accord. Yet he had never fired a gun or fought a battle in his life. When I knew him on board the Ajax he was seventy-two years old, and had plowed the salt water sixty one of them. For sixteen years he had gone in and out of the harbour of Honolulu in command of a whale ship, and for sixteen more had been captain of a San Francisco and Sandwich Island passenger packet, and had never had an accident or lost a vessel. The simple natives knew him for a friend who never failed them, and regarded him as children regard a father. It was a dangerous thing to oppress them when the roaring Admiral was around. Two years before I knew the Admiral he had retired from the sea on a competence, and sworn a colossal nine-jointed oath that he would never go within smelling distance of the salt water again as long as he lived, and he had conscientiously kept it, that is to say he considered he had kept it, and it would have been more than dangerous to suggest to him, even in the gentlest way, that making eleven long sea voyages as a passenger during the two years that had transpired since he retired was only keeping the general spirit of it and not the strict letter. The Admiral knew only one narrow line of conduct to pursue in any and all cases where there was a fight, and that was to shoulder his way straight in without an inquiry as to the rights or the merits of it, and take the part of the weaker side. And this was the reason why he was always sure to be present at the trial of any universally execrated criminal to oppress and intimidate the jury with a vindictive pantomime of what he would do to them if he ever caught them out of the box. And this was why harried cats and outlawed dogs that knew him confidently took sanctuary under his chair in time of trouble. In the beginning he was the most frantic and bloodthirsty union man that drew breath in the shadow of the flag. But the instant the Southerners began to go down before the sweep of the northern armies he ran up the Confederate colors and from that time till the end was a rampant and inexorable secessionist. He hated intemperance with a more uncompromising animosity than any individual I have ever met of either sex, and he was never tired of storming against it, and beseeching friends and strangers alike to be wary and drink with moderation. And yet if any creature had been guileless enough to intimate that his absorbing nine gallons of straight whiskey during our voyage was any fraction short of rigid or inflexible abstemiousness, in that self-same moment the old man would have spun him to the uttermost parts of the earth in the whirlwind of his wrath. Mind I am not saying his whiskey ever affected his head or his legs for it did not, in even the slightest degree. He was a capacious container, but he did not hold enough for that. He took a level tumbler full of whiskey every morning before he put his clothes on to sweeten his bilge water, he said. He took another after he got the most of his clothes on to settle his mind and give him his bearings. He then shaved and put on a clean shirt after which he recited the Lord's prayer in a fervent thundering base that shook the ship to her kelson and suspended all conversation in the main cabin. Then, at this stage, being invariably by the head or by the stern, or listed to port or starboard, he took one more to put him on an even keel, so that he would mind his helm and not miss stays and go about every time he came up in the wind. And now his stateroom door swung open, and the sun of his benign and face beamed redly out upon men and women and children, and he roared his shipments ahoy in a way that was calculated to wake the dead and precipitate the final resurrection, and forth he strode a picture to look at and a presence to enforce attention. Stalwart and portly, not a gray hair, broad-brimmed slouch hat, semi-sailor taugary of blue navy flannel, roomy and ample, a stately expanse of shirt front and a liberal amount of black silk neckcloth tied with a sailor knot, large chain and imposing seals impending from his fob, awe-inspiring feet, and a hand like a hand of providence, as his wailing brethren expressed it, wristbands and sleeves pushed back halfway to the elbow, out of respect for the warm weather and exposing hairy arms, gaudy with red and blue anchors, ships, and goddesses of liberty tattooed in India ink. But these details were only secondary matters, his face was the lodestone that chained the eye. It was a sultry disc, glowing determinately out through a weather-beaten mask of mahogany, and studded with warts seamed with scars, blazed all over with unfailing fresh slips of the razor, and with cheery eyes under shaggy brows, contemplating the world from over the back of a gnarled crag of a nose that loomed vast and lonely out of the undulating immensity that spread away from its foundation. At his heels frisked the darling of his bachelor estate, his terrier fan, a creature no larger than a squirrel, the main part of his daily life was occupied in looking after fan in a motherly way and doctoring her for a hundred ailments which existed only in his imagination. The Admiral seldom read newspapers, and when he did he never believed anything they said. He read nothing and believed in nothing, but the Old Guard, a secession periodical published in New York. He carried a dozen copies of it with him always, and referred to them for all required information. If it was not there, he supplied it himself out of a bountiful fancy, inventing history, names, dates, and everything else necessary to make his point good in an argument. Consequently he was a formidable antagonist in a dispute. Whenever he swung clear of the record and began to create history, the enemy was helpless and had to surrender. Indeed, the enemy could not keep from betraying some little spark of indignation at his manufactured history, and when it came to indignation that was the Admiral's very best hold. He was always ready for a political argument, and if nobody started one he would do it himself. With his third retort his temper would begin to rise, and within five minutes he would be blowing a gale, and within fifteen his smoking-room audience would be utterly stormed away, and the old man left solitary and alone, banging the table with his fist, kicking the chairs, and roaring a hurricane of profanity. It got so after a while that whenever the Admiral approached, with politics in his eye, the passengers would drop out with quiet accord, afraid to meet him, and he would camp on a deserted field. But he found his match at last, and before a full company. At one time or another everybody had entered the lists against him and been routed except the quiet passenger Williams. He had never been able to get an expression of opinion out of him on politics. But now, just as the Admiral drew near the door and the company were about to slip out, Williams said, Admiral, are you certain about that circumstance concerning the clergymen you mentioned the other day, referring to a piece of the Admiral's manufactured history? Everyone was amazed at the man's rashness. The idea of deliberately inviting annihilation was a thing incomprehensible. The retreat came to a halt. Then everybody sat down again wondering to await the upshot of it. The Admiral himself was as surprised as any one. He paused in the door with his red handkerchief half raised to his sweating face, and contemplated the daring reptile in the corner. Certain of it? Am I certain of it? Do you think I've been lying about it? What do you take me for? Anybody that don't know that circumstance don't know anything. A child ought to know it. Read up your history. Read it up! And don't come asking a man if he's certain about a bit of ABC stuff that the very southern niggers know all about. Here the Admiral's fires began to wax hot. The atmosphere thickened. The coming earthquake rumbled. He began to thunder and lighten. Within three minutes his volcano was in full eruption, and he was discharging flames and ashes of indignation belching black volumes of foul history aloft, and vomiting red hot torrents of profanity from his crater. Meantime William sat silent, and apparently deeply and earnestly interested in what the old man was saying. By and by when the lull came he said in the most deferential way, and with the gratified air of a man who has had a mystery cleared up which had been puzzling him uncomfortably, now I understand it. I always thought I knew that piece of history well enough, but was still afraid to trust it. Because there was not that convincing particularity about it that one likes to have in history. But when you mentioned every name the other day, and every date, and every little circumstance in their just order and sequence, I said to myself, this sounds something like, well, this is history. This is putting it in a shape that gives a man confidence. And I said to myself afterward, I will just ask the Admiral if he is perfectly certain about the details, and if he is, I will come out and thank him for clearing this matter up for me. And that is what I want to do now, for until you set that matter right, it was nothing but just a confusion in my mind without head or tail to it. Nobody ever saw the Admiral look so mollified before and so pleased. Nobody had ever received his bogus history as gospel before. His genuineness had always been called in question either by words or looks, but here was a man that not only swallowed it all down, but was grateful for the dose. He was taken aback. He hardly knew what to say. Even his profanity failed him. Now Williams continued modestly and earnestly. But Admiral, in saying that this was the first stone throne and that this precipitated the war, you have overlooked a circumstance which you are perfectly familiar with, but which has escaped your memory. Now I grant you that what you have stated is correct in every detail, to it that on the 16th of October, 1860, two Massachusetts clergymen named Waite and Granger went in disguise to the house of John Moody in Rockport at dead of night, and dragged forth to southern women and their two little children, and after towering and feathering them, conveyed them to Boston and burned them alive in the State House Square. And I also grant your proposition that this deed is what led to the secession of South Carolina on the 20th of December, following. Very well. Here the company were pleasantly surprised to hear Williams proceed to come back at the Admiral with his own invincible weapon, clean, pure, manufactured history without a word of truth in it. Very well, I say, but Admiral, why overlook the Willis and Morgan case in South Carolina? You are too well informed a man not to know all about that circumstance. Your arguments and your conversations have shown you to be intimately conversant with every detail of this national quarrel. You develop matters of history every day that show plainly that you are no smatterer in it, content to nibble about the surface, but a man who has searched the depths and possessed yourself of everything that has a bearing upon the great question. Therefore let me just recall to your mind that Willis and Morgan case, though I see by your face that the whole thing is already passing through your memory at this moment. On the 12th of August, 1860, two months before the Wait and Granger affair, two South Carolina clergymen named John H. Morgan and Winthrop L. Willis, one a Methodist and the other an old school Baptist, disguised themselves and went at midnight to the house of a planter named Thompson, archibald F. Thompson, vice-president under Thomas Jefferson, and took thence at midnight his widow-dant, a northern woman, and her adopted child, an orphan named Mortimer Haie, afflicted with epilepsy and suffering at the time from white swelling on one of his legs, and compelled to walk on crutches in consequence, and the two ministers, in spite of the pleadings of the victims, dragged them to the bush, tarred and feathered them, and afterward burned them at the stake in the city of Charleston. You remember perfectly well what a stir it made, you remember perfectly well that even the Charleston courier stigmatized the act as being unpleasant of questionable propriety and scarcely justifiable, and likewise that it would not be matter of surprise if retaliation ensued. And you remember also that this thing was the cause of the Massachusetts outrage, who indeed were the two Massachusetts ministers, and who were the two southern women they burned. I do not need to remind you, Admiral, with your intimate knowledge of history, that Waite was the nephew of the woman burned in Charleston, that Granger was her cousin in the second degree, and that the woman they burned in Boston was the wife of John H. Morgan, and the still-loved, but divorced wife of Winthrop L. Willis. Now, Admiral, it is only fair that you should acknowledge that the first provocation came from the southern preachers, and that the northern ones were justified in retaliating. In your arguments you never yet have shown the least disposition to withhold a just verdict, or be in any wise unfair, when authoritative history condemned your position, and therefore I have no hesitation in asking you to take the original blame from the Massachusetts ministers in this matter, and transfer it to the South Carolina clergymen where it justly belongs. The Admiral was conquered. This sweet-spoken creature, who swallowed his fraudulent history as if it were the bread of life, basked in his furious blasphemy as if it were generous sunshine, found only calm, even handed justice in his rampart partisanship, and flooded him with invented history so sugar-coated with flattery and deference that there was no rejecting it, was too many for him. He stammered some awkward profane sentences about the Willis and Morgan business having escaped his memory, but that he remembered it now, and then, under pretense of giving fans some medicine for an imaginary cough, drew out of the battle, and went away a vanquished man. Then cheers and laughter went up, and Williams, the ship's benefactor, was a hero. The news went about the vessel. Champagne was ordered, and enthusiastic reception instituted in the smoking-room, and everybody flocked thither to shake hands with the conqueror. The wheel-man said afterward that the admiral stood up behind the pilot-house, and ripped and cursed all to himself till he loosened the smokestack guys and becalmed the mainsail. The admiral's power was broken. After that, if he began argument, somebody would bring Williams, and the old man would grow weak and begin to quiet down at once, and as soon as he was done, Williams, in his dulcet insinuating way, would invent some history referring for proof to the old man's own excellent memory and to copies of the old guard known not to be in his possession, that would turn the tables completely and leave the admiral all aboard and helpless. By and by he came to sow dread Williams and his gilded tongue that he would stop talking when he saw him approach, and finally ceased to mention politics altogether, and from that time forward there was entire peace and serenity in the ship. END OF CHAPTER sixty-two This is Chapter sixty-three of Roughing It. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Roughing It by Mark Twain, Chapter sixty-three On a certain bright morning the islands hove in sight, lying low on the lonely sea, and everybody climbed to the upper deck to look. After two thousand miles of watery solitude, the vision was a welcome one. As we approached, the imposing promontory of Diamond Head rose up out of the ocean, its rugged front softened by the hazy distance, and presently the details of the land began to make themselves manifest. First the line of beach, then the plumed coconut trees of the tropics, then cabins of the natives. Then the white town of Honolulu, said to contain between twelve and fifteen thousand inhabitants, spread over a dead level. With streets from twenty to thirty feet wide, solid and level as a floor, most of them straight as a line, and few as crooked as a corkscrew. The further I traveled 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 fronts of San Francisco, I saw dwellings built of straw, adobes, and cream-colored pebble and shell conglomerated coral cut into oblong blocks and laid in cement. Also a great number of neat white cottages with green window shutters. In place of front yards like billiard tables with iron fences around them, I saw these homes surrounded by ample yards, thickly clad with green grass and shaded by tall trees, through whose dense foliage the sun could scarcely penetrate. In place of the customary geranium, kaya lily, etc., languishing in dust and general debility, 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 San Francisco's pleasure grove, the willows, I saw huge bodied, wide-spreading 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 goldfish, wiggling around in glass globes, assuming countless shades and degrees of distortion through the magnifying and diminishing qualities of their transparent prison houses, I saw cats, Tom cats, Marianne cats, long-tailed cats, bob-tailed cats, blind cats, one-eyed cats, wall-eyed cats, cross-eyed cats, gray cats, black cats, white cats, yellow cats, striped cats, spotted cats, tame 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. I looked on a multitude of people, some white in white coats, vests, pantaloons, even white cloth shoes, made snowy with chalk duly laid on every morning, but the majority of the people were almost as dark as negroes. Women with cumbly features, fine black eyes, rounded forms, inclining to voluptuous, clad in a single bright red or white garment that fell free and unconfined from shoulder to heel, long black hair falling loose, gypsy hats, encircled with wreaths of natural flowers of a brilliant carmine tint, plenty of dark men in various costumes, and some with nothing on but a battered stove pipe hat tilted on the nose, and a very scant, breech clout. Certain smoke-dried children were closed in nothing but sunshine, a very neat fitting and picturesque apparel indeed. In place of ruffs and rowdies staring and black guarding on the corners, I saw long-haired, saddle-colored, sandwiched island maidens sitting on the ground in the shade of corner houses, gazing indolently at whatever or whoever happened along. Instead of wretched cobblestone pavements, 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 the fathomless perdition long ago through the seared and blackened crater that stands dead and harmless 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 astride with gaudy, riding sashes, streaming like banners behind them. Instead of combined stenches of chinatum and Brannon Street slaughterhouses, I breathed the balmy fragrance of jesamine, oleander, and the pride of India. In place of the hurry and bustle and noisy confusion of San Francisco, I moved in the midst of a summer calm, as tranquil as dawn in the garden of Eden. In place of the golden city's skirting sandhills 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 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 the far horizon a single lonely sail, a mere accent mark, to emphasize a slumberous calm and a solitude that were without sound or limit. When the sun sank down, the one intruder from other realms and persistent in suggestions of them, it was trance luxury to sit in the perfumed air and forget that there was any world but these enchanted islands. It was such ecstasy to dream and dream till you got a bite, a scorpion bite. Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion, and the next to bathe the bit in place with alcohol or brandy, and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in future. Then came an adjournment to the bed-chamber and the past time of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other, a whole community of them at a slap. Then, observing an enemy approaching, a hairy tarantula on stilts, why not set the spittoon on him? It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. Then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a hole through a raw hide, more soaking with alcohol and a resolution to examine the bed before entering it in future. Then wait and suffer till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in under the bar. Then slip out quietly, shut them in, and sleep peacefully on the floor till morning. Meantime it is comforting to curse the tropics in occasional wakeful intervals. We had an abundance of fruit in Honolulu, of course, oranges, pineapples, bananas, strawberries, lemons, limes, mangos, guavas, melons, and a rare and curious luxury called the cherimoya, which is deliciousness itself. Then there is the tamarind. I thought tamarinds were made to eat, but that was probably not the idea. I ate several, and it seemed to me that they were rather sour that year. They pursed up my lips till they resembled the stem end of a tomato, and I had to take my sustenance through a quill for twenty-four hours. They sharpened my teeth till I could have shaved with them, and gave them a wire edge that I was afraid would stay. But a citizen said no, it will come off when the enamel does, which was comforting at any rate. I found afterward that only strangers eat tamarinds, but they only eat them once. End of Chapter 63 This is Chapter 64 of Roughing It. Roughing It by Mark Twain, Chapter 64 In my diary of our third day in Honolulu I find this. I am probably the most sensitive man in 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. An excursion to Diamond Head and the king's coconut grove was planned today, time four-thirty 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, with Captain Fish and another whale-ship skipper, Captain Phillips, 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 along with his turnout, 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 just pride in his driving and in the speed of his horse, and 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 fearful 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 of twenty-six years' experience, who sat there through the 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-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 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 overtake them. I said, never mind, I prefer 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 of 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 so I 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-Wau-hi. 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 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. He abandoned 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 apprehension. I said to myself, this creature is planning some new outrage, some fresh deviltry 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 the suspense became almost unbearable, 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 he was lifted from my mind when I found that he was only asleep. I woke him up and started him into a faster walk, and then the 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 surrendered. 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. And now there can be no fitter occasion than the present to pronounce a left-handed blessing 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 way or the other in a moment, but the subject is too exasperating to write about. 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 a forest of colossal ragged parasols with bunches of magnified grapes under them would be. I once heard a gouty northern invalid say that a coconut tree might be poetical, possibly it was, but it looked like a feather duster struck by lightning. I think that describes it better than a picture, and yet, without any question, there is something fascinating about a coconut tree, and graceful too. 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 and 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 bearskins. 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. 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 kin-folks 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! This ancient temple was built of rough blocks of lava, and was simply a ruthless 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 naked and howling savages. If these mute stones could speak, what tales they could tell, what pictures they could describe, of fettered victims writhing under the knife, of masked forms straining forward out of the gloom, with ferocious faces lit up by the sacrificial fires, of the background of ghostly trees, of the dark pyramid of diamond head-standing sentinel over the uncanny scene, and the peaceful moon looking down upon it through rifts in the cloud-rack. When Kamehameha, pronounced Kamehameha, the great, who was a sort of a 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 on the walls of this temple. Those were savage times when this old slaughterhouse was in its prime. The king and the chiefs ruled the common herd with a rod of iron, made them gather all the provisions the masters needed, build all the houses and temples, stand all the expenses of whatever kind, take kicks and cuffs for thanks, drag out lives well-favored 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 their hands and brains produce, with equal laws for all, and punishment for all alike who transgress them. The contrast is so strong, the benefit conferred upon this people by the missionaries is so prominent, so palpable, and so unquestionable, that the Frankish 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 to-day. Their work speaks for itself. End of Chapter 64 This is Chapter 65 of Roughing It. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Roughing It by Mark Twain, Chapter 65 By and by, after a rugged climb, we halted on the summit of a hill which commanded a far-reaching view. The moon rose and flooded mountain and valley and ocean with a mellow radiance, and out of the shadows of the foliage the distant lights of Honolulu glinted like an encampment of fireflies. The air was heavy with the fragrance of flowers. The halt was brief. Gayly laughing and talking the party galloped on, and I clung to the pommel and cantered 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. 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. But 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 the First 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 these 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 inspiring example to remember their oath, to die if need be, but never cross the fatal line. The struggle was manfully maintained, but at last 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 crossed. 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 Nuannu valley paused a moment, hemmed in by precipitous mountains on either hand, and the frightful precipice of the paris 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 the Oahuans were entrenched in Nuannu 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. 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 thoughts. 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 Maua valley! What a grand pyramid of billowy clouds towers above the storied paris! 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 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 cavalcade 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 turned his attention strictly to business. 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 wretched description from the Kanakas, i.e. natives. 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 the islands mounted as I was today. In hiring a horse from a Kanaka, you must have all your eyes about you, because you can rest satisfy that you are dealing with a shrewd, unprincipled rascal. 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 a fine-looking horse at night, anybody's, maybe the king's, if the royal steed be in a convenient view, and bring you the mate to my Oahu in the morning and contend that it is the same animal. If you make trouble, 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. The reply was not bad. Oh, yes, yes, my brother all the 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 Kanaka 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 bar the 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 places. 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 a bat 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 instance, and then I will pass to something else. I am informed that when a certain Mr. L, a visiting stranger, 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. Mr. L 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, where upon the Kanaka departed to join his brother in the country. The fellow had shamefully swindled L, 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. 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 day before yesterday for a dollar and seventy-five cents, and sold again today for two dollars and twenty-five cents. Williams 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 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 baled 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. The 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 to thirty-five dollars. You can hire a horse, saddle and bridle, at from seven to ten dollars a week, and the owner will take care of them at his own expense. It is time to close this day's record, bed time. As I prepare for sleep, a rich voice rises out of the still night, and far as this ocean rock is toward the ends of the earth, I recognize a familiar home air. But the word seems somewhat out of joint. Waikiki, Lantoni, Oyka, Holy, Holy, Waohu translated, that means, when we were marching through Georgia. End of chapter sixty-five. This is chapter sixty-six of Roughing It. This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Roughing It by Mark Twain, chapter sixty-six. Passing through the marketplace, we saw that feature of Honolulu under its most favorable auspices, that is, in the full glory of Saturday afternoon, which is a festive day with the natives. The native girls, by twos and threes, and parties of a dozen, and sometimes in whole platoons and companies, went cantering up and down the neighbouring streets a stride of fleet, but homely horses, and with their gaudy riding habits streaming like banners behind them, such a troop of free and easy riders in their natural home, the saddle, makes a gay and graceful spectacle. The riding habit I speak of is simply a long, broad scarf, like a tavern tablecloth, brilliantly coloured, wrapped around the loins once, then apparently passed between the limbs and each end thrown backward over the same, and floating and flapping behind on both sides, beyond the horse's tail, like a couple of fancy flags. Then slipping the stirrup irons between her toes, the girl throws her chest forward, sits up like a major general, and goes sweeping by like the wind. The girls put on all the finery they can on Saturday afternoon, fine black silk robes, flowing red ones that nearly put your eyes out, others as white as snow, still others that discount the rainbow, and they wear their hair in nets, and trim their jaunty hats with fresh flowers, and encircle their dusky throats with homemade necklaces of the brilliant vermilion-tinted blossom of the Ohio, and they fill the markets and the adjacent street with their bright presences, and smell like a rag factory on fire with their offensive coconut oil. Occasionally you see a heathen from the sunny aisles, a way down in the south seas, with his face and neck tattooed, till he looks like the customary mendicant from Washoo, who has been blown up in a mine. Some are tattooed a dead blue colour down to the upper lip, masked as it were, leaving the natural light yellow skin of Micronesia unstained from thence down. Some with broad marks drawn down from hair to neck on both sides of the face, and a strip of the original yellow skin two inches wide down the centre, a gridiron with a spoke broken out, and some with the entire face discoloured with the popular mortification tint, relieved only by one or two thin, wavy threads of natural yellow running across the face from ear to ear, and eyes twinkling out of this darkness from under shadowy hatbrims like stars in the dark of the moon. Moving among the stirring crowds you come to the poi merchants, squatting in the shade on their hams in true native fashion and surrounded by purchasers. The sandwich islanders always squat on their hams, and who knows, but they may be the old original ham sandwiches. The thought is pregnant with interest. The poi looks like common flour paste and is kept in large bowls formed of a species of gourd and capable of holding from one to three or four gallons. Poi is the chief article of food among the natives, and is prepared from the taro plant. The taro root looks like a thick, or if you please, a corpulent sweet potato in shape, but is of a light purple colour when boiled. When boiled it answers as a passable substitute for bread. The buck canakas bake it underground, then mash it up well with a heavy lava pestle, mix water with it until it becomes a paste, set it aside and let it ferment, and then it is poi. And an unseductive mixture it is, almost tasteless before it ferments, and too sour for a luxury afterward, but nothing is more nutritious. When solely used, however, it produces acrid humours, a fact which sufficiently accounts for the humorous character of the canakas. I think there must be as much of a knack in handling poi as there is in eating with chopsticks. The forefinger is thrust into the mess and stirred quickly round several times, and drawn as quickly out, thickly coated, just as if it were poultice. The head is thrown back, the finger inserted in the mouth, and the delicacy stripped off and swallowed, the eye closing gently meanwhile in a language sort of ecstasy. Many a different finger goes into the same bowl, and many a different kind of dirt and shade and quality of flavour is added to the virtues of its contents. Around a small shanty was collected a crowd of natives buying the awa root. It is said that, but for the use of this root, the destruction of the people in former times by certain imported diseases would have been far greater than it was, and by others it is said that this is merely a fancy. All agree that poi will rejuvenate a man who is used up and his vitality almost annihilated by hard drinking, and that in some kinds of diseases it will restore health after all medicines have failed. But all are not willing to allow to the awa, the virtues claimed for it. The natives manufacture an intoxicating drink from it which is fearful in its effects when persistently indulged in. It covers the body with dry white scales, inflames the eyes, and causes premature decrepitude. Although the man before whose establishment we stopped has to pay a government license of eight hundred dollars a year for the exclusive right to sell awa root, it is said that he makes a small fortune every twelve months, while saloon keepers who pay a thousand dollars a year for the privilege of retailing whiskey, etc., only make a bare living. We found the fish market crowded, for the native is very fond of fish, and eats the article raw and alive. Let us change the subject. In old times here Saturday was a grand gala day indeed. All the native population of the town forsook their labours, and those of the surrounding country journeyed to the city. Then the white folks had to stay indoors, for every street was so packed with charging cavaliers and cavalieresses that it was next to impossible to thread one's way through the cavalcades without getting crippled. At night they feasted, and the girls danced the lascivious hula-hula, a dance that is said to exhibit the very perfection of educated notion of limb and arm, hand, head, and body, and the exactest uniformity of movement and accuracy of time. It was performed by a circle of girls with no raiment on them to speak of, who went through an infinite variety of motions and figures without prompting, and yet so true was their time, and in such perfect concert did they move that when they were placed in a straight line, hands, arms, bodies, limbs, and heads waved, gesticulated, bowed, stooped, whirled, squirmed, twisted, and undulated, as if they were part and parcel of a single individual, and it was difficult to believe they were not moved in a body by some exquisite piece of mechanism. Of late years, however, Saturday has lost most of its quantum gala features. This weekly stampede of the natives interfered too much with labor and the interests of the white folks, and by sticking in a law here and preaching a sermon there, and by various other means, they gradually broke it up. The demoralizing hula-hula was forbidden to be performed save at night, with closed doors, in presence of few spectators, and only by permission duly procured from the authorities, and the payment of ten dollars for the same. There are few girls nowadays able to dance this ancient national dance in the highest perfection of the art. The missionaries have Christianized and educated all the natives. They all belong to the Church, and there is not one of them above the age of eight years, but can read and write with facility in the native tongue. It is the most universally educated race of people outside of China. They have any quantity of books printed in the Kanaka language, and all the natives are fond of reading. They are inveterate churchgoers. Nothing can keep them away. All this ameliorating cultivation has at last built up in the native women a profound respect for chastity in other people. Perhaps that is enough to say on that head. The national sin will die out when the race does, but perhaps not earlier. But doubtless this purifying is not far off, when we reflect that contact with civilization and the whites has reduced the native population from four hundred thousand, Captain Cook's estimate, to fifty-five thousand in something over eighty years. Society is a queer medley in this notable missionary, whaling, and governmental center. If you get into conversation with a stranger 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, strike 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 apiece all around. A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs the other day 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? What do you take me for? I'm not a whaler. Oh, I beg a thousand pardons, your Excellency. Major General in the household troops, no doubt. Minister of the interior likely. Secretary of War? First gentleman of the bed-chamber. Commissioner of the royal staff. 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. Now, not a missionary, not a whaler, not a member of His Majesty's government, not even Secretary of the Navy. Ah, heaven! It is too blissful to be true. Alas, I do but dream. And yet that noble, honest countenance, those oblique, ingenious eyes, that massive head, incapable of anything. Your hand, give me your hand, bright wave. 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 pitied 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. I still quote from my journal. I found the national legislature to consist of half a dozen white men and some thirty or forty natives. It was a dark assemblage. The nobles and ministers, about a dozen of them altogether, occupied the extreme left of the hall, with David Calacaua, the King's Chamberlain, and Prince William at the head. The President of the Assembly, his Royal Highness M. Kekuanawa, Kekuanawa is not of the Blood Royal. He derives his princely rank from his wife, who was a daughter of Kamehameha the Great. Under other monarchies the male line takes precedence of the female in tracing genealogies, but here the opposite is the case. The female line takes precedence. The reason for this is exceedingly sensible, and I recommend it to the aristocracy of Europe. They say it is easy to know who a man's mother was. But, etc., etc. And the Vice President, the latter a white man, sat in the pulpit. If I may so term it. The President is the King's father. He is an erect, strongly built, massive featured, white-haired, tawny old gentleman of eighty years of age or thereabouts. He was simply but well dressed, in a blue cloth coat and white vest, and white pantaloons without spot, dust or blemish upon them. He bears himself with a calm, stately dignity, and is a man of noble presence. He was a young man and a distinguished warrior under that terrific fighter, Kamehameha the First, more than half a century ago. A knowledge of his career suggested some such thought as this. This man, naked as the day he was born, and war-club and spear in hand, has charged at the head of a horde of savages against other hordes of savages more than a generation and a half ago, and reveled in slaughter and carnage, has worshiped wooden images on his devout knees, has seen hundreds of his race offered up in heathen temples as sacrifices to wooden idols at a time when no missionary's foot had ever pressed this soil, and he had never heard of the white man's god, has believed his enemy could secretly pray him to death, has seen the day in his childhood when it was a crime punishable by death for a man to eat with his wife or for a plebeian to let his shadow fall upon the king, and now look at him. An educated Christian, neatly and handsomely dressed, a high-minded, elegant gentleman, a traveller in some degree, and one who has been the honoured guest of royalty in Europe, a man practised in holding the reins of an enlightened government, and well-versed in the politics of his country and in general practical information. Look at him, sitting there presiding over the deliberations of a legislative body, among whom are white men, a grave, dignified, statesman-like personage, and as seemingly natural and fitted to the place as if he had been born in it and had never been out of it in his lifetime. How the experiences of this old man's eventful life shame the cheap inventions of romance. The Christianizing of the natives has hardly even weakened some of their barbarian superstitions, much less destroyed them. I have just referred to one of these. It is still a popular belief that if your enemy can get hold of any article belonging to you, he can get down on his knees over it and pray you to death. Therefore many a native gives up and dies merely because he imagines that some enemy is putting him through a course of damaging prayer. This praying an individual to death seems absurd enough at a first glance, but then when we call to mind some of the pulpit efforts of certain of our own ministers, the thing looks plausible. In former times among the islanders, not only a plurality of wives was customary, but a plurality of husbands likewise. Some native women of noble rank had as many as six husbands. A woman thus supplied did not reside with all her husbands at once, but lived several months with each intern. An understood sign hung at her door during these months. When the sign was taken down, it meant next. In those days woman was rigidly taught to know her place. Her place was to do all the work, take all the cuffs, provide all the food, and content herself with what was left after her lord had finished his dinner. She was not only forbidden by ancient law and under penalty of death to eat with her husband or enter a canoe, but was debarred under the same penalty from eating bananas, pineapples, oranges, and other choice fruits at any time or in any place. She had to confine herself pretty strictly to poi and hard work. These poor ignorant heathen seemed to have had a sort of groping idea of what came of woman eating fruit in the Garden of Eden, and they did not choose to take any more chances. But the missionaries broke up this satisfactory arrangement of things. They liberated woman, and made her the equal of man. The natives had a romantic fashion of burying some of their children alive, when the family became larger than necessary. The missionaries interfered in this matter too, and stopped it. To this day the natives are able to lie down and die whenever they want to, whether there is anything to matter with them or not. If a Kanaka takes a notion to die, that is the end of him. Nobody can persuade him to hold on. All the doctors in the world could not save him. A luxury which they enjoy more than anything else is a large funeral. If a person wants to get rid of a troublesome native, it is only necessary to promise him a fine funeral and name the hour, and he will be on hand to the minute. At least, his remains will. All the natives are Christians now, but many of them still desert to the Great Shark God for temporary succor in time of trouble. An eruption of the Great Volcano of Kilauea, or an earthquake, always brings a deal of latent loyalty to the Great Shark God to the surface. It is common report that the king, educated, cultivated, and refined Christian gentleman as he undoubtedly is, still turns to the idols of his fathers for help when disaster threatens. A planter caught a shark, and one of his Christianized natives testified his emancipation from the thrall of ancient superstition by assisting to dissect the shark after a fashion forbidden by his abandoned creed. But remorse shortly began to torture him. He grew moody and sought solitude, brooded over his sin, refused food, and finally said he must die and ought to die, for he had sinned against the Great Shark God and could never know peace any more. He was proof against persuasion and ridicule, and in the course of a day or two took to his bed and died, although he showed no symptom of disease. His young daughter followed his lead and suffered a like fate within the weak. Superstition is ingrained in the native blood and bone, and it is only natural that it should crop out in time of distress. Wherever one goes in the islands he will find small piles of stones, by the wayside, covered with leafy offerings, placed there by the natives to appease evil spirits or honor local deities belonging to the mythology of former days. In the rural districts of any of the islands the traveler hourly comes upon parties of dusky maidens bathing in the streams or in the sea without any clothing on and exhibiting no very intemperate zeal in the matter of hiding their nakedness. When the missionaries first took up their residence in Honolulu the native women would pay their families frequent friendly visits day by day, not even clothed with a blush. It was found a hard matter to convince them that this was rather indelicate. Finally the missionaries provided them with long, loose, calico robes, and that ended the difficulty, for the women would troop through the town stark-naked with their robes folded under their arms, march to the missionary houses, and then proceed to dress. The natives soon manifested a strong proclivity for clothing, but it was shortly apparent that they only wanted it for grandeur. The missionaries imported a quantity of hats, bonnets, and other male and female wearing apparel, instituted a general distribution, and begged the people not to come to church naked next Sunday as usual, and they did not, but the national spirit of unselfishness led them to divide up with neighbors who were not at the distribution, and next Sabbath the poor preachers could hardly keep countenance before their vast congregations. In the midst of the reading of a hymn, a brown, stately dame would sweep up the aisle with a world of heirs, with nothing in the world on but a stove-pipe hat and a pair of cheap gloves. Another dame would follow, tricked out in a man's shirt and nothing else. Another one would enter with a flourish, with simply the sleeves of a bright calico dress tied around her waist, and the rest of the garment dragging behind like a peacock's tail off duty. A stately buck, Kanaka, would stalk in with a woman's bonnet on, wrong side before, only this, and nothing more. After him would stride his fellow with the legs of a pair of pantaloons tied around his neck, the rest of his person untrammeled. In his rear would come another gentleman simply gotten up in a fiery neck-tie and a striped vest. The poor creatures were beaming with complacency and wholly unconscious of any absurdity in their appearance. They gazed at each other with happy admiration, and it was plain to see that the young girls were taking note of what each other had on, as naturally as if they had always lived in a land of Bibles and knew what churches were made for. Here was the evidence of a dawning civilization. The spectacle which the congregation presented was so extraordinary, and was also moving, that the missionaries found it difficult to keep to the text and go on with the services. And by and by, when the simple children of the sun began a general swapping of garments in open meeting and produced some irresistibly grotesque effects in the course of redressing, there was nothing for it, but to cut the thing short with a benediction and dismiss the fantastic assemblage. In our country children play keep house, and in the same high-sounding but miniature way the grown folk here with the poor little material of slender territory and meager population play empire. There is his royal majesty the king, with a New York detective's income of thirty or thirty-five thousand dollars a year from the royal civilist and the royal domain. He lives in a two-story frame palace. And there is the royal family, the customary hive of royal brothers, sisters, cousins, and other noble drones and vagrants usual to monarchy, all with a spoon in the national paptish, and all bearing such titles as his or her royal highness the prince or princess so and so. Few of them can carry their royal splendors far enough to ride in carriages, however. They sport the economical kanaka horse or hoof it with the plebeians. Then there is his excellency the royal chamberlain, a sinecure for his majesty dresses himself with his own hands except when he is ruralizing at Waikiki and then he requires no dressing. Next we have his excellency the commander in chief of the household troops, whose forces consist of about the number of soldiers usually placed under a corporal in other lands. Next comes the royal steward and the grand equity in waiting, high dignitaries with modest salaries and little to do. Then we have his excellency the first gentleman of the bed chamber, an office as easy as it is magnificent. Next we come to his excellency the prime minister, a renegade American from New Hampshire, all jaw, vanity, bombast, and ignorance, a lawyer of Scheister caliber, a fraud by nature, a humble worshiper of the scepter above him, a reptile never tired of sneering at the land of his birth, or glorifying the ten-acre kingdom that has adopted him, salary, four thousand dollars a year, vast consequence, and no perquisites. Then we have his excellency the imperial minister of finance who handles a million dollars of public money a year, sends in his annual budget with great ceremony, talks prodigiously of finance, suggests imposing schemes for paying off the national debt of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and does it all for four thousand dollars a year and unimaginable glory. Next we have his excellency the minister of war who holds sway over the royal armies. They consist of two hundred and thirty uniform canakas, mostly brigadier generals, and if the country ever gets into trouble with a foreign power we shall probably hear from them. I knew an American whose copper plate visiting card bore this impressive legend, Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Infantry, to say that he was proud of this distinction is stating it but tamely. The minister of war has also in his charge some venerable swivels on Punchbowl Hill, wherewith royal salutes are fired when foreign vessels of war enter the port. Next comes his excellency the minister of the navy, a nabob who rules the royal fleet, a steam tug, and a sixty ton schooner. And next comes his grace the Lord Bishop of Honolulu, the chief dignitary of the established church, for when the American Presbyterian missionaries had completed the reduction of the nation to a compact condition of Christianity native royalty stepped in and erected the grand dignity of an established Episcopal church over it, and imported a cheap ready-made bishop from England to take charge. The chagrin of the missionaries has never been comprehensively expressed to this day, profanity not being admissible. Next comes his excellency the minister of public instruction. Next their excellencies the governors of Oahu, Hawaii, etc., and after them a string of high sheriffs and other small fry too numerous for computation. Then there are their excellencies the envoy extraordinary and the minister plenipotentiary of his imperial majesty the emperor of the French, her British majesty's minister, the minister resident of the United States, and some six or eight representatives of other foreign nations all with sounding titles imposing dignity and prodigious but economical state. Imagine all this grandeur in a playhouse kingdom whose population falls absolutely short of sixty thousand souls. The people are so accustomed to nine jointed titles and colossal magnates that a foreign prince makes very little more stir in Honolulu than a western congressman does in New York. And let it be borne in mind that there is a strictly defined court costume of so stunning a nature that it would make the clown in a circus look tame and common place by comparison, and each Hawaiian official dignitary has a gorgeous, very colored, gold-laced uniform peculiar to his office. No two of them are alike, and it is hard to tell which one is the loudest. The king had a drawing-room at stated intervals like other monarchs, and when these varied uniforms congregate there, weak-eyed people have to contemplate the spectacle through smoked glass. Is there not a gratifying contrast between this latter-day exhibition and the one the ancestors of some of these magnates afforded the missionaries the Sunday after the old-time distribution of clothing? Behold what religion and civilization have wrought.