 While I was in Honolulu I witnessed the ceremonious funeral of the King's sister, Her Royal Highness the Princess Victoria. According to the royal custom, the remains had lain in state at the palace thirty days, watched day and night by a guard of honour, and during all that time a great multitude of natives from the several islands had kept the palace grounds well crowded, and had made the place a pandemonium every night with their howlings and wailings, beating of tom-toms and dancing of the, at other times, forbidden hula-hula by half-clad maidens to the music of songs of questionable decency chanted in honour of the deceased. The printed program of the funeral procession interested me at the time, and after what I have just said of Hawaiian grandiloquence in the matter of playing empire, I am persuaded that a perusal of it may interest the reader. After reading the long list of dignitaries, etc., and remembering the sparseness of the population, one is almost inclined to wonder where the material for that portion of the procession devoted to Hawaiian population generally is going to be procured. Undertaker. Royal School. Kauaiahaua School. Roman Catholic School. Mai Mai School. Honolulu Fire Department. Mechanics Benefit Union. Attending Physicians. Kanonohikis. Superintendents of the Crown Lands. Kanonohikis of the Private Lands of His Majesty. Kanonohikis of the Private Lands of Her Late Royal Highness. Governor of Oahu and Staff. Hulumanu Military Company. Household Troops. The Prince of Hawaii's Own Military Company. The King's Household Servants. Servants of Her Late Royal Highness. Protestant Clergy. The Clergy of the Roman Catholic Church. His Lordship Louis Magre. The Right Reverend Bishop of Arathia. Vicar Apostolic of the Hawaiian Islands. The Clergy of the Hawaiian Reformed Catholic Church. His Lordship the Right Reverend Bishop of Honolulu. Her Majesty Queen Emma's Carriage. His Majesty's Staff. Carriage of Her Late Royal Highness. Carriage of Her Majesty the Queen Dowager. The King's Chancellor. Cabinet Ministers. His Excellency the Minister-Resident of the United States. H.B.M.'s Commissioner. H.B.M.'s Acting Commissioner. Judges of Supreme Court. Privy Counselors. Members of Legislative Assembly. Consular Corps. Circuit Judges. Clerks of Government Departments. Members of the Bar. Collector General. Custom House Officers and Officers of the Customs. Marshal and Sheriffs of the Different Islands. King's Yomanry. Foreign Residents. Ahahui Kahumanu. Hawaiian Population Generally. Hawaiian Cavalry. Police Force. I resume my journal at the point where the procession arrived at the Royal Mosulium. As the procession filed through the gate, the military deployed handsomely to the right and left and formed an avenue through which the long column of mourners passed to the tomb. The coffin was borne through the door of the Mosulium, followed by the King and his chiefs, the great officers of the kingdom, foreign consuls, ambassadors and distinguished guests, Berlingame and General Van Valkenburg. Several of the Kahilis were then fastened to a framework in front of the tomb there to remain until they decay and fall to pieces, or forestalling this until another scion of royalty dies. At this point of the proceedings, the multitude set up such a heartbroken wailing, as I hope I never hear again. The soldiers fired three volleys of musketry, the wailing being previously silenced to permit of the guns being heard. His Highness Prince William, in a showy military uniform, the True Prince, this scion of the house overthrown by the present dynasty, he was formerly betrothed to the princess, but was not allowed to marry her, stood guard and paced back and forth within the door. The privileged few who followed the coffin into the Mosulium remained some time, but the King soon came out and stood in the door and near one side of it. A stranger could have guessed his rank, although he was so simply and unpretentiously dressed, by the profound deference paid him by all persons in his vicinity, by seeing his high officers receive his quiet orders and suggestions with bowed and uncovered heads, and by observing how careful those persons who came out of the Mosulium were to avoid crowding him, although there was room enough in the doorway for a wagon to pass, for that matter, how respectfully they edged out sideways, scraping their backs against the wall and always presenting a front view of their persons to his majesty, and never putting their hats on until they were well out of the royal presence. He was dressed entirely in black, dress coat and silk hat, and looked rather democratic in the midst of the showy uniforms about him. On his breast he wore a large gold star which was half hidden by the lapel of his coat. He remained at the door a half hour, and occasionally gave an order to the men who were erecting the Cahiles, ranks of long-handled mops made of gaudy feathers sacred to royalty. They are stuck in the ground around the tomb and left there, before the tomb. He had the good taste to make one of them substitute black crepe, for the ordinary hemp and rope he was about to tie one of them to the framework with. Finally he entered his carriage and drove away, and the populace shortly began to drop into his wake. While he was in view there was but one man who attracted more attention than himself, and that was Harris, the Yankee prime minister. This feeble personage had crepe enough around his hat to express the grief of an entire nation, and as usual he neglected no opportunity of making himself conspicuous and exciting the admiration of the simple Kanakas. Oh, noble ambition of this modern Richelieu. It is interesting to contrast the funeral ceremonies of the Princess Victoria with those of her noted ancestor Kamehameha, the conqueror, who died fifty years ago in 1819, the year before the first missionaries came. On the eighth of May, 1819, at the age of sixty-six, he died, as he had lived, in the faith of his country. It was his misfortune not to have come in contact with men who could have rightly influenced his religious aspirations. Judged by his advantages and compared with the most eminent of his countrymen, he may be justly styled not only great, but good. To this day his memory warms the heart and elevates the national feelings of Hawaiians. They are proud of their old warrior king. They love his name. His deeds form their historical age, and an enthusiasm everywhere prevails shared even by foreigners who knew his worth, but constitutes the firmest pillar of the throne of his dynasty. In lieu of human victims, the custom of that age, a sacrifice of three hundred dogs attended his obsequies. No mean holocaust when their national value and the estimation in which they were held are considered. The bones of Kamehameha, after being kept for a while, were so carefully concealed that all knowledge of their final resting place is now lost. There was a proverb current among the common people that the bones of a cruel king could not be hid. They made fish hooks and arrows of them, upon which, in using them, they vented their abhorrence of his memory in bitter execrations. The account of the circumstances of his death, as written by the native historians, is full of minute detail, but there is scarcely a line of it which does not mention or illustrate some bygone custom of the country. In this respect it is the most comprehensive document I have yet met with. I will quote it entire. When Kamehameha was dangerously sick and the priests were unable to cure him, they said, Be of good courage and build a house for the God, his own private God or idol, that thou mayest recover. The chiefs corroborated this advice of the priests, and a place of worship was prepared for Kukaili Muku and consecrated in the evening. They proposed also to the king, with a view to prolong his life, that human victims should be sacrificed to his deity, upon which the greater part of the people absconded through fear of death and concealed themselves in hiding places till the taboo, taboo pronounced taboo, means prohibition, we have borrowed it, or sacred, the taboo was sometimes permanent, sometimes temporary, and the person or thing placed under taboo was for the time being sacred to the purpose for which it was set apart. In the above case the victims selected under the taboo would be sacred to the sacrifice, till the taboo in which destruction impended was passed. It is doubtful whether Kamehameha, approved of the plan of the chiefs and priests to sacrifice men, as he was known to say, the men are sacred for the king, meaning that they were for the service of his successor. This information was derived from Liholiho, his son. After this his sickness increased to such a degree that he had not strength to turn himself in his bed. When another season, consecrated for worship at the new temple, Heau, arrived, he said to his son, Liholiho, Go thou, and make supplication to thy God, I am not able to go and will offer my prayers at home. When his devotions to his feathered God, Kukaili Moku, were concluded, a certain religiously disposed individual who had a bird God, suggested to the king that through its influence his sickness might be removed. The name of this God was Puah. Its body was made of a bird, now eaten by the Hawaiians, and called in their language Alai. Kamehameha was willing that a trial should be made, and two houses were constructed to facilitate the experiment. But while dwelling in them, he became so very weak as not to receive food. After lying there three days, his wives, children, and chiefs, perceiving that he was very low, returned him to his own house. In the evening he was carried to the eating house, where he took a little food in his mouth, which he did not swallow, also a cup of water. The chiefs requested him to give them his counsel, but he made no reply, and was carried back to the dwelling-house. But when, near midnight, ten o'clock perhaps, he was carried again to the place to eat, but as before he merely tasted of what was presented to him. Then Kaikyoa addressed him thus, Here we all are, your younger brethren, your son Liholiho, and your foreigner. In part to us your dying charge that Liholiho and Kahumanu may hear. Then Kamehameha inquired, What do you say? Kaikyoa repeated, Your counsels for us. He then said, Move on in my good way, and—he could proceed no further. The foreigner, Mr. Young, embraced and kissed him. Haopili also embraced him, whispering something in his ear, after which he was taken back to the house. At twelve he was carried once more to the house for eating, into which his head entered, while his body was in the dwelling-house immediately adjoining. It should be remarked that this frequent carrying of a sick chief from one house to another resulted from the taboo system then in force. There were, at that time, six houses, huts, connected with an establishment. One was for worship, one for the men to eat in, an eating-house for the women, a house to sleep in, a house in which to manufacture kappa, native cloth, and one where, at certain intervals, the women might dwell in seclusion. The sick was once more taken to his house when he expired. This was at two o'clock, a circumstance from which Eleg Hoku derived his name. As he breathed his last, Kalimoku came to the eating-house to order those in it to go out. There were two aged persons, thus directed to depart. One went, the other remained on account of love to the king, by whom he had formerly been kindly sustained. The children also were sent away. Then Kalimoku came to the house, and the chiefs had a consultation. One of them spoke thus. This is my thought. We will eat him raw. This sounds suspicious, in view of the fact that all Sandwich Island historians, white and black, protest that cannibalism never existed in the islands. However, since they only proposed to eat him raw, we won't count that. But it would certainly have been cannibalism if they had cooked him. M. T. Kahumanu, one of the dead king's widows, replied, Perhaps his body is not at our disposal. That is more properly with his successor. Our part in him, his breath, has departed. His remains will be disposed of by Liholiho. After this conversation the body was taken into the consecrated house for the performance of the proper rites by the priest and the new king. The name of this ceremony is Ukul, and when the sacred hog was baked the priest offered it to the dead body, and it became a god. The king, at the same time repeating the customary prayers. Then the priest, addressing himself to the king, and chiefs said, I will now make known to you the rules to be observed respecting persons to be sacrificed on the burial of this body. If you obtain one man before the corpse is removed one will be sufficient. But after it leaves this house four will be required. If delayed until we carry the corpse to the grave there must be ten. But after it is deposited in the grave there must be fifteen. Tomorrow morning there will be a taboo, and if the sacrifice be delayed until that time forty men must die. Then the high priest, inquired of the chiefs, Where shall be the residence of King Liholiho? They replied, Where indeed? You of all men ought to know. Then the priest observed, There are two suitable places. One is Ka'u, the other is Kohala. The chiefs preferred the latter, as it was more thickly inhabited. The priest added, These are proper places for the king's residence, but he must not remain in Kona for it has polluted. This was agreed to. It was now break of day. As he was being carried to the place of burial the people perceived that their king was dead and they wailed. When the corpse was removed from the house to the tomb, a distance of one chain, the procession was met by a certain man who was ardently attached to the deceased. He leapt upon the chiefs who were carrying the king's body. He desired to die with him on account of his love. The chiefs drove him away. He persisted in making numerous attempts, which were unavailing. Kalimoka also had it in his heart to die with him, but was prevented by Hukyo. The morning following Kamehameha's death, Liholiho and his train departed for Kohala, according to the suggestions of the priest, to avoid the defilement occasioned by the dead. At this time if a chief died the land was polluted, and the heirs sought a residence in another part of the country until the corpse was dissected and the bones tied in a bundle which, being done, the season of defilement terminated. If the deceased were not a chief, the house only was defiled, which became pure again on the burial of the body. Such were the laws on this subject. On the morning on which Liholiho sailed in his canoe for Kohala, the chiefs and the people mourned after their manner on occasion of a chief's death, conducting themselves like madmen and like beasts. Their conduct was such as to forbid description. The priests also put into action the sorcery apparatus that the person who had prayed the king to death might die, for it was not believed that Kamehameha's departure was the effect either of sickness or old age. When the sorcerers set up by their fireplaces sticks with a strip of kapa flying at the top, the chief Kiyomoku, Kahumanu's brother, came in a state of intoxication and broke the flagstaff of the sorcerers from which it was inferred that Kahumanu and her friends had been instrumental in the king's death. On this account they were subjected to abuse. You have the contrast now, and a strange one it is. This great queen, Kahumanu, who was subjected to abuse during the frightful orgies that followed the king's death in accordance with ancient custom, afterward became a devout Christian and a steadfast and powerful friend of the missionaries. Dogs were and still are reared and fattened for food by the natives, hence the reference to their value in one of the above paragraphs. Forty years ago it was the custom in the islands to suspend all law for a certain number of days after the death of a royal personage, and then a Saturnalia ensued which one may picture to himself after a fashion but not in the full horror of the reality. The people shaved their heads, knocked out a tooth or two, plucked out an eye sometimes, cut, bruised, mutilated, or burned their flesh, got drunk, burned each other's huts, maimed or murdered one another according to the caprice of the moment, and both sexes gave themselves up to brutal and unbridled licentiousness. And, after it all, came a torpor from which the nation slowly emerged bewildered and dazed, as if from a hideous half-remembered nightmare. They were not the salt of the earth, those gentle children of the sun. The natives still keep up an old custom of theirs which cannot be comforting to an invalid. When they think a sick friend is going to die, a couple of dozen neighbors surround his hut and keep up a deafening wailing night and day till he either dies or gets well. No doubt this arrangement has helped many a subject to a shroud before his appointed time. They surround a hut and wail in the same heartbroken way when its occupant returns from a journey. This is their dismal idea of a welcome. A very little of it would go a great way with most of us. Which distinguished that island above the remainder of the group. We sailed from Honolulu on a certain Saturday afternoon in the Good Schooner Boomerang. The Boomerang was about as long as two street cars, and about as wide as one. She was so small, though she was larger than the majority of the inter-island coasters, that when I stood on her deck I felt but little smaller than the colossus of roads must have felt when he had a man of war under him. I could reach the water when she lay over under a strong breeze. When the captain and my comrade, a Mr. Billings, myself and four other persons, were all assembled on the little after portion of the deck which is sacred to the cabin passengers, it was full. There was not room for any more quality folks. Another section of the deck, twice as large as ours, was full of natives of both sexes, with their customary dogs, mats, blankets, pipes, calabashes of poi, fleas, and other luxuries, and baggage of minor importance. As soon as we set sail the natives all lay down on the deck as thick as Negroes in a slave-pen, and smoked, conversed, and spit on each other, and were truly sociable. The little low-sealed cabin below was rather larger than a hearse, and as dark as a vault. It had two coffins on each side—I mean, two bunks—a small table capable of accommodating three persons at dinner, stood against the forward bulkhead, and over it hung the dingiest whale-oil lantern that ever peopled the obscurity of a dungeon with ghostly shapes. The floor-room, unoccupied, was not extensive. One might swing a cat in it, perhaps, but not a long cat. The hold forward of the bulkhead had but little freight in it, and from morning till night a portly old rooster, with a voice like Balan's ass, and the same disposition to use it, strutted up and down in that part of the vessel, and crowed. He usually took dinner at six o'clock, and then, after an hour devoted to meditation, he mounted a barrel and crowed a good part of the night. He got horser all the time, but he scorned to allow any personal consideration to interfere with his duty, and kept up his labours in defiance of threatened diphtheria. Sleeping was out of the question when he was on watch. He was a source of genuine aggravation and annoyance. It was worse than useless to shout at him or apply offensive epithets to him. He only took these things for applause, and strained himself to make more noise. Occasionally during the day I threw potatoes at him through an aperture in the bulkhead, but he only dodged and went on crowing. The first night, as I lay in my coffin, idly watching the dim lamp swinging to the rolling of the ship and snuffing the nauseous odours of bilge water, I felt something gallop over me. I turned out promptly. However I turned in again when I found it was only a rat. Presently something galloped over me once more. I knew it was not a rat this time, and I thought it might be a centipede because the captain had killed one on deck in the afternoon. I turned out. The first glance at the pillow showed me repulsive sentinel perched upon each end of it, cockroaches as large as peach-leaves, fellows with long quivering antennae and fiery malignant eyes. They were grating their teeth like tobacco worms, and appeared to be dissatisfied about something. I had often heard that these reptiles were in the habit of eating off sleeping sailors' toenails down to the quick, and I would not get in the bunk any more. I lay down on the floor, but a rat came and bothered me, and shortly afterward a procession of cockroaches arrived and camped in my hair. In a few moments the rooster was crowing with uncommon spirit and a party of fleas were throwing double-summer salts about my person in the wildest disorder and taking a bite every time they struck. I was beginning to feel really annoyed. I got up and put my clothes on and went on deck. The above is not overdrawn. It is a truthful sketch of inter-island schooner life. There is no such thing as keeping a vessel in elegant condition when she carries molasses and canakas. It was compensation for my sufferings to come unexpectedly upon so beautiful a scene as met my eye, to step suddenly out of the sepulchral gloom of the cabin and stand under the strong light of the moon, in the center, as it were, of a glittering sea of liquid silver, to see the broad sails straining in the gale. The ship healed over on her side, the angry foam hissing past her lee bulwarks and sparkling sheets of spray dashing high over her boughs and raining upon her decks. To brace myself and hang fast to the first object that presented itself, with hat jammed down and coat tails whipping in the breeze, and feel that exhilaration that thrills in one's hair and quivers down his backbone when he knows that every inch of canvas is drawing and the vessel cleaving through the waves at her utmost speed. There was no darkness, no dimness, no obscurity there. All was brightness. Every object was vividly defined. Every prostrate canaca, every coil of rope, every calabash of poi, every puppy, every seam in the flooring, every bolthead, every object, however minute, showed sharp and distinct in its every outline, and the shadow of the broad mainsail lay black as a paw upon the deck, leaving Billing's white upturned face glorified and his body in a total eclipse. Monday morning we were close to the island of Hawaii. Two of its high mountains were in view, Mauna Loa and Hua Lai. The latter is an imposing peak, but being only ten thousand feet high is seldom mentioned or heard of. Mauna Loa is said to be sixteen thousand feet high. The rays of glittering snow and ice that clasped its summit like a claw looked refreshing when viewed from the blistering climate we were in. One could stand on that mountain, wrapped up in blankets and furs to keep warm, and while he nibbled a snowball or an icicle to quench his thirst, he could look down the long sweep of its sides and see spots where plants are growing that grow only where the bitter cold of winter prevails. Lower down he could see sections devoted to production that thrive in the temperate zone alone, and at the bottom of the mountain he could see the home of the tufted cocoa-palms and other species of vegetation that grow only in the sultry atmosphere of eternal summer. He could see all the climbs of the world at a single glance of the eye, and that glance would only pass over a distance of four or five miles as the bird flies. By and by we took boat and went ashore at Kai Loa, designing to ride horseback through the pleasant orange and coffee-region of Kona, and rejoin the vessel at a point some leagues distant. This journey is well worth taking. The trail passes along on high ground, say a thousand feet above sea level, and usually about a mile distant from the ocean, which is always in sight, save that occasionally you find yourself buried in the forest in the midst of a rank tropical vegetation and a dense growth of trees whose great boughs overarch the road, and shut out sun and sea and everything, and leave you in a dim, shady tunnel, haunted with invisible singing birds and fragrant with the odor of flowers. It was pleasant to ride occasionally in the warm sun, and feast the eye upon the ever changing panorama of the forest beyond and below us, with its many tints, its softened lights and shadows, its billowy undulations sweeping gently down from the mountain to the sea. It was pleasant also, at intervals, to leave the sultry sun and pass into the cool green depths of this forest, and indulge in the sentimental reflections under the inspiration of its brooding twilight and its whispering foliage. We rode through one orange grove that had ten thousand tree in it. They were all laden with fruit. At one farmhouse we got some large peaches of excellent flavor. This fruit, as a general thing, does not do well in the Sandwich Islands. It takes a sort of almond shape and is small and bitter. It needs frost, they say, and perhaps it does. If this be so, it will have a good opportunity to go on kneading it, as it will not be likely to get it. The trees from which the fine fruit I have spoken of came had been planted and replanted sixteen times, and to this treatment the proprietor of the orchard attributed his success. We passed several sugar plantations, new ones, and not very extensive. The crops were, in most cases, third ratunes. Note, the first crop is called plant cane. Subsequent crops, which spring from the original roots without replanting, are called ratunes. Almost everywhere on the island of Hawaii, sugar cane matures in twelve months, both ratunes and plant, and although it ought to be taken off as soon as it tassles, no doubt, it is not absolutely necessary to do it until about four months afterward. In Kona the average yield of an acre of ground is two tons of sugar, they say. This is only a moderate yield for these islands, but would be astounding for Louisiana and most other sugar-growing countries. The plantations in Kona, being on pretty high ground, up among the light and frequent rains, no irrigation whatever is required. CHAPTER VII We stopped some time at one of the plantations to rest ourselves and refresh the horses. We had a chatty conversation with several gentlemen present, but there was one person, a middle-aged man, with an absent look in his face, who simply glanced up, gave us good day, and lapsed again into the meditations which our coming had interrupted. The planters whispered us not to mind him. Crazy. They said he was in the islands for his health, was a preacher, his home, Michigan. They said that if he woke up presently and fell to talking about a correspondence which he had some time held with Mr. Greeley about a trifle of some kind, we must humor him and listen with interest, and we must humor his fancy that this correspondence was the talk of the world. It was easy to see that he was a gentle creature and that his madness had nothing vicious in it. He looked pale and a little worn, as if with perplexing thought and anxiety of mind. He sat a long time looking at the floor and at intervals muttering to himself and nodding his head acquiescingly, or shaking it in mild protest. He was lost in his thought or in his memories. We continued our talk with the planters, branching from subject to subject, but at last the word circumstance, casually dropped in the course of conversation, attracted his attention and brought an eager look into his countenance. He faced about in his chair and said, Circumstance? What circumstance? I know, I know too well. So you have heard of it too, with a sigh. Well, no matter. All the world has heard of it. All the world, the whole world. It is a large world, too, for a thing to travel so far in now, isn't it? Yes, yes. The Greeley correspondence with Erickson has created the saddest and bitterest controversy on both sides of the ocean, and still they keep it up. It makes us famous, but at what a sorrowful sacrifice! I was so sorry when I heard that it had caused that bloody and distressful war over there in Italy. It was little comfort to me, after so much bloodshed, to know that the victors sided with me, and the vanquished with Greeley. It is little comfort to know that Horace Greeley is responsible for the battle of Sadoa and not me. Queen Victoria wrote me that she felt just as I did about it. She said that, as much as she was opposed to Greeley and the spirit he showed in the correspondence with me, she would not have had Sadoa happen for hundreds of dollars. I can show you her letter, if you would like to see it. But gentlemen, much as you may think you know about that unhappy correspondence, you cannot know the straight of it till you hear it from my lips. It has always been garbled in the journals, and even in history. Yes, even in history, think of it. Let me—please let me give you the matter exactly as it occurred. I truly will not abuse your confidence. Then he leaned forward, all interest, all earnestness, and told his story, and told it appealingly too, and yet in the simplest and most unpretentious way—indeed in such a way as to suggest to one all the time that this was a faithful, honourable witness giving evidence in the sacred interest of justice and under oath—he said, Mrs. Beasley—Mrs. Jackson Beasley, widow of the village of Hamilton, Kansas, wrote me about a matter which was near her heart, a matter which many might think trivial, but to her it was a thing of deep concern. I was living in Michigan then, serving in the ministry. She was, and is, an estimable woman, a woman to whom poverty and hardship have proven incentives to industry in place of discouragements. Her only treasure was her son William, a youth just verging upon manhood—religious, amiable, and sincerely attached to agriculture. He was the widow's comfort and her pride, and so moved by her love for him she wrote me about a matter, as I have said before, which lay near her heart, because it lay near her boys. She desired me to confer with Mr. Greeley about turnips. Turnips were the dream of her child's young ambition. While other youths were frittering away in frivolous amusements the precious years of budding vigor which God had given them for useful preparation, this boy was patiently enriching his mind with information concerning turnips. The sentiment which he felt toward the turnip was akin to adoration. He could not think of the turnip without emotion. He could not speak of it calmly. He could not contemplate it without exaltation. He could not eat it without shedding tears. All the poetry in his sensitive nature was in sympathy with the gracious vegetable. With the earliest pipe of dawn he sought his patch, and when the curtening night drove him from it he shut himself up with his books and garnered statistics till sleep overcame him. On rainy days he sat and talked hours together with his mother about turnips. When company came he made it his loving duty to put aside everything else and converse with them all the day long of his great joy in the turnip. And yet was this joy rounded and complete? Was there no secret alloy of unhappiness in it? Alas there was. There was a canker gnawing at his heart. The noblest inspiration of his soul eluded his endeavour. These he could not make of the turnip a climbing vine. Months went by. The bloom forsook his cheek. The fire faded out of his eye. Signs and abstraction usurped the place of smiles and cheerful converse. But a watchful eye noted these things, and in time a motherly sympathy unsealed the secret. Hence the letter to me. She pleaded for attention. She said her boy was dying by inches. I was a stranger to Mr. Greeley, but what of that? The matter was urgent. I wrote and begged him to solve the difficult problem, if possible, and save the student's life. My interest grew until it partook of the anxiety of the mother. I waited in much suspense. At last the answer came. I found that I could not read it readily, the handwriting being unfamiliar, and my emotions somewhat wrought up. It seemed to refer in part to the boy's case, but chiefly to other and irrelevant matters such as paving stones, electricity, oysters, and something which I took to be absolution or agrarianism. I could not be certain which. Still these appeared to be simply casual mentions, nothing more. Friendly in spirit, without doubt, but lacking the connection or coherence necessary to make them useful. I judged that my understanding was affected by my feelings, and so laid the letter away till morning. In the morning I read it again, but with difficulty and uncertainty still. For I had lost some little rest and my mental vision seemed clouded. The note was more connected now, but did not meet the emergency it was expected to meet. It was too discursive. It appeared to read as follows, though I was not certain of some of the words. Polygamy dissembles majesty, extracts redeem polarity, causes hitherto exist, ovations pursue wisdom, or warts inherit and condemn. Boston botany, cakes, fallony undertakes, but who shall allay? We fear not, rearly, he vays a village. But there did not seem to be a word about turnips. There seemed to be no suggestion as to how they might be made to grow like vines. There was not even a reference to the Beasleys. I slept upon the matter. I ate no supper, neither any breakfast next morning. So I resumed my work with a brain refreshed and was very hopeful. Now the letter took a different aspect. All saved the signature. Which later I judged to be only a harmless affection of Hebrew. The epistle was necessarily from Mr. Greeley, for it bore the printed heading of the Tribune, and I had written to no one else there. The letter, I say, had taken a different aspect, but still its language was eccentric and avoided the issue. It now appeared to say Bolivia extemporizes mackerel. Borax esteems polygamy. Sausages wither in the east. Creation perdue is done. For woes inherent one can dam. Buttons, buttons, corks. Geology underrates, but we shall allay. My beer's out. Yeur, yevurly, he vase, yevillage. I was evidently overwork'd. My comprehension was impaired. Therefore I gave two days to recreation and then returned to my task, greatly refreshed. The letter now took this form. Polteises do sometimes choke swine. Tulips reduce posterity. Causes leather to resist. Our notions empower wisdom. Her, let's afford while we can. But her, but any cakes, fill any undertaker, we'll wean him from his filly. We feel hot. Yerks, li, he vace, velodge." I was still not satisfied. These generalities did not meet the question. They were crisp and vigorous, and delivered with a confidence that almost compelled conviction. But at such a time as this, with a human life at stake, they seemed inappropriate, worldly, and in bad taste. At any other time I would have been not only glad but proud to receive from a man like Greeley a letter of this kind, and would have studied it earnestly and tried to improve myself all I could. But now, with that poor boy in his far home languishing for relief, I had no heart for learning. Three days passed by, and I read the note again. Again its tenor had changed. It now appeared to say, "'Potations do sometimes wake wines. Turnips restrain passion. Causes necessary to state. Infest the poor widow. Her lord's effects will be void. But dirt, bathing, etc., etc. God unfairly will worm him from his folly. So swear not. Yerks will he vace, velodge." This was more like it. But I was unable to proceed. I was too much worn. The word turnips brought temporary joy and encouragement. But my strength was so much impaired, and the delay might be so perilous for the boy, that I relinquished the idea of pursuing the translation further, and resolved to do what I ought to have done at first. I sat down and wrote Mr. Greeley as follows, "'Dear sir, I fear I do not entirely comprehend your kind note. It cannot be possible, sir, that turnips restrain passion, at least the study or contemplation of turnips cannot, for it is this very employment that has scorched our poor friend's mind and sapped his bodily strength. But if they do restrain it, will you bear with us a little further and explain how they should be prepared? I observe that you say causes necessary to state, but you have omitted to state them. Under a misapprehension you seem to attribute to me interested motives in this matter, to call it by no harsher term. But I assure you, dear sir, that if I seem to be infesting the widow it is all seeming and void of reality. It is from no seeking of mind that I am in this position. She asked me herself to write you. I never have infested her. Indeed, I scarcely know her. I do not infest anybody. I try to go along in my humble way, doing as near right as I can, never harming anybody, and never throwing out insinuations. As for her lord and his effects, they are of no interest to me. I trust I have effects enough of my own, shall endeavour to get along with them at any rate, and not go mousing around to get a hold of somebodies that are void. But do you not see this woman is a widow? She has no lord. He is dead, or pretended to be, when they buried him. Therefore no amount of dirt, bathing, etc., etc., however unfairly followed, will be likely to worm him from his folly, if being dead and a ghost is folly. Your closing remark is as unkind as it was uncalled for. And if report says true you might have applied it to yourself, sir, with more point and less impropriety. Very truly yours, Simon Erickson. In the course of a few days Mr. Greeley did what would have saved a world of trouble, and much mental and bodily suffering and misunderstanding if he had done it sooner. To it he sent an intelligible re-script or translation of his original note, made in a plain hand by his clerk. Then the mystery cleared, and I saw that his heart had been right all the time. I will recite the note in its clarified form. Potatoes do sometimes make vines, turnips remain passive, cause unnecessary to state. Inform the poor widow, her lads' efforts will be vain. But diet, bathing, etc., etc., followed uniformly, will wean him from his folly, so fear not, yours, Horace Greeley. But alas it was too late, gentlemen, too late. The criminal delay had done its work. Young Beasley was no more. His spirit had taken its flight to a land where all anxieties shall be charmed away, all desires gratified, all ambitions realized. Poor lad, they laid him to his rest with a turnip in each hand. So ended Erickson, and lapsed again into nodding, mumbling, and abstraction. The company broke up and left him so, but they did not say what drove him crazy. In the momentary confusion I forgot to ask. End of CHAPTER 70. At four o'clock in the afternoon we were winding down a mountain of dreary and desolate lava to the sea, and closing our pleasant land journey. This lava is the accumulation of ages. One torrent of fire after another has rolled down here in old times, and built up the island structure higher and higher. Underneath it is honeycombed with caves. It would be of no use to dig wells in such a place. They would not hold water. You would not find any for them to hold for that matter. Consequently the planters depend upon cisterns. The last lava flow occurred here so long ago that there are none now living who witnessed it. In one place it enclosed and burned down a grove of coconut trees, and the holes in the lava where the trunk stood are still visible. Their sides retained the impression of the bark. The trees fell upon the burning river, and becoming partly submerged, left in it the perfect counterpart of every knot and branch and leaf, and even nut for curiosity-seekers of a long distant day to gaze upon and wonder at. There were doubtless plenty of Kanaka sentinels on guard hereabouts at that time, but they did not leave castes of their figures in the lava as the Roman sentinels at Herculaneum and Pompeii did. It is a pity it is so, because such things are so interesting, and so it is. They probably went away. They went away early, perhaps. However, they had their merits. The Romans exhibited the higher pluck, but the Kanaka showed the sounder judgment. Shortly we came in sight of that spot whose history is so familiar to every schoolboy in the wide world. Keala Kekua Bay, the place where Captain Cook, the great circumnavigator, was killed by the natives nearly a hundred years ago. The setting sun was flaming upon it, a summer shower was falling, and it was spanned by two magnificent rainbows. Two men who were in advance of us rode through one of these, and for a moment their garments shone with a more than regal splendor. Why did not Captain Cook have taste enough to call his great discovery the rainbow islands? These charming spectacles are present to you at every turn. They are common in all the islands. They are visible every day, and frequently at night also. Not the silvery bow we see once in an age in the States, by moonlight, but barred with all bright and beautiful colors like the children of the sun and rain. I saw one of them a few nights ago. What the sailors call rain dogs, little patches of rainbow, are often seen drifting about the heavens in these latitudes, like stained cathedral windows. Keala Kekua Bay is a little curve like the last kink of a snail-shell winding deep into the land, seemingly not more than a mile wide from shore to shore. It is bounded on one side, where the murder was done, by a little flat plain, on which stands a coconut grove and some ruined houses. A steep wall of lava, a thousand feet high at the upper end and three or four hundred at the lower, comes down from the mountain and bounds the inner extremity of it. From this wall the place takes its name Keala Kekua, which in the native tongue signifies the pathways of the gods. They say, and still believe, in spite of their liberal education in Christianity, that the great god Lono, who used to live upon the hillside, always travelled that causeway when urgent business connected with heavenly affairs, called him down to the seashore in a hurry. As the red sun looked across the placid ocean through the tall, clean stems of the coconut trees, like a blooming whiskey bloat through the bars of a city prison, I went and stood in the edge of the water on the flat rock pressed by Captain Cook's feet when the blow was dealt which took away his life, and tried to picture in my mind the doomed man struggling in the midst of the multitude of exasperated savages, the men in the ship crowding to the vessel's side and gazing in anxious dismay toward the shore, the—but I discovered that I could not do it. It was growing dark, the rain began to fall. We could see that the distant boomerang was helplessly becalmed at sea, and so I adjourned to the cheerless little box of a warehouse, and sat down to smoke and think, and wished the ship would make the land, for we had not eaten much for ten hours, and were viciously hungry. Plain, unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's assassination and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide. Wherever he went among the islands he was cordially received and welcomed by the inhabitants and his ships lavishly supplied with all manner of food. He returned these kindnesses with insult and ill-treatment. Perceiving that the people took him for the long vanished and lamented God Lono, he encouraged them in the delusion for the sake of the limitless power it gave him. But during the famous disturbance at this spot, and while he and his comrades were surrounded by fifteen thousand maddened savages, he received a hurt and betrayed his earthly origin with a groan. It was his death warrant. Instantly a shout went up, he groans, he is not a God, so they closed in upon him and dispatched him. His flesh was stripped from the bones and burned, except nine pounds of it, which were sent on board the ships. The heart was hung up in a native hut where it was found and eaten by three children who mistook it for the heart of a dog. One of these children grew to be a very old man and died in Honolulu a few years ago. Some of Cook's bones were recovered and consigned to the deep by the officers of the ships. Small blame should attach to the natives for the killing of Cook, they treated him well. In return he abused them. He and his men inflicted bodily injury upon many of them at different times and killed at least three of them before they offered any proportionate retaliation. Near the shore we found Cook's monument, only a coconut stump four feet high and about a foot in diameter at the butt. It had lava boulders piled around its base to hold it up and keep it in its place, and it was entirely sheathed over from top to bottom with rough discolored sheets of copper, such as ship's bottoms are coppered with. Each sheet had a rude inscription scratched upon it, with a nail, apparently, and in every case the execution was wretched. Most of these merely recorded the visits of British naval commanders to the spot, but one of them bore this legend. Near this spot fell Captain James Cook, the distinguished navigator, who discovered these islands A.D. 1778. After Cook's murder his second-in-command on board the ship opened fire upon the swarms of natives on the beach, and one of his cannon-balls cut this coconut tree short off and left this monumental stump standing. It looked sad and lonely enough to us out there in the rainy twilight, but there is no other monument to Captain Cook. True, up on the mountainside we had passed by a large enclosure like an ample hog-pen built of lava blocks which marks the spot where Cook's flesh was stripped from his bones and burned, but this is not properly a monument since it was erected by the natives themselves, and less to do honour to the circumnavigator than for the sake of convenience in roasting him. A thing like the guide-board was elevated above this pen on a tall pole, and formerly there was an inscription upon it, describing the memorable occurrence that had there taken place, but the sun and the wind have long ago so defaced it as to render it illegible. Toward midnight a fine breeze sprang up, and the schooner soon worked herself into the bay and cast anchor. The boat came ashore for us, and in a little while the clouds and the rain were all gone. The moon was beaming tranquilly down on land and sea, and we too were stretched upon the deck sleeping the refreshing sleep and dreaming the happy dreams that are only vouchsafe to the weary and the innocent. End of Chapter 71. In the breezy morning we went ashore and visited the ruined temple of the last god, Lono, the high chief cook of this temple, the priest who presided over it and roasted the human sacrifices, was uncle to Obukia, and at one time that youth was an apprentice priest under him. Obukia was a young native of fine mind who, together with three other native boys, was taken to New England by the captain of a whale-ship during the reign of Kamehameha first, and they were the means of attracting the attention of the religious world to their country. This resulted in the sending of missionaries there, and this Obukia was the very same sensitive savage who sat down on the church steps and wept because his people did not have the Bible. That incident has been very elaborately painted in many a charming Sunday school book, I and told so plaintively and so tenderly that I have cried over it in Sunday school myself, on general principles, although at a time when I did not know much and could not understand why the people of the Sandwich Islands needed to worry so much about it as long as they did not know there was a Bible at all. Obukia was converted and educated, and was to have returned to his native land with the first missionaries had he lived. The other native youths made the voyage, and two of them did good service, but the third, William Kanui, fell from grace afterward for a time, and when the gold excitement broke out in California he journeyed thither and went to mining, although he was fifty years old. He succeeded pretty well, but the failure of Page Bacon and Company relieved him of six thousand dollars, and then, to all intents and purposes, he was a bankrupt in his old age and he resumed service in the pulpit again. He died in Honolulu in 1864. Quite a broad tract of land near the temple extending from the sea to the mountaintop was sacred to the god Lono in olden times, so sacred that if a common native set his sacrilegious foot upon it it was judicious for him to make his will, because his time had come. He might go around it by water, but he could not cross it. It was well sprinkled with pagan temples and stocked with awkward, homely idols carved out of logs of wood. There was a temple devoted to prayers for rain, and with fine sagacity it was placed at a point so well up on the mountainside that if you prayed there twenty four times a day for rain you would be likely to get it every time. You would seldom get to your ah men before you would have to hoist your umbrella. And there was a large temple near at hand which was built in a single night in the midst of storm and thunder and rain by the ghastly hands of dead men. Tradition says that by the weird glare of the lightning a noiseless multitude of phantoms were seen at their strange labor far up the mountainside at dead of night, flitting hither and thither and bearing great lava blocks clasped in their nerveless fingers, appearing and disappearing as the pallid luster fell upon their forms and faded away again. Even to this day it is said the natives hold this dread structure in awe and reverence and will not pass by it in the night. At noon I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen. I begged them to come out, for the sea was rising and I was satisfied that they were running some risk, but they were not afraid, and presently went on with their sport. They were finished swimmers and divers and enjoyed themselves to the last degree. They swam races, splashed and ducked and tumbled each other about, filled the air with their laughter. It is said that the first thing an islander learns is how to swim. Learning to walk, being a matter of smaller consequence, comes afterward. One hears tales of native men and women swimming ashore from vessels many miles at sea, more miles indeed than I dare vouch for or even mention, and they tell of a native diver who went down in thirty or forty foot waters and brought up an anvil. I think he swallowed the anvil afterwards, if my memory serves me. However, I will not urge this point. I have spoken, several times, of the god Lono. I may as well furnish two or three sentences concerning him. The idol the natives worshipped for him was a slender, unornamented staff twelve feet long. Tradition says he was a favorite god on the island of Hawaii, a great king who had been deified for meritorious services, just our own fashion of rewarding heroes, with a difference that we would have made him a postmaster instead of a god, no doubt. In an angry moment he slew his wife, a goddess named Kaikilani Aii. Remorse of conscience drove him mad, and tradition presents us the singular spectacle of a god traveling on the shoulder, for in his gnawing grief he wandered about from place to place, boxing and wrestling with all whom he met. Of course this past time soon lost its novelty, in as much as it must necessarily have been the case that when so powerful a deity sent a frail human opponent to grass, he never came back any more. Therefore he instituted games called makahiki, and ordered that they should be held in his honor, and then sailed for foreign lands on a three-corner draft, stating that he would return some day, and that was the last of Lono. He was never seen any more, his raft got swamped perhaps, but the people always expected his return, and thus they were easily led to accept Captain Cook as the restored god. Some of the old natives believed Cook was Lono to the day of their death, but many did not, for they could not understand how he could die if he was a god. Only a mile or so from Kealakekua Bay is a spot of historic interest, the place where the last battle was fought for idolatry. Of course we visited, and came away as wise as most people do, who go and gaze upon such mementos of the past when in an unreflective mood. While the first missionaries were on their way around the horn, the idolatrous customs which had obtained in the island, as far back as tradition reached, were suddenly broken up. Old Kamehameha I was dead and his son, Liholiho, the new king, was a free-liver, a roistering disolate fellow, and hated the restraints of the ancient taboo. His assistant in the government, Kahumanu, the Queen Dowager, was proud and high-spirited, and hated the taboo because it restricted the privileges of her sex, and degraded all women very nearly to the level of brutes. So the case stood. Liholiho had half a mind to put his foot down. Kahumanu had a whole mind to badger him into doing it, and Whiskey did the rest. It was probably the rest. It was probably the first time Whiskey ever prominently figured as an aid to civilization. Liholiho came up to Kailua as drunk as her Piper, and attended a great feast. The determined Queen spurred his drunken courage up to a reckless pitch, and then, while all the multitude stared in blank dismay, he moved deliberately forward, and sat down with the women. They saw him eat from the same vessel with them, and were appalled. Terrible moments drifted slowly by, and still the King ate, still he lived, still the lightnings of the insulted gods were withheld. Then conviction came like a revelation. The superstitions of a hundred generations passed from before the people like a cloud, and a shout went up, The taboo is broken. The taboo is broken. Thus did King Liholiho and his dreadful Whiskey preach the first sermon, and prepare the way for the new gospel that was speeding southward over the waves of the Atlantic. The taboo, broken and destruction failing to follow the awful sacrilege, the people, with that childlike precipitancy which has always characterized them, jumped to the conclusion that their gods were a weak and wretched swindle, just as they formerly jumped to the conclusion that Captain Cook was no God, merely because he groaned, and promptly killed him without stopping to inquire whether a God might not groan as well as a man, if it suited his convenience to do it, and satisfied that the idols were powerless to protect themselves, they went to work at once, and pulled them down, hacked them to pieces, applied the torch, annihilated them. The pagan priests were furious, and well they might be. They had held the fattest offices in the land, and now they were beggared. They had been great, they had stood above the chiefs, and now they were vagabonds. They raised a revolt, they scared a number of people into joining their standard, and Bakua Kalani, an ambitious offshoot of royalty, was easily persuaded to become their leader. In the first skirmish the idolaters triumphed over the royal army sent against them, and full of confidence they resolved to march upon Kailua. The king sent an envoy to try and conciliate them, and came very near being an envoy short by the operation. The savages not only refused to listen to him, but wanted to kill him. So the king sent his men forth under Major General Kalai Moku, and the two host met at Kuamu. The battle was long and fierce, men and women fighting side by side, as was the custom, and when the day was done the rebels were flying in every direction in hopeless panic, and idolatry and the taboo were dead in the land. The royalists marched gaily home to Kuailua, glorifying the new dispensation. There is no power in the gods, said they. They are a vanity and a lie. The army with idols was weak. The army without idols was strong and victorious. The nation was without a religion. The missionary ship arrived in safety shortly afterward, timed by providential exactness to meet the emergency, and the gospel was planted as in virgin soil. End of Chapter 72. This is Chapter 73 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 73. At noon we hired a Kanaka to take us down to the ancient ruins at Honuanan, in his canoe, priced two dollars, reasonable enough for a sea voyage of eight miles, counting both ways. The native canoe is an irresponsible-looking contrivance. I cannot think of anything to liken it to, but a boy's sled-runner hollowed out, and that does not quite convey the correct idea. It is about fifteen feet long, high, and pointed at both ends, is a foot and a half or two feet deep, and is so narrow that if you wedged a fat man into it, you might not get him out again. It sits on top of the water like a duck, but it has an outrigger and does not upset easily, if you keep still. This outrigger is formed of two long bent sticks like plow handles, which project from one side, and to their outer ends is bound a curved beam composed of an extremely light wood, which skims along the surface of the water, and thus saves you from an upset on that side. While the outrigger's weight is not so easily lifted as to make an upset on the other side a thing to be greatly feared. Still, until one gets used to sitting perched upon this knife-blade he is apt to reason within himself, but it would be more comfortable if there were just an outrigger or so on the other side also. I had the bow seat, and Billings sat amid ships and faced the Kanaka, who occupied the stern of the craft, and did the paddling. With a first stroke the trim shell of a thing shot out from the shore like an arrow. There was not much to see. While we were on the shallow water of the reef it was past time to look down into the limpid depths at the large bunches of branching coral, the unique shrubbery of the sea. We lost that, though, when we got out into the dead blue water of the deep. But we had the picture of the surf, then, dashing angrily against the crag-bound shore and sending a foaming spray high into the air. There was interest in this beatling border, too, for it was honey-coned with quaint caves and arches and tunnels, and had a rude semblance of the dilapidated architecture of ruined keeps and castles rising out of the restless sea. When this novelty ceased to be a novelty, we turned our eyes shoreward and gazed at the long mountain, with its rich green forest stretching up into the curtaining clouds, and at the specks of houses in the rearward distance and the diminished schooner riding sleepily at anchor. And when these grew tiresome we dashed boldly into the midst of a school of huge beastly porpoises engaged at their eternal game of arching over a wave and disappearing, and then doing it over again and keeping it up, always circling over, in that way, like so many well-submerged wheels. But the porpoises wheeled themselves away, and then we were thrown upon our own resources. It did not take many minutes to discover that the sun was blazing like a bonfire, and that the weather was of a melting temperature. It had a drowsing effect, too. In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing. Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea, taking a short board with him, then face the shore, and wait for a particularly a prodigious billow to come along. At the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell. It did not seem that a lightning express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed. I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too, but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time with a couple of barrels of water in me. None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly. At the end of an hour we had made the four miles, and landed on a level point of land upon which was a wide extent of old ruins, with many a tall coconut tree growing among them. Here was the ancient city of refuge, a vast enclosure whose stone walls were twenty feet thick at the base, and fifteen feet high, an oblong square, a thousand and forty feet one way, and a fraction under seven hundred the other. Within this enclosure, in early times, has been three rude temples, each two hundred and ten feet long by one hundred wide, and thirteen high. In those days, if a man killed another anywhere on the island, the relatives were privileged to take the murderer's life, and then a chase for life and liberty began, the outlawed criminal flying through pathless forests and over mountain and plain, with his hopes fixed upon the protecting walls of the city of refuge, and the avenger of blood following hotly after him. Sometimes the race was kept up to the very gates of the temple, and the panting pair sped through long files of excited natives who watched the contest with flashing eye and dilated nostril, encouraging the hunted refugee with sharp, inspiring ejaculations, and sending up a ringing shout of exaltation when the saving gates closed upon him, and the cheated pursuer sank exhausted at the threshold. But sometimes the flying criminal fell under the hand of the avenger at the very door, when one more brave stride, one more brief second of time, would have brought his feet upon the sacred ground and barred him against all harm. Where did these isolated pagans get this idea of a city of refuge? This ancient Oriental custom. The old sanctuary was sacred to all, even to rebels in arms and invading armies. Once within its walls, and confession made to the priest and absolution obtained, the wretch with a price upon his head could go forth without fear and without danger. He was taboo, and to harm him was death. The routed rebels in the lost battle for idolatry fled to this place to claim sanctuary, and many were thus saved. Close to the corner of the great enclosure is a round structure of stone, some six or eight feet high, with a level top about ten or twelve feet in diameter. This was the place of execution. A high palisade of coconut-piles shut out the cruel scenes from the vulgar multitude. Here criminals were killed, the flesh stripped from the bones and burned, and the bones secreted in holes in the body of the structure. If the man had been guilty of a high crime the entire corpse was burned. The walls of the temple are a study, the same food for speculation that is offered the visitor to the pyramids of Egypt he will find here, the mystery of how they were constructed by the people unacquainted with science and mechanics. The natives have no invention of their own for hoisting heavy weights, they had no beasts of burden, and they had never even shown any knowledge of the properties of the lever. Yet some of the lava blocks quarried out, brought over rough broken ground and built into this wall six or seven feet from the ground, are of prodigious size and would weigh tons. How did they transport and how raised them? Both the inner and outer surfaces of the walls present a smooth front and are very creditable specimens of masonry. The blocks are of all manner of shapes and sizes, but yet are fitted together with the neatest exactness. The gradual narrowing of the wall from the base upward is accurately preserved. No cement was used, but the edifice is firm and compact and is capable of resisting storm and decay for centuries. Who built this temple, and how was it built, and when, are mysteries that may never be unraveled. Outside of these ancient walls lies a sort of coffin-shaped stone eleven feet four inches long and three feet square at the small end. It would weigh a few thousand pounds, which the High Chief, who held sway over this district many centuries ago, brought thither on his shoulder one day to use as a lounge. This circumstance is established by the most reliable traditions. He used to lie down on it, in his indolent way, and keep an eye on his subjects at work for him, and see that there was no soldiering done. And no doubt there was not any done to speak of, because he was a man of that sort of build that incites to attention to business on the part of an employee. He was fourteen or fifteen feet high. When he stretched himself at full length on his lounge his legs hung down over the end, and when he snored he woke the dead. These facts are all attested by irrefutable tradition. On the other side of the temple is a monstrous seven-ton rock, eleven feet long, seven feet wide, and three feet thick. It is raised a foot or a foot-and-a-half above the ground, and rests upon half a dozen little stony pedestals. The same old fourteen-footer brought it down from the mountain merely for fun. He had his own notions about fun, and propped it up, as we find it now, and as others may find it a century hence, for it would take a score of horses to budget from its position. They say that fifty or sixty years ago the proud queen Kahumanu used to fly to this rock for safety whenever she had been making trouble with her fierce husband, and hide under it until his wrath was appeased. But these Kanakas will lie, and this statement is one of their ableist efforts, for Kahumanu was six feet high, and she was bulky, she was built like an ox, and she could no more have squeezed herself under that rock than she could have passed between the cylinders of a sugar mill. What could she gain by it, even if she succeeded? To be chased and abused by a savage husband could not be otherwise than humiliating to her high spirit, yet it could never make her feel so flat as an hour's repose under that rock wood. We walked a mile over a raised, macadamized road of uniform width, a road paved with flat stones, and exhibiting in its every detail a considerable degree of engineering skill. Some say that that wise old pagan Kamehameha I planned and built it, but others say it was built so long before his time that the knowledge of who constructed it has passed out of the traditions. In either case, however, as the handiwork of an untaught and degraded race, it is a thing of pleasing interest. The stones are worn and smooth and pushed apart in places, so that the road has the exact appearance of those ancient paved highways leading out of Rome, which one sees in pictures. The object of our tramp was to visit a great natural curiosity at the base of the foothills, a congealed cascade of lava. Some old forgotten volcanic eruption sent its broad river of fire down the mountainside here, and it poured down in a great torrent from an overhanging bluff some 50 feet high to the ground below. The flaming torrent cooled in the winds from the sea, and remains there to-day, all seemed and frost and rippled in a petrified Niagara. It is very picturesque, and with all so natural that one might almost imagine it still flowed. A smaller stream trickled over the cliff and built up an isolated pyramid about 30 feet high, which has the semblance of a mass of large gnarled and knotted vines and roots and stems intricately twisted and woven together. We passed in behind the cascade and the pyramid, and found the bluff pierced by several cavernous tunnels, whose crooked courses we followed a long distance. Two of these winding tunnels stand as proof of nature's mining abilities. Their floors are level, they are seven feet wide, and their roofs are gently arched. Their height is not uniform, however. We passed through one a hundred feet long, which leads through a spur of the hill and opens out well up in the sheer wall of a precipice, whose foot rests in the waves of the sea. It is a commodious tunnel, except that there are occasional places in it where one must stoop to pass under. The roof is lava, of course, and is thickly studded with little lava-pointed icicles an inch long, which hardened as they dripped. They project as closely together as the iron teeth of a corn-sheller, and if one will stand up straight and walk any distance there, he can get his hair combed free of charge. Org. Roughing it by Mark Twain, Chapter 74. We got back to the schooner in good time, and then sailed down to Kau, where we disembarked, and took final leave of the vessel. Next day we bought horses, and bent our way over the summer clad mountain terraces, toward the great volcano of Kilauea. Kilauea. We made nearly a two-days journey of it, but that was on account of laziness. Toward sunset on the second day we reached an elevation of some four thousand feet above sea level, and as we picked our careful way through billowy wastes of lava long generations ago, stricken dead and cold in the climax of its tossing fury, we began to come upon signs of the near presence of the volcano, signs in the nature of ragged fishers that discharged jets of sulfurous vapor into the air, hot from the molten ocean down in the bowels of the mountain. Shortly the crater came into view. I have seen Vesuvius since, but it was a mere toy, a child's volcano, a soup-kettle, compared to this. Mount Vesuvius is a shapely cone, thirty-six hundred feet high, its crater an inverted cone only three hundred feet deep, and not more than a thousand feet in diameter, if as much as that. Its fires meager, modest, and docile. But here was a vast perpendicular walled cellar, nine hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others, level, floored, and ten miles in circumference. Here was a yawning pit upon whose floor the armies of Russia could camp, and have room to spare. Perched upon the edge of the crater at the opposite end from where we stood was a small lookout-house, say, three miles away. It assisted us, by comparison, to comprehend and appreciate the great depth of the basin. It looked like a tiny martin box, clinging at the eaves of a cathedral. After some time spent in resting and looking and ciphering, we hurried on to the hotel. By the path it is half a mile from the volcano-house to the lookout-house. After a hearty supper we waited until it was thoroughly dark, and then started to the crater. The first glance in that direction revealed a scene of wild beauty. There was a heavy fog over the crater, and it was splendidly illuminated by the glare from the fires below. The illumination was two miles wide and a mile high, perhaps, and if you ever, on a dark night, and at a distance, beheld the light from thirty or forty blocks of distant buildings all on fire at once, reflected strongly against overhanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what this looked like. A colossal column of cloud towered to a great height in the air immediately above the crater, and the outer swell of every one of its vast folds was died with a rich crimson luster, which was subdued to a pale rose tint in the depression between. It glowed like a muffled torch, and stretched upward to a dizzy height toward the zenith. I thought it just possible that its like had not been seen since the children of Israel wandered on their long march through the desert so many centuries ago over a path illuminated by the mysterious pillar of fire. And I was sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the majestic pillar of fire was like, which almost amounted to a revelation. Arrived at the little thatched look-out house, we rested our elbows on the railing in front, and looked abroad over the wide crater and down over the sheer precipice at the seething fires beneath us. The view was a startling improvement on my daylight experience. I turned to see the effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of men I almost ever saw. In the strong light every countenance glowed like red-hot iron. Every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity. The place below looked like the infernal regions, and these men like half-cooled devils just come up on a furlough. I turned my eyes upon the volcano again. The cellar was tolerably well lighted up. For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated. Beyond these limits the mists hung down their gauzy curtains, and cast a deceptive gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote corners of the crater seem countless leagues removed, made them seem like the campfires of a great army far away. Here was room for the imagination to work. You could imagine those lights the width of a continent away, and that hidden under the intervening darkness were hills and winding rivers and weary wastes of plain and desert, and even then the tremendous vista stretched on and on and on to the fires and far beyond. You could not compass it. It was the idea of eternity made tangible, and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye. The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink and apparently smooth and level, but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire. It looked like a colossal railroad map of the state of Massachusetts done in a chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it! Imagine a cold black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire. Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter broken in the dark crust and in them the melted lava, the color of a dazzling white just tinged with yellow, was boiling and surging furiously, and from these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions like the spokes of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while and then swept round in huge rainbow curves or made a long succession of sharp worm-fence angles which looked precisely like the fiercest jagged lightning. These streams met other streams, and they mingled with and crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction like skate tracks on a popular skating ground. Sometimes streams twenty or thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing, and through the upper-glasses we could see that they ran down small steep hills and were genuine cataracts of fire white at their source, but soon cooling and turning to the richest red grained with alternate lines of black and gold. Every now and then masses of the dark crust broke away and floated slowly down these streams like rafts down a river. Occasionally the molten lava flowing under the super-incumbent crust broke through, split a dazzling streak from five hundred to a thousand feet long like a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre after acre of the cold lava parted into fragments turned up edgewise like cakes of ice when a great river breaks up, plunged downward and were swallowed in the crimson cauldron. Then the wide expanse of the thaw maintained a ruddy glow for a while, but shortly cooled and became black and level again. During a thaw every dismembered cake was marked by a glittering white border which was superbly shaded inward by a aurora borealis rays, which were a flaming yellow where they joined the white border, and from thence toward their points tapered into glowing crimson, then into a rich pale carmine, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a moment, and then dimmed and turned black. Some of the streams preferred to mingle together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then they looked something like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship's deck when she has just taken in sail and dropped anchor, provided one can imagine those ropes on fire. Through the glasses the little fountains scattered about looked very beautiful. They boiled and coughed and spluttered and discharged sprays of stringy red fire, of about the consistency of mush, for instance, from ten to fifteen feet into the air along with a shower of brilliant white sparks, a quaint and unnatural mingling of gout of blood and snowflakes. We had circles and serpents and streaks of lightning all twined and wreathed and tied together without a breakthrough out an area more than a mile square. That amount of ground was covered, though it was not strictly square, and it was with a feeling of placid exaltation that we reflected that many years had elapsed since any visitor had seen such a splendid display, since any visitor had seen anything more than the now-snubbed and insignificant North and South Lakes in action. We had been reading old files of Hawaiian newspapers and the record book at the volcano-house and were posted. I could see the North Lake lying out on the black floor away off in the outer edge of our panorama and knitted to it by a web-work of lava streams. In its individual capacity it looked very little more respectable than a school-house on fire. True, it was about nine hundred feet long and two or three hundred wide, but then under the present circumstances it necessarily appeared rather insignificant, and besides, it was so distant from us. I forgot to say that the noise made by the bubbling lava is not great heard as we heard it from our lofty perch. It makes three distinct sounds, a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or puffing sound. And if you stand on the brink and close your eyes, it is no trick at all to imagine that you are sweeping down a river on a large, low-pressure steamer, and that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing from her escape pipes, and the churning rush of the water about her wheels. The smell of sulfur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner. We left the lookout-house at ten o'clock in my half-cooked condition because of the heat from Pele's furnaces, and wrapping up in blankets for the night was cold, we returned to our hotel. End of Chapter 74 This is Chapter 75 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 75 The next night was appointed for a visit to the bottom of the crater, for we desired to traverse its floor and see the North Lake of Fire, which lay two miles away toward the further wall. After dark, half a dozen of us set out with lanterns and native guides, and climbed down a crazy thousand-foot pathway in a crevice fractured in the crater wall, and reached the bottom in safety. The eruption of the previous evening had spent its force, and the floor looked black and cold. But when we ran out upon it, we found it hot yet to the feet, and it was likewise riven with crevices, which revealed the underlying fires gleaming vindictively. A neighbouring cauldron was threatening to overflow, and this added to the dubiousness of the situation. So the native guides refused to continue the venture, and then everybody deserted except a stranger named Marlett. He said he had been in the crater a dozen times in daylight, and believed he could find his way through it at night. He thought that a run of three hundred yards would carry us over the hottest part of the floor, and leave us our shoe-soles. His pluck gave me backbone. We took one lantern, and instructed the guide to hang the other to the roof of the lookout house to serve as a beacon for us in case we got lost. And then the party started back up the precipice, and Marlett and I made our run. We skipped over the hot floor and over the red crevices with brisk dispatch, and reached the cold lava safe, but with pretty warm feet. Then we took things leisurely and comfortably, jumping tolerably wide and probably bottomless chasms, and threading our way through picturesque lava upheavals with considerable confidence. We got fairly away from the cauldrons of boiling fire. We seemed to be in a gloomy desert, and a suffocatingly dark one, surrounded by dim walls that seemed to tower to the sky. The only cheerful objects were the glinting stars high overhead. By and by Marlett shouted, Stop! I never stopped quicker in my life. I asked what the matter was. He said we were out of the path. He said we must not try to go on till we found it again, for we were surrounded with beds of rotten lava through which we could easily break and plunge down a thousand feet. I thought eight hundred would answer for me, and was about to say so when Marlett partly proved his statement by accidentally crushing through and disappearing to his armpits. He got out and we hunted for the path with the lantern. He said there was only one path, and that it was but vaguely defined. We could not find it. The lava surface was all alike in the lantern light, but he was an ingenious man. He said it was not the lantern that had informed him that we were out of the path, but his feet. He had noticed a crisp grinding of the fine lava needles under his feet, and some instinct reminded him that in the path these were all worn away. So he put the lantern behind him and began to search with his boots instead of his eyes. It was good sagacity. The first time his foot touched the surface that did not grind under it he announced that the trail was found again, and after that we kept up a sharp listening for the rasping sound, and it always warned us in time. It was a long tramp, but an exciting one. We reached the North Lake between ten and eleven o'clock and sat down on a huge, overhanging lava shelf, tired but satisfied. The spectacle presented was worth coming double the distance to see. Under us, and stretching away before us, was a heaving sea of molten fire of seemingly limitless extent. The glare from it was so blinding that it was some time before we could bear to look upon it steadily. It was like gazing at the sun at noonday, except that the glare was not quite so white. At unequal distances all around the shores of the lake were nearly white-hot chimneys, or hollow drums of lava four or five feet high, and up through them were bursting gorgeous sprays of lava gouts and gem spangles, some white, some red, and some golden. A ceaseless bombardment, and one that fascinated the eye with its unapproachable splendor. The mere distant jets sparkling up through an intervening gossamer veil of vapor seemed miles away, and the further the curving ranks of fiery fountains receded, the more fairy-like and beautiful they appeared. Now and then the surging bosom of the lake under our noses would calm down ominously and seemed to be gathering strength for an enterprise, and then all of a sudden a red dome of lava of the bulk of an ordinary dwelling would heave itself aloft like an escaping balloon, then burst asunder, and out of its heart would flit a pale green film of vapor, and float upward and vanish in the darkness, a released soul soaring homeward from captivity with a damned, no doubt. The crashing plunge of the ruined dome into the lake again would send a world of seething billows lashing against the shores and shaking the foundations of our perch. By and by a loosened mass of the hanging shelf we sat on tumbled into the lake, jarring the surroundings like an earthquake, and delivering a suggestion that may have been intended for a hint, and may not. We did not wait to see. We got lost again on our way back, and were more than an hour hunting for the path. We were where we could see the beacon lantern at the lookout-house at the time, but thought it was a star and paid no attention to it. We reached the hotel at two o'clock in the morning pretty well fagged out. Kilauea never overflows its vast crater, but bursts a passage for its lava through the mountain side when relief is necessary, and then the destruction is fearful. About 1840 it rent its overburdened stomach and sent a broad river of fire careening down to the sea, which swept away forests, huts, plantations, and everything else that lay in its path. The stream was five miles broad in places and 200 feet deep, and the distance it travelled was 40 miles. It tore up and bore away acre patches of land on its bosom like rafts, rocks, trees, and all intact. At night the red glare was visible a hundred miles at sea, and at a distance of 40 miles a fine print could be read at midnight. The atmosphere was poisoned with sulfurous vapours and choked with falling ashes, pumice stones, and cinders. Countless columns of smoke rose up and blended together in a tumbled canopy that hid the heavens and glowed with a ruddy flush reflected from the fires below. Here and there jets of lava sprung hundreds of feet into the air and burst into rocket sprays that returned to earth in a crimson rain, and all the while the laboring mountain shook with nature's great palsy and voiced its distress in moanings and the muffled booming of subterranean thunders. Fishes were killed for twenty miles along the shore where the lava entered the sea. The earthquakes caused some loss of human life, and a prodigious tidal wave swept in land, carrying everything before it and drowning a number of natives. The devastation consummated along the route traversed by the river of lava was complete and incalculable. Only a Pompeii and a Herculinaeum were needed at the foot of Kilauea to make the story of the eruption immortal. End of Chapter 75 This is Chapter 76 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 76 We rode horseback all around the island of Hawaii, the crooked road making the distance two hundred miles, and enjoyed the journey very much. We were more than a week making the trip, because our Kanaka horses would not go by a house or a hut without stopping. Whip and spur could not alter their minds about it, and so we finally found that it economized time to let them have their way. Upon inquiry the mystery was explained. The natives are such thoroughgoing gossips that they never pass a house without stopping to swap news. And consequently their horses learned to regard that sort of thing as an essential part of the whole duty of man and his salvation not to be compassed without it. However, at a former crisis of my life I had once taken an aristocratic young lady out driving, behind a horse that had just retired from a long and honorable career as the moving impulse of a milk-wagon. And so this present experience awoke a reminiscent sadness in me, in place of the exasperation more natural to the occasion. I remembered how helpless I was that day and how humiliated, how ashamed I was of having intimated to the girl that I had always owned the horse and was accustomed to grandeur, how hard I tried to appear easy and even vivacious under suffering that was consuming my vitals, how placidly and maliciously the girl smiled, and kept on smiling, while my hot blushes baked themselves into a permanent blood pudding in my face, how the horse ambled from one side of the street to the other and waited complacently before every third house two minutes and a quarter, while I belabored his back and reviled him in my heart, how I tried to keep him from turning corners and failed, how I moved heaven and earth to get him out of town and did not succeed, how he traversed the entire settlement and delivered imaginary milk at a hundred and sixty-two different domiciles and how he finally brought up at a dairy depot and refused to budge further, thus rounding and completing the revealment of what the plebeian service of his life had been, how in eloquent silence I walked the girl home and how when I took leave of her, her parting remarks scorched my soul and appeared to blister me all over. She said that my horse was a fine, capable animal, and I must have taken great comfort in him in my time, but that if I would take along some milk-tickets next time and appear to deliver them at the various halting places it might expedite his movements a little, there was a coolness between us after that. In one place in the island of Hawaii we saw a laced and ruffled cataract of limpid water leaping from a sheer precipice fifteen hundred feet high, but that sort of scenery finds its staunchest ally in the arithmetic rather than in spectacular effect. If one desires to be so stirred by a poem of nature wrought in the happily commingled graces of picturesque rocks and glimpsed distances, foliage, color, shifting lights and shadows, and fallen water, that the tears almost come into his eyes so potent is the charm exerted, he need not go away from America to enjoy such an experience. The rainbow fall in Watkins Glen, New York, on the Erie Railway, is an example. It would recede into pitiable insignificance if the callous tourists drew on arithmetic on it, but left to compete for the honors simply on scenic grace and beauty, the grand, the august, and the sublime being barred the contest, it could challenge the old world and the new to produce its pure. In one locality on our journey we saw some horses that had been born and reared on top of the mountains, above the range of running water, and consequently they had never drank that fluid in their lives, but had been always accustomed to quenching their thirst by eating due laden or shower-wetted leaves, and now it was destructively funny to see them sniff suspiciously at a pail of water, and then put in their noses and try to take a bite out of the fluid, as if it were a solid. Finding it liquid they would snatch away their heads and fall to trembling, snorting, and showing other evidences of fright. When they became convinced at last that the water was friendly and harmless, they thrust their noses up to their eyes, brought out a mouthful of water, and proceeded to chew it complacently. We saw a man coax, kick, and spur one of them five or ten minutes before he could make it cross a running stream. It spread its nostrils, distended its eyes, and trembled all over, just as horses customarily do in the presence of a serpent, and for ought I know it thought the crawling stream was a serpent. In due course of time our journey came to an end at Kauaihai, usually pronounced Tuahai, and before we find fault with this elaborate, orthographical method of arriving at such an un-austentatious result, let us lop off the ug from our word, though. I made this horse-back trip on a mule. I paid ten dollars for him at Ka'u, Ka'u, added four to get him shod, rode him two hundred miles, and then sold him for fifteen dollars. I marked the circumstance with a white stone in the absence of chalk, for I never saw a white stone that a body could mark anything with, though out of respect for the ancients I have tried it often enough. For up to that day and date it was the first strictly commercial transaction I had ever entered into, and come out, winner. We returned to Honolulu, and from thence sailed to the island of Maui, and spent several weeks there very pleasantly. I still remember, with a sense of indolent luxury, a picnicking excursion up a romantic gorge there called the Iao Valley. The trail lay along the edge of a brawling stream in the bottom of the gorge. A shady route, for it was well-roofed with the verdant domes of forest trees. Through openings in the foliage we glimpsed picturesque scenery that revealed ceaseless changes and new charms with every step of our progress. Perpendicular walls from one to three thousand feet high guarded the way, and were sumptuously plumbed with varied foliage in places, and in places swathed in waving ferns. Passing shreds of cloud trailed their shadows across these shining fronts, mottling them with blots. Billowy masses of white vapor hid the turreted summits, and far above the vapor swelled a background of gleaming green crags and cones that came and went through the veiling mists, like islands drifting in a fog. Sometimes the cloudy curtain descended till half the cannon wall was hidden, then shredded gradually away till only airy glimpses of the ferny front appeared through it. Then swept aloft and left it glorified in the sun again. Now and then, as our position changed, rocky bastions swung out from the wall, a mimic ruin of castellated ramparts and crumbling towers closed with mosses and hung with garlands of swaying vines, and as we moved on they swung back again and hid themselves once more in the foliage. Presently a verger clad needle of stone a thousand feet high stepped out from behind a corner and mounted guard over the mysteries of the valley. It seemed to me that if Captain Cook needed a monument here was one ready-made. Therefore why not put up his sign here and sell out the venerable coconut stump? But the chief pride of Maui is her dead volcano of Haleakala, which means translated the House of the Sun. We climbed a thousand feet up the side of this isolated colossus one afternoon, then camped and next day climbed the remaining nine thousand feet and anchored on the summit where we built a fire and froze and roasted by terns all night. With the first pallor of dawn we got up and saw things that were new to us. Mounted on a commanding pinnacle we watched nature work her silent wonders. The sea was spread abroad on every hand, its tumbled surface seeming only wrinkled and dimpled in the distance. A broad valley below appeared like an ample checkerboard, its velvety green sugar plantations alternating with done squares of barrenness and groves of trees diminished to mossy tufts. Beyond the valley were mountains picturistically grouped together, but bear in mind we fancied that we were looking up at these things not down. We seemed to sit in the bottom of a symmetrical bowl ten thousand feet deep with the valley and the skirting sea lifted away into the sky above us. It was curious, and not only curious, but aggravating, for it was having our trouble all for nothing to climb ten thousand feet toward heaven and then have to look up at our scenery. However, we had to be content with it and make the best of it. For all we could do we could not coax our landscape down out of the clouds. Formerly, when I had read an article in which Poe treated of this singular fraud perpetrated upon the eye by isolated great altitudes, I had looked upon the matter as an invention of his own fancy. I have spoken of the outside view, but we had an inside one too. That was the yawning dead crater into which we now and then tumbled rocks, half as large as a barrel, from our perch, and saw them go careening down the almost perpendicular sides, bounding three hundred feet at a jump, kicking up cast clouds wherever they struck, diminishing to our view as they sped farther into distance, growing invisible finally, and only betraying their course by faint little puffs of dust, and coming to a halt at last in the bottom of the abyss two thousand five hundred feet down from where they started. It was magnificent sport. We wore ourselves out at it. The crater of Vesuvius, as I have before remarked, is a modest pit about a thousand feet deep and three thousand in circumference. That oculiwea is somewhat deeper and ten miles in circumference. But what are either of them compared to the vacant stomach of Haleakala? I will not offer any figures of my own, but give official ones, those of Commander Wilkes, U.S. Navy, who surveyed it and testified that it is twenty-seven miles in circumference. If it had a level bottom it would make a fine sight for a city like London. It must have afforded a spectacle worth contemplating in the old days when its furnaces gave full reign to their anger. Presently, vagrant white clouds came drifting along high over the sea and the valley. Then they came in couples and groups. Then in imposing squadrons, gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly together a thousand feet under us, and totally shut out land and ocean. Not a vestige of anything was left in view, but just a little of the rim of the crater, circling away from the pinnacle whereon we sat. For a ghostly procession of wanderers from the filmy hosts without had drifted through a chasm in the crater wall, and filed round and round, and gathered and sunk and blended together till the abyss was stored to the brim with a fleecy fog. Thus banked, motion ceased, and silence reigned. Clear to the horizon, league on league, the snowy floor stretched without a break, not level but in rounded folds, with shallow creases between, and with here and there stately piles of vapory architecture lifting themselves aloft out of the common plain, some near at hand, some in the middle distances, and others relieving the monotony of the remote solitudes. There was little conversation for the impressive scene over awed speech. I felt like the last man neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid heaven a forgotten relic of a vanished world. While the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the coming resurrection appeared in the east, a growing warmth suffused the horizon, and soon the sun emerged, and looked out over the cloud-waste, flinging bars of ruddy light across it, staining its folds and billow-caps with blushes, purpling the shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy vapor palaces and cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all blendings and combinations of rich coloring. It was the sublimus spectacle I ever witnessed, and I think the memory of it will remain with me always.