A Progress Around the Big Island

“Why can we three not go around Hawaii together? I will take you to some Hawaiian homes, and you will love them and they you,” urged Mary Low, perhaps the third time we met.

“Why not?” Jack brightly took her up. “I’m ready as soon as I finish ‘Michael, Brother of Jerry,’ When shall it be? Set the date. Any time you say—eh? Mate?”

So it came to pass that on the Big Island we spent six weeks going from house to house of the Hawaiians, some strangers to us, some old acquaintances, in a round of entertainment and hospitality that set us on tiptoe with the unstudied human beauty and wonder of it all.

“I question—do you really get what this means to you and me, in our present and future relation to Hawaii?” Jack would reiterate with that adorable eagerness that I share in his vision. “I have read more, listened to more, than have you, of the ways of the people in the past generations—of the royal progresses of their princes, their kings, and their queens. This way of ours, led by Mary Low, is of the nature of a royal progress, but with the difference that, not being born into the honor, it is up to us to be worthy of its being thrust upon us. Do you get me?—Oh, pardon my insistence,” he would relax his high, sparkling tension, “but I do so want you, my sharer, to enjoy with me the knowledge of what all this means for you and me.”

Ah, I did, I did. And I do. My own heart and intelligence, further quickened by his still more sensitive divination, lent to the otherwise vastly interesting experience an appreciation that will abide for all my days. The imperishable charm of what it meant and means has come back a thousandfold, pressed down and overflowing, his share and mine together, to me in my singleness.

“Mary Low is a wonder, I tell you!” Thus Jack, elate. “She is a mine of interest and information. Her mind a kingdom is. I haven’t talked with a woman in Hawaii, of whatever nationality or blend of nationalities, whose brain can eclipse Sister Mary’s for vision of the enormous dramatic connotations of the race as it has been and is being lived out right here on this soil which you and I love. Listen here,” breaking off to read me his scribbled notes, “think of the story this will make—why, I want to write a dozen yarns all at once. I become desperate with my inability to do so, when, any hour of the day, Mary chats about say the Parker Ranch history, or, for that matter, almost any big holding on this isle of ranches. She might, with her memory and adjustment of values and her imagination, have been a great writer of fiction.”

In such company, we disembarked one morning before daylight on the wharf at Kailua, Hawaii, where, far cry to the old time Goodhue surrey, in the thick darkness we made our way toward an electric-lighted 1916 motor that had cost its owner, Robert Hind, Mary’s brother-in-law, some eight thousand dollars to land here from the East.

Effortlessly we surmounted the familiar road, to a point where our way turned to the left. In a gray car in a gray-and-silver dawn we passed the home of the Maguires, and with Mauna Kea’s icy peak flushing in our eyes, pursued the drive toward Parker Ranch. Bending off to the right for a remembered sugar-loaf hill, Puuwaawaa, we came to the home of the Hinds, and there spent a fortnight with Robert Hind and his wife, Hannah, whose eyes and smile Jack more than once preserved, for what time may be, in written romances. Their sons and daughters were absent in eastern colleges. Here in terraced gardens of lawns and every flower and plant that will grow at this 2700-foot elevation, we worked and played; and each morning, before breakfast, Jack and I made it a point to attend the toilette of a kingly peacock, whose absorption in the preening of his black-opal plumage was little disturbed by our admiring scrutiny and conversation. And there were horseback rides, and long motoring trips. One of these picnics was to the great heiau of Honaunau, south of Kealakekua Bay.

To reach this Temple of Refuge,—which also served as a court of Justice—one was obliged to leave a vehicle and take to the saddle. There has since been made a good automobile road.

We descended upon horses lent by Miss Ethel Paris, an energetic young woman capable of running her cattle ranch unaided should need arise. She entertained us with the unobtrusive, faultless hospitality of her Hawaiian strain, combined with the Caucasian blood that attains, in this gentle tropic, to something nearly equal in warmth and generousness.

Honaunau is one of the most imposing of Hawaii’s relics, and covers nearly seven acres. Its walls, still intact, measure a dozen feet in height and eighteen in thickness, and in olden times protected uncounted fugitives from the wrath of their fellows. Those of the Tower of London dwindle into comparative insignificance before this savage architectural triumph.

The heiau forms a lordly man-made promontory upon a low cape of lava, relieved by towering coconut palms that wave their plumage at entrancing angles for one who would sketch. It is a mammoth pile of mystery, every stone, small and great, a secret laid by the hands of men who were born of woman and who loved, and fought, and worked, and now are cosmic dust. The Bishop Museum is conducting further investigations into this broken edifice that piques the imagination far beyond its available legend.

Umbilical cords were placed in interstices of the stones and sealed with small rocks. To this day, many a modest Hawaiian maiden of Christian beliefs could admit, if she would, that her parents had dedicated to the huge altar of their forefathers such souvenir of their pride and lingering sense of romance and reverence for hereditary custom. I wonder, left to themselves in this lotus land, how long it would take the Hawaiians to revert. I wonder, equally, how long we dominant white-faces, given that same dreamy environment, would need to attain the same retrogression. Jack London played with this theme in “The Scarlet Plague,” but in California climate. He gave them about a generation.

A racy episode in the pre-Christian stage of Kaahumanu’s career, when she fled the consequences of Kamehameha’s rage following an amorous escapade, is still whispered half-laughingly by hapa-haoles. They point out, in the great inclosure, the tilted, roof-like stone under which the fascinating and capricious lady took sanctuary.

That night we slept at the Tommy Whites’, after a luau at their house. Here, to our joy, we found Mother Shipman, carrying on a little “progress” of her own; and her greeting was: “My own son and daughter!” Next day there was still another luau, mauka at the old Roy place, Wahou, where again we met the Walls. Mrs. Roy, mother of both Mrs. Shipman and Mrs. White, had passed away several years earlier. Her garden remained, more beautiful than ever in its fragrant riot of roses and blumeria and heliotrope, and the begonias had surpassed all promising.

Kiholo, seaside retreat of the Hinds, was enjoyed for a night and a day—miles down-slope over the lava. And again we drove to Parker Ranch, guests of Mary and Hannah’s Aunt Kalili, Mrs. Martin Campbell. The great holding, nearly doubled in acreage, is now the fortune of one part-Hawaiian lad, Richard Smart. For Thelma Parker had sacrificed herself for love in a tragic marriage, and died untimely, survived by but one of her children, who, the father shortly following his child-wife to the grave, became sole heir to the estate. On the side of Mauna Kea, in the family burial ground walled with sepulchral cypresses, rest the ashes of beautiful Thelma, taken there with all fitting pomp, mourned by every Hawaiian heart born on her lands. Standing beside her grave, we tried to vision that long funeral cortège winding up the grassy leagues she had so often galloped wild in her childhood. Poor little maid—one is thankful that at least she had that wonderful maidenhood.

Near the cemetery is Mana, old deserted home of Parkers, rambling in a great courtyard. The main body of the building is called Kapuaikahi; the right wing, Waialeale; the left, Evahale. Mary wept amidst the ruined fountains, for here her early years had been spent with her sisters and cousins, and Princess Kaiulani had been a familiar visitor. An Hawaiian caretaker let us in, and through the koa rooms we wandered, touching almost reverently the treasures of generations—furniture, pianos, china, and moldy albums of photographs. One curio especially appealed to Jack, who uses a similar incident in “Michael, Brother of Jerry”—a whale-tooth, sailor-carven, with an inscription referring to the sinking of the Essex by a cow-whale. Coincidentally, a man, claiming to be a survivor of the Essex, died in Honolulu about this time of our visit to Mana.

It was a distinct pleasure to learn that Frank Woods, of Kohala, had lately bought the old place for his wife, Eva, who is a daughter of the famous Colonel Sam Parker, Minister of Foreign Affairs during the reign of Liliuokalani, bon vivant and familiar of King Kalakaua. Mr. Woods later acquired the house at Waikiki, Honolulu, in which Robert Louis Stevenson once lived and wrote. The early home of the original Parker, Mana Hale, built with his own hands, stands in a corner of the inclosure. One aches with the romance of it all, and would like to write an entire volume upon the history of the Ranch that started on this spot.

At the historic old port, Kawaihae, where the Ranch does its shipping, we were shown Queen Emma’s home, eloquent with decay, still dignified in the age-wreck of its palm gardens. It was off Kawaihae, in a gale, that Captain Cook’s Resolution sprung her foremast, which caused him to put in at Kealakekua Bay for repairs, to his doom. Only the heat prevented us from making an effort to walk to the ruins of the important heiau of Puukohala, erected upon advice of the priests, to secure to Kamehameha the Kingdom of Hawaii.

Upon our final leave-taking of Puuwaawaa, the Hinds’ open-handed hospitality sent us in one of their cars to Hilo. On the way, Mrs. Tommy White ran out with an addition to our lunch—a marvelous cold red fish, the ulaula, baked in ti-leaves, and a huge cake, compounded of fresh-grated, newly plucked coconut and other delicious things we could not guess. Of course we visited the Maguires, as well as the Goodhues down their lovely winding lane. And we must slip in for a moment to the wide unglassed window-ledge, to gaze once more, from that vantage through the needled branches of imported ironwood trees, across the long void of lava, upon the divine Blue Flush.

South we passed beyond the Blue Flush of Kona, and sped over the road traveled by the Congressional party the year before, through the tranquil village of Pahala, and on up Mauna Loa for an all-too-short stopover, which included a sumptuous luau, with Mr. and Mrs. Julian Monsarrat, on Kapapala Ranch in the Kau District, before pushing on to the Volcano.

Different again from other volcanic deserts of the island is this of Kau, made up of flow upon succeeding flow from Mauna Loa, in color black and bluish-gray. Vast fields of cane alternate with arid stretches, and west of Pahala is a sisal plantation and mill, the most extensive on the Island. Mauka of the road one sees a fertile swath of cane growing on a mud-flow of Mauna Loa at an elevation of 1200 feet. This mud-flow was originally a section of clay marshland which, in 1868, was jarred loose by an earthquake from the bluff at the head of a valley. In but a few moments it had swept down three miles in a wet landslide half a mile wide and thirty feet deep. Immediately afterward a tidal wave inundated the entire coast of Kau, while Kilauea, joining the general celebration, disgorged lava through underground fissures toward the southwest.

Full majestic lies Kau under the deep-blue sky, and as majestic moves the deep-blue, white-crested ocean that washes its lava-bound feet. From the Monsarrats’ roof we made a side-trip to the coast, where in the black sands of Ninole beach we gathered the “breeding-stones,” believed by old inhabitants to be reproductive, and which were sought after as small idols. Being full of holes, these large pebbles secrete smaller pebbles, which roll out at odd times, thus furnishing grist for the fancy of simple folk. Jack, immensely taken with the conceit, in no time had several brown urchins earning nickels collecting a supply which, he declared, he was going to turn loose on the Ranch at home to raise stone walls. Another curiosity in the neighborhood is a fresh-water pool just inside the high beach where the Pacific swell breaks. But to the hunter, Kau’s prime attraction is its wide opportunity for plover shooting.

A pretty legend is told of a small fishing place, Manilo, near Honuapo on the coast. A trick of the current eternally brought flotsam of various sorts from the direction of Puna into the little indentation at Manilo. Over and above the driftage of bodies of warriors who had been slain and thrown over the cliffs along the coast, the inlet became famous as a sort of post office for the lovers of Puna, whose messages, in the form of hala or mailé leis, inclosed in calabashes, could dependably be sent to their sweethearts in Kau.

Near Punaluu, the landing place for East Kau, are the remains of a couple of heiaus—Punaluunui and Kaneeleele, said to have been connected in their workings with the great Wahaula heiau, of Puna. Scientists are continually on the hunt for old temples and sites, and in 1921 the total for all of the Islands reached five hundred and seventeen. Dr. T. A. Jaggar, Jr., recently stumbled upon a most interesting discovery—an old heiau in the Pahala section of the Kau district, of which the neighborhood professed to have no knowledge. The ruins differ from all others known, in that the stones bear many rude carvings, or petroglyphs, in crescents and circles, with and without dots. These may be similar to the petroglyphs that may be seen on the rocks of the Kona shore.

And thus we merely glanced through a District rife with treasures for the explorer into the past, making mental notes for a return. That day we were to see evidence of the high attainment of the Hawaiians in the science of massage. An old woman, still handsome, with an antic humor in her black eyes from which the fire was yet to be quenched, noticed that I had a severe headache. Enticing me, with benevolent gestures and moans, to an ancient sofa, she laid rude but shrewd hands upon the tendons of the inner side of the legs below the knees. Nothing availed my shrieks of agony. Those powerful fingers, relentless as the bronze they looked, kneaded and twanged those cords until, lo! in a mere ten minutes or so the headache, accumulated in hours of motoring under the brassy sky, was charmed away—charmed not by any means being the best word for such drastic method. In this manner we thenceforth did away with headaches in our family of two.

The Monsarrats’, on Kapapala Ranch, is another of the homes that quaintly combine the lines and traditions of prim New England architecture with a lavish charm of subtropic treatment of interior and garden compound. In the latter, high-edged aloofly with cypress and eucalyptus from the winds of the surrounding amplitude of far-flung, treeless mountain areas, one feels bewilderingly lifted apart and set aside, amidst an abandon of flowers, from the rest of the kingly island.

Julian Monsarrat, with keen appreciation of Hawaii’s turbulent history, filled Jack with valuable material for fiction.

From this Ranch, one may ride to the summit of Mauna Loa, which is overtopped by its sister peak only by 150 feet height of small cones in Mauna Kea’s immense crater. But Mary Low’s time was limited, and there was still so much ahead of us, that this venture, too, was set forward into the ever receding allure of future returnings.

Still another sumptuous luau, at which we came in contact with some of the Pahala neighbors, and we set out for Kilauea. There, in broad daylight, at last we beheld the bursting, beating wonder of her heart of lava quite as blood-red as all its painted or sculptured imagings. Thus it must have been when a churchman half a century ago wrote:

“Wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of His indignation.”

We amused ourselves trying to believe that this manifestation was the reward of certain offerings, of flowers and tid-bits brought purposely from the Monsarrat abundance, which Mary and ourselves cast into the burning lake.

From Hilo, where our Shipman family once more enfolded us, even to Uncle Alec, we made another flying trip down the Puna Coast, leaving Pahoa behind on our second quest into idyllic Kalapana by the turquoise sea. Here the natives are still “natives” in simple mode of life and attitude toward the same; and here one finds, at the village of Kaimu, what is said to be the largest grove of coconut palms in the Islands. On the high-piled crescent of sand, overrun by a blossoming vine, under the angled plume-tossing pillars of the grove lolled a scattered group of Hawaiians. From the noble silvered head of one of the benevolent old men Jack bought me a coral-red lei, one of a sort seldom seen these latter days in Hawaii—a solid cable full an inch in diameter, made by laboriously perforating, below the center, hard red berries or seeds, resembling the black-eyed Susan, but smaller, and sewing these close together around a cord.

The village of Kalapana, farther south, supports quite a large population, and is very lovely with its fine growth of coconut, puuhala, and monkey-pod trees. Near by are to be seen the niu moe, or sleeping-coconuts—palms such as are bent, when young, by visiting chiefs, and thereafter called by the names of the chiefs. These in Kalapana were bent by Queen Emma, wife of Kamehameha IV. The day has now gone by when Hawaiian travelers observed their telic and beautiful custom of planting a coconut wherever they chanced to rest. I call to mind an exquisite cluster of five green coco-palms beside a spring, on the Peninsula, near Pearl Harbor, Oahu. They were planted by John F. Colburn on his own estate, in the stormy days of Liliuokalani’s accession to the tottering throne, to commemorate her appointment of himself and four other ministers to serve in her cabinet. Every mile in the Territory of Hawaii is fraught with keen human interest, if one could only recognize the signs.

Kalapana landing has become so rough that it is used only for canoes, and not far off rises a cliff from out the ocean. From an inshore dell we labored up a gigantic litter of bowlders to the plateau of this bluff, and looking down from the top could detect shoals of large fish directly below in deep water. Jack, bargaining for raw fish at a native hut, missed this side-diversion, which included the exploring of a century-old tunnel beginning midway of the plateau, its mouth surrounded by broken old stone fences. Reached by this eerie passage is a large chamber once used as a place of refuge. The tunnel, made winding so that spears might not be cast after the fleeing, snakes out from the main chamber to a place on the cliff, high above the deep water. There is also, in this neighborhood, the remnant of the Niukukahi heiau. From Kalapana runs a native trail to the Volcano, but no road farther than the village itself. Also near Kalapana lies the heiau of Wahaula, “Red Mouth,” that being a feature of the idols it contained. Here idolatry was most extensively, and last, practiced. It is the largest and best preserved of the heiaus, supposed to have been built by Paao, a powerful priest, in the eleventh century. Wahaula, by the way, is the original of that restored model in the Bishop Museum, at Honolulu. The natives still tell the story of the temple’s destruction. The tradition runs that a wrestler lived near by, whose habit it was to slay pilgrims to the sacred grove of pandanus and coconut. On guard in a cave in the bluff where the trail strikes mauka toward Kau, lived a blood-thirsty maiden whose pleasure it was to signal the wrestler when wayfarers approached. The inference is that she ate the flesh of those he slew; but this, unlike the incident of the Wahiawa, Oahu, ogre, is not authentic.

A Kona chief had a friend who had been sacrificed in the heiau. This friend’s spirit appeared and bade his friend go and recover his bones from the temple inclosure. But first he must anoint his body with kukuinut oil; and by this slippery strategy he withstood the attack of the wrestler, whom he killed. He entered the heiau by daylight, the spirits, akuas, being then off duty, and hid beneath the picked bones of his friend. When the akuas returned at dusk, they suspicioned the presence of a human, but were reassured by the spirit of the Kona man’s friend, who, at midnight, crowed like a cock, and the akuas departed, thinking it was dawn. Before the rescuer of his friend’s bones made his own escape, he destroyed the great grass temple by fire. The tabu (kapu) of Wahaula was fire, and any person upon whom rested the shadow of smoke from the ghastly rites, was sacrificed.

Farther along the trail, on the makai side, is shown the footprint of a demigod of old, Niheu, as well as the mark of an arrow which he sent at another demigod who came to fight him. Following west, makai of where the trail turns mauka, is Kamoamoa, and there one may see a natural arch, of which there are several in the islands. A few interesting rock-carvings have been found here.

That night we slept in Kapoho, to the north, the beautiful old home of Henry K. Lyman, whom we had known for some time, Road Supervisor of the Puna District, and part-Hawaiian, descended from the old missionary stock, and a most interesting personality. At the Chicago Convention of Delegates, he was affectionately known as Prince of Kapoho. And right princely does the tall, suave-mannered gentleman live in the lovely house of his childhood.

Not far away is a famous spring in the lava-rock, always at blood heat, which forms a bath sixty feet long by thirty wide, and twenty-five deep. Also near Kapoho is Green Lake, a “bottomless” pond in a volcanic emerald cup, in which it is said the bodies of swimmers under water show brilliant in shades of blue and green.

Many lava trees are to be seen in the Puna District—trees once surrounded and preserved by upstanding lava—great vases sprouting from their tops with living growths of fern or parasite. Certain deep-green hills seen from the lanai showed as if sculptured by the hand of man; and it is not considered unlikely that they were fortifications in their day. This Puna coast is packed with beauty and historical interest. Sitting on the fragrant lanai at dusk, listening to a serenade by the plantation boys after their day in the canefields, Jack assured me we should come back to explore Puna to heart’s content.

In the morning we drove to Hilo, in a steady downpour that almost made a motorboat of the automobile. The loops of that old road that wound over the aged lava through the magnificent jungle into Hilo’s suburbs, are now cut across by a perfect highway, carved through stone and solid tropical forest that does its best to encroach upon the asphalt. Rolling along, one who remembers the old leisurely way cannot help casting regretful glances upon the rambling lane that now and again comes into view, fast falling into decay.

At the same time, let no malihini think that the straight-away engineering of the modern motor track is an innovation in the old Kingdom of Hawaii. I have traveled, horseback, many miles on the Shipman holdings along Puna’s ironbound coast, from their beach retreat Keaau, to Papae, a sheep camp, upon a road straight as a moonbeam, that was built by hands dust this hundred years and more. It was Kamehameha’s edict that it be laid in a direct line across the turbulent surface of rotting a-a lava, so his fleet runners might lose no dispatch in carrying his commands and news. Where caverns from cooled bubbles were encountered, masonry of the same lavish material was reared from the depths to support that unswerving, level pave which was to bear the feet of him who did the great monarch’s bidding.

At Hilo we boarded the train for Paauilo, the end of the railroad, and were confirmed in our belief that it is one of the world’s wonder routes. An observation-car, carrying a buffet, has since been added for the convenience of tourists.

From Paauilo, the young manager of two big sugar plantations took us to Honokaa above the sea, whence we had ascended to Louissons eight years before. Next day we journeyed on to the second plantation home at Kukuihaele, an enormous house, sedately paneled the height of its walls, and set in a terraced park of lawns and umbrageous trees. We wondered at such an inappropriate structure in this sub-tropic land, and were told that the original happy bungalow, built by a Scotch architect, had been demolished by a later German manager, who preferred the present stately pile. But the gravest architecture could not dampen our spirits, and a contented time we had in the sober interior playing cards by a large fireplace of an evening, and working by day, meanwhile delaying for the unobliging weather to clear, that we might visit Waipio and Waimanu valleys near at hand.

From the deck of the Kilauea the previous spring, I had been pointed out these grand clefts, which by old travelers have been called the Eden of the Hawaiian Islands; and I was urged, rather than enter by trail, to surf in from seaward in canoes. This we had hoped to do; but the natives reported too great a swell from the continued rough weather. Moreover, the trail up the pali out of Waipio into Waimanu was little safer than the beach. But one day, riding in a drizzle, Jack and I happened upon the broad, steep trail of the 2500-foot eastern scarp, into Waipio, and mushed through its mud down into a sunnier level, meeting strings of ascending mules laden with garden produce. An old chronicler referred to the condition of the “roads” hereabout as “embarrassing.” Our horses tried very fractiously to refuse the descent.

This was one of the prettiest little adventures we two ever had together, dropping into the sequestered vale that opened wondrously as we progressed to the lovely banks of a wooded river that wound to the sea, widening to meet the surf that thundered upon a two-mile shingle. On the banks of the stream we could see wahines at their washing, and hear the ringing sweet voices of children at play—survivors of a once thick population, as evidenced by remains that are to be found of fish-ponds, taro-patches, and the like. Here the last Hawaiian tapa cloth was made. That same chronicler says: “There was something about that valley so lovely, so undisturbed ... it seemed to belong to another world, or to be a portion of this into which sorrow and death had never entered.”

At the head of this great break in the coast nestles the half-deserted, half-ruined village of Waipio, and behind it there wedges into the floor of the valley a tremendous rock bastion veiled in waterfalls to its mid-hidden summit. A second river curved from beyond its feet, and joined the one that flowed into the sea. We rode on across reedy shallows to a pathway once sacred to the sorcerers, kahunas, the which no layman then dared to profane with his step. Only approaching twilight held us back from the beach trail that leads to a clump of tall coconuts, marking the site of a one-time important temple of refuge in this section of Hawaii, Puuhonua, built as long ago as the thirteenth century by a Kauai king. There is reason to believe that there were several lesser temples in the neighborhood. They do say that Kamehameha the Great was born here in Waipio. One would like to think that first seeing the light of day in so superlatively grand and beautiful a vale might make for greatness!

That day, moving along the bases of the cloud-shadowed precipices, we planned happily how we should some day come here, restore one of the abandoned cottages and its garden, and live for a while without thought of time. What a place for quietude and work! For once Jack seemed to welcome the idea of such seclusion and repose. Little as he ever inclined toward folding his pinions for long, Hawaii stayed them more than any other land. “You can’t beat the Ranch in California—it’s a sweet land,” he would stanchly defend, “but I’d like to spend a great deal of my time down here.”

We bemoaned the weather that prevented us from climbing the zig-zag stark above our heads into Waimanu.

An accession of the storm began tearing out the road to Honokaa, and even a section of the plantation railway along the seaward bluffs. That repaired, we heeded the warning of the manager, aware of our schedule, that we might not be able to leave for weeks if we did not avail ourselves of this route. In a heavy downpour and wind that turned our futile umbrellas inside-out, we made the several miles in an open roadster on the track, and the spanning of rain-washed gulches recalled the flume-coasting of 1907.

After an automobile passage over the roads of our journey of years earlier, we arrived once more at Waimea, on the Parker Ranch. Here, turning off into North Kohala, the machine emerged into better weather and dryer roads along the flanks of the Kohala Mountains, which are over 5000 feet in elevation. Carelessly enough, we had somehow pictured the North Kohala District as in the main a wilderness of impassable gulches. And to be sure this feature is not lacking, for the district embraces some splendid country that is a continuation of the gulch and valley scenery of which Waipio and Waimanu form part.

Imagine our surprise to find ourselves, at the Frank Woods’ home, Kahua, on a gigantic green-terraced sweep from mountain top to sea rim, in the midst of a ranch or conglomeration of ranches covering many thousands of acres, whose volcanic rack had been rounded by the ages and clothed with pasture. The laying out of the grounds had been guided by the natural lines of the incline. From the house, where the living-room extended full width overlooking the vast panorama, it was hard to discern, except by the finer grass of the lawns, where garden and wild ended and began. Never have I seen Jack so pleased over any gardening as with the undulating spaces of Kahua. And in this house of valuable antiques we slept in a high koa bedstead, crested with the royal arms, that had belonged to Queen Emma.

Motoring across to the northwest coast, our surprise grew. A perfect road traversed an ordered landscape that was unescapably English in its general trimness as well as in the architecture of its buildings. Of course, there was everywhere a waving expanse of the fair green cane, and near the oceanside were ranged the sugar mills of Kohala. At the town of Kohala, where Kamehameha began his conquesting career, one happens suddenly upon the original Kamehameha statue, spear in hand, helmet and cape gilded to simulate yellow feathers. This figure, by T. R. Gould of Boston, cast in Italy, was lost coming around Cape Horn. The exact duplicate, which stands before Honolulu’s Court House, was made and set up previous to the salving of the original from the wreck, which was sold to the Hawaiian Government.

The rich plantations formerly depended upon rainfall for irrigation; but in 1905 and 1906 they became independent of this more or less sporadic source by constructing the Kohala Ditch on the order of those of Maui and Kauai. The indefatigable M. M. O’Shaughnessy was chief engineer of this nine miles of tunnel-building and fourteen of open waterway, that supplies five plantations. He was assisted by Jorgen Jorgensen, whose own remarkable Waiahole Tunnel and ditch on Oahu, aggregating nearly 19,000 feet, we had seen; and P. W. P. Bluett, whom we visited at Puuhue following our stay at Kahua.

Mr. Bluett took us horseback up the mountain to show us this Kohala Ditch, and also the second great engineering feat, of his own designing and supervision, the Kehena Ditch, consisting of fourteen miles of tunnel and ditch line, some of it through rank jungly swampland. This ditch supplements the Kohala viaduct by conserving storm-waters which had heretofore been wasted. Along the Kehena we rode at an elevation of thousands of feet, through some of the most gorgeous country of the whole Territory of Hawaii, culminating in that of the valley Honokane Nui, into which we peered while our host described the perilous building of a trail we could see scratched oh the almost perpendicular wooded side of the great gulch, this being the line of communication for the O’Shaughnessy system.

Jack, with his unquestionable love of natural beauty, was ever impressed with man’s lordly harnessing of the outlaw, Nature, leading her by the mouth to perform his work upon earth.

“Do you get the splendid romance of it?” he would say. “Look what these engineers have done—reaching out their hands and gathering and diverting the storm wastage of streams over the edge of this valley thousands of feet here in the clouds.

“Look what man has accomplished, and he isn’t shouting very loud about it, either. Do you remember Jorgensen, what a modest, unassuming fellow he was?—and Peter Bluett here—look at him: Anglo-Saxon, big, strong, efficient—you have to draw out such men to learn what they’ve done in making the world a better place to live in.... And yet,” he would lapse sadly, “just such men are devoting their brains to producing destructive machinery for making anarchical chaos out of Europe, where there should be only constructive work ... all because a crazy kaiser and his lot want a place in the sun, and the whole earth to boot, and the rest of the earth objects.”

The story of this Ranch alone, and the old headquarters, Puuhue, of its original owner, James Woods, an Englishman who married a sister of Colonel Sam Parker, is inextricably woven with the golden age of the Parker Ranch. Puuhue is a house of connected as well as detached houses, strung over a terraced green court high-hedged from the Trades and shaded by fine trees. The whole premises are a-whisper with gentle ghosts of the past.

Again is the compulsion strong within me to expatiate upon the place of our blissful tarrying; but my book would needs start a yard-shelf of books—none too long to do the subject justice—were I to let pen stray among the unwritten stories that Mary Low’s active memory, impelled by her untrained sense of artistry, spun for us on the way to and from charming social functions given by the hospitable dwellers of the English countryside, from Kahua and Puuhue to Kohala and beyond.

There was an afternoon in an entrancing British garden on a Hawaiian hillside. And once, after tea in a quaint garden lanai past Kohala, on the beautiful Niulii Plantation, its little gulches choked with ferns and blossoming ginger, we were taken to inspect a less modern ditch, tunnel and all, that still irrigates a large tract of taro—another striking ebullition of the constructive genius of Kamehameha.

There is a prehistoric chart, eloquent of long-forgotten affairs of men, laid upon the long incline of the Woods Ranch. It resembles the map of a vast scheme of town-lots, the rocks, overgrown with green, windrowed into age-leveled partitions. An explanation which has been offered is that this was not a continuously inhabited district, but the chance halting place of chiefs, who, ever migrating with their retainers, were wont to settle down for months and even years, raising their produce as well as depending upon the commoners of the invaded soil. These miles-broad checkerboards of windrowed stones are also to be seen in Kona and Waianea, both sections being, like this portion of Kohala, more or less dry in certain seasons, where sweet potatoes were of old the principal crops, growing abundantly in the wetter months.

This location was the point at which Kamehameha I from time to time converged his great armies, for the invasion of Maui, Molokai, and Oahu. Several years, for example, were consumed in assembling his legion of 18,000 fighting men and a fleet of war canoes to transport them to the conquest of Oahu alone. It is likely that many of these troops practically supported themselves in and around this area, which would account for the large operations in rock-gathering that fenced and divided their myriad plots.

“And they, too, whispered to their loves that life was sweet—and passed,” Jack would muse upon their disappearance from the face of the earth; “and we, too, shall pass, as they passed, from the land they loved.”

Mr. Woods lent me a chestnut horse that had been in training for his wife, absent in Honolulu. She had not yet seen her husband’s surprise gift, and I was the first woman to ride the splendid creature, while the Hawaiian cowboys who had broken him stood about waiting for whatever might happen. For be it known that Eva and Frank Woods are notable specimens of Polynesian “physical aristocracy,” despite their slight Hawaiian blood; and this animal, his dam a cow-pony and his sire a thoroughbred race-horse belonging to Prince Cupid, had been chosen for size and power to carry his Amazonian mistress about the mountain ranch, and trained by heavy men. Little was he held down to the springy earth by my light weight, and we spent much time in mid-air, for he touched ground as seldom as possible in his leaping uphill or down, over the high lush grasses, as if conquering a never ending succession of hurdles. This is a paradise for one who rides.

It was from Mahukona, after a luau, that our truly royal progress around the royal island came to its end. Laden with the leis of our friends, we embarked in boats for the Mauna Kea anchored outside the bight. And while the steamer edged along the southerly coast before squaring for Oahu, stopping off several familiar landings, over again we lived what Jack vowed were six of the happiest weeks he had ever spent in the Islands.

Back at Waikiki, the spreading bungalow seemed home indeed, with our own servants, always adoring of Jack, smiling welcome from the wide lanai.

“Almost do we feel ourselves kamaaina, Mate Woman,” he would say, arm about my shoulders, while we greeted or sped Honolulu guests, or watched, beyond the Tyrian dyes of the reef, smoke of liners that brought to us visitors from the Coast. “Only, never forget—it is not for us to say.”

One thing that earned Jack London his kamaainaship was his activity for the Pan-Pacific Club, with its “Hands Around the Pacific” movement. Under the algarobas at Pearl Harbor, in 1907, one day he and Alexander Hume Ford had discussed socialism—upon Ford’s initiative. “Well,” the latter concluded, “I can’t ‘see’ your socialism. My idea is, to find out what people want, help them to it, then make them do what you wish them to do; and if it is right, they will do it—if you keep right after them!... Now, I’m soon leaving for Australia and around the Pacific at my own expense, to see if there is a way to get the peoples to work together for one another and for the Pacific.”

“That’s socialism—look out!” Jack contentedly blew rings into the still air.

“I don’t care if it is,” retorted his friend. “That won’t stop me. Walter Frear has just been appointed Governor of Hawaii, and I’ve interested him, and carry an official letter with me. Hawaii, with her mixture of Pacific races, yet with no race problems, should be the country to take the lead. I’m going to call a Pan-Pacific Convention here.”

“Go to it, Ford, and I’ll help all I can,” Jack approved.

“All right, then,” the other snapped him up. “Address the University Club next week!”

“Sure I will, and glad to, though you know how I despise public speaking.” And Jack kept his pledge, while Mr. Ford was presently off on his mission to Australasia.

On the day of our return from California to Honolulu in 1915, while helping us find a house at Waikiki, Ford recounted the expansion of his venture, which he declared needed only Jack’s further co-operation to carry it through to success. “It’s big, I tell you; it’s big!” Weekly dinners were given by Ford in the lanai of the Outrigger Club, at which occasion there were present a score of the leading Hawaiians, or Chinese, or Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, or Portuguese, to exchange ideas with the leading white men who were behind the movement. The speeches and discussions were of vital interest, all bent toward bringing about a working in unison for the mutual benefit of Pacific nations.

Out of these affairs sprang up interesting friendships between ourselves and these foreigners and their families, resulting in social functions in our respective homes and at the foreign clubs, and also at the Japanese theaters. Would that all the international differences of the Union might be handled as harmoniously as they are in Hawaii. During that sojourn in Honolulu, more than one Japanese father assured us: “My sons were born under your flag. I should expect them to fight under your flag if need arose.”

One evening, at the Outrigger Club, Jack spoke the Pan-Pacific doctrine before the Congressional visitors and three hundred representatives of the various nationalities in Hawaii, all of whom responded enthusiastically through their orators. One of our friends, Mr. S. Sheba, of the Japanese paper, Hawaii Shimpo, and an early director in the Pan-Pacific Union, has since bought the Japan Times, an English daily in Tokyo, and placed in charge a former American editor of Honolulu. Another American editor of Hawaii is connected with the Transpacific Magazine in Tokyo, and is also on the staff of the Japan Advertiser. An ex-Honolulu newspaperman owns a daily in Manila, while in Shanghai several Hawaii-Americans do their bit for Pan-Pacific sentiment by their editorial writings.

While the rest of the world writhes and struggles, Hawaii forges ahead, using its best brains to further the means of international peace; and the Pan-Pacific Union grows apace. It is incorporated as an international body of trustees, the consuls in Honolulu from all Pacific lands are on its board of management, and the heads of all Pacific governments, from President Harding to the king of Siam, are among its officers and active workers. Among its branches may be named those in Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines; and the zeal of its members is steadily creating new branches. Its first official housing was in the University Club, in the room where Jack London first spoke to its nucleus. And in this room, on Balboa Day, 1917, Finn Haakon Frolich’s bust of Jack London, modeled from life in 1915, was unveiled; while at Waikiki, beneath the date palm that marks the site of our brown tent-cottage, a Jack London Memorial drinking-fountain is talked of. Although Alexander Hume Ford was the discoverer of this new Pacific, and founder of the movement whose name now rings from shore to shore around the Western Ocean, humbly he insists that without his friend’s help and moral support it would have been a longer, stronger pull to bring about the present situation. Which is:

That Honolulu, Oahu, Territory of Hawaii, at the very crossroads of the Pacific, has become what might be called the racial experiment station of the Western Hemisphere. In place of the weekly pan-race luncheons established years ago by Mr. Ford and Mr. Thurston, to further co-operation to the common weal of all countries represented, and that of the adoptive one Hawaii, now monthly dinners are attended by leaders of the Chinese, Japanese, and American races, twelve picked men from each, comprising editors, consuls, and other officials of the Territory. The discussions are understood not to be for publication, and therefore are of a freedom and frankness, to quote Lorrin A. Thurston, never before experienced. One triumphant consequence of this policy of uninterrupted conference was a settling, by the Japanese themselves, of the delicate and long-troublesome question of the Japanese language-schools in Hawaii. After one of these Pan-Pacific Union meetings, they drew up a bill which was introduced into the legislature and has become a law.

Another burning topic touched upon has been the treatment of citizens of Oriental parentage born under the Stars and Stripes, who are Americans. Wise adjustment of the relations among the many peoples whose territory margins the Pacific is a task for statesmen, nay, for seers. The attitude of the Union is that recognition of reciprocal rights and duties toward one’s alien neighbor, and a general desire on the part of the rank and file of different nationalities to live in harmony, will accomplish wonders. The Pan-Pacific Union and the Y. M. C. A. of Hawaii are fostering a movement to make the passport of an American worth one hundred per cent of its face value regardless of the slant of a man’s eyes or the color of his skin; to devise methods, by amendments of laws, regulations or instructions, as may be found expedient, and to make sure of enactment, of securing to American citizens of Oriental descent the same rights and privileges enjoyed by other citizens, and protect them, when traveling, from unreasonable technical delays and annoyances from officials, such as have been suffered by known characters, of proven loyalty and good business and social standing; to become familiar with our laws and those of other countries, for the purpose of enabling naturalized citizens of the United States, and those of American birth but foreign ancestry, to free themselves from the claims of the governments to whom they or their fathers owed allegiance, and establish their status as American citizens; to devise means to prevent the language press from aggravating racial antipathy, but rather to promote harmony and Americanization of aliens and citizens of alien descent; to organize evening schools for adults, for education in English, in Americanization, and general knowledge; to seek the remedying of living conditions in tenement houses, and improving of the surroundings of the rising generation in their individual homes; to create children’s playgrounds.

Aside from the humanitarian aspect of these intentions, to quote from a report of the Committee of Nine, of which Mr. Thurston is chairman, “public policy demands that we bind these citizens to us and encourage their loyalty and co-operation in the solution of the many puzzling problems that face us, for which task they are peculiarly fitted. They are not subjects for ‘Americanization,’ They are already American by birth, by law, by inclination, by sentiment, by residence, by service, by participation in the burdens and responsibilities incident to American citizenship.... Our fellow citizens of Oriental descent proved during the late war to be as loyal and patriotic in all respects as those of other race origin in service in the army, participation in Red Cross and other services and contributions. We then freely accepted their services and contributions and voluntarily recognized their loyalty to the government and their value to the community. To discriminate now against them in any manner, upon the sole ground of their race or their ancestors, is ungrateful, contrary to basic American principles of justice and fair play; humiliating alike to the subjects of the discrimination and to other American citizens who feel that American honor is thereby being impugned.”

But the Union branches out from this direct drive to promote a mutually beneficial inter-racial amity. There is, for instance, the Pan-Pacific Scientific Council, an outgrowth of the first conference in Honolulu in August, 1920. This was called by the Union, and made possible by Mr. A. H. Ford, who secured a territorial appropriation of $10,000, then a Congressional appropriation from Washington of $9,000, and, next, appropriations from Australia, New Zealand, and China. The Pan-Pacific conference headquarters, through the courtesy of Governor C. J. McCarthy, are the throne room and senate chamber of the Executive building, the Iolani Palace of the monarchy. Two or three times a year, Pan-Pacific conferences of some sort are held there.

These conferences, the resolute dream of Mr. Ford, have been materialized by the aid of Director Herbert E. Gregory, of the Bishop Museum, who, with a few co-workers, organized the Conference body, and sent out over a hundred invitations to prominent scientists and research institutions, for delegates to consider the desirability, and ways and means, for exploration of the Pacific area on lines of Anthropology, Biology, Botany, Entomology, Geography, Meteorology, Seismology and Volcanology, and allied subjects. Some of the main purposes of the Scientific Research Council are: To organize, create and conduct an institute of learning that will gather and disseminate information of a scientific character; acting for and co-operating with the Pan-Pacific Union in conducting its scientific conferences. To correspond with scientific bodies throughout the world, but more particularly with those interested in the solution of the scientific problems connected with the Pacific region. To co-operate at all times with the Union in obtaining from the legislature, and commercial bodies, as well as from individuals, appropriations and funds necessary for carrying on the scientific research approved by the Union.

The call to the first conference was responded to in person by ninety-six delegates, scientists all, hailing from the United States, British Columbia, Australia’s various provinces, China, Japan, England, Philippines, Samoa, New Zealand, Tahiti, and other remote quarters. Such scientific Conferences are to be followed by others. It is considered that the next gathering should be on a far broader basis than the first, which was but preliminary to the series the Pan-Pacific Union pledged itself to call. Each class of scientific men now desires a section under its direction—the agriculturists, the medical brothers, the entomologists, and so through the roster.

That the activities of the Pan-Pacific Union have not been hid under a bushel by her publicity agents, is seen by the fact that the state department, represented by Dr. P. P. Claxton, U. S. Commissioner of Education, awakening to the importance of Hawaii as the central information outpost at the crossroads of the Pacific, has co-operated with the Secretary of the Interior, Thomas Barton Payne, in preparing the program for a great Pan-Pacific Educators’ Congress at Honolulu in August, 1921, and issuing a summons thereto to more than a score of countries encircling the globe. The scope of interests for the attention of such a Pan-Pacific educational Congress are best indicated by certain tentative questions suggested by the state department, such as:

What are the outstanding educational problems of each country?

What should be the ideals of education in each country?

(a) As to preparation for citizenship?

(b) As to preparation for the vocations?

How are these ideals affected by forms of government and by the social ideals of the respective countries? How affected by geographical conditions, including natural resources?

What elements should be included in the education of these countries to serve international relations?

(a) Commercial relations.

(b) Political relations.

What is taught in the schools of each country in regard to the other countries of the group—as to resources, industries, commerce, people, civilization, ideals, government, etc.?

(a) What does a child know about these matters at the end of the elementary school period? At the end of the high school period? At the end of the college period?

(b) What attitude of mind toward the other countries will the child have as a result?

By what means may the schools and other educational agencies assure the continuity and still further strengthen the cordial relations existing among the countries of this group?

The adult element is taken account of with regard to the extension of education through community activities and otherwise; also looking toward research from the standpoint of practical results in agriculture, home-making, industry, commerce, and so forth.

That the purely commercial consideration is not lacking in the schemes of the Pan-Pacific leaders, is borne out by plans which enlisted the interest of Franklin K. Lane, first honorary vice-president of the Union, in a Commercial Conference at Honolulu. “Good fortune to you, brave man of big visions,” he wrote, shortly before his death, to Alexander Hume Ford, whose official status is that of secretary-director. “What an interest there is now in the South Seas,” Mr. Lane goes on. “Never before have I seen anything like it. Get people to your islands—boat service—that’s all you need. Then they will become the focus of Pacific progress.” And in furtherance of publicity for the manifold ambitions of the Pan-Pacific Union, a mammoth Press Conference has been called, as a department of the Press Congress of the world. In fact, that World Congress, representing forty nations, convened at Honolulu in the autumn of 1921.

One tangible result of the Scientific Conference has been that every state bordering the vast bowl of the Pacific has been aroused to the conserving and furthering of the world supply of sea-food. This means the stimulation of the fishery scientists to resume a definite study of the migrations and habits of fish, that they may in turn counsel the various governments what laws should be enacted for the protection of young food fish, looking toward supplying the world. The establishment of fish universities has become a hope of the Pan-Pacific group; in fact, there is already an institution in Seattle along these lines. And a merchant prince of Osaka, Japan, Hirabayashi by name, has offered to found and finance an extensive educational plant in a peninsula park on the Inland Sea. It is to include an aquarium, a library on Pacific Research, a laboratory for the observing of fish culture, a building to house students, and all other departments consonant with the purpose of such an establishment, from which will be sent out scientists to garner knowledge of fish and their habits, as well as the methods of fishing, canning, and distribution pursued by different lands.

It sometimes happens that government appropriations to the Pan-Pacific Union are in blanket form, the Union to appropriate the funds to cover expenses of either educational or commercial conferences, the scientific coming under the latter head, though scientists may be invited to attend the commercial councils. And at the Legislative Pan-Pacific conference, those scientists who are familiar with the depredations in Pacific waters by unscientific commercial fishermen, may be sure of warm welcome; for the various conferences are fashioned to overlap and co-operate as much as possible one with another. It is prophesied that the sages of the Pan-Pacific Union will not rest until they have set in operation international fishery laws for the whole Pacific area.

The Union was for a time at home in that white caravansary dear to many a by-gone voyager to Honolulu and beyond, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, with its shaded spaciousness and its flying balconies. But it has now come to rest at the Alexander Young Hotel, while plans are in progress for the erection of a great Pan-Pacific Palace that will house the commercial and art exhibits that are now being collected from every Pacific land. Here will convene the Conference; and the scope of the building includes an open air Greek theatre to seat five thousand.

Professor Pitkin of Columbia University has urged the Union to summon a conference of heads of Pacific governments, to consider the formation of a Pan-Pacific League of Nations. President Warren G. Harding, in his letter of acceptance as an Honorary President of the Pan-Pacific Union, cautions a gentle approach to this subject. He writes:

“I feel the policy of the Union should be one of proceeding for the time being in an unofficial fashion.... as a wise one. I should hope that in due time such an organization might secure the co-operation and support of the governments which have interests in the Pacific; for I can realize that it has possibilities of very great usefulness.”

President Harding has been invited to attend one of the Conferences this summer of 1921. “Why not make Honolulu the summer capital of the United States?” the Pan-Pacific heads propose. Indeed, their boundless ambition points out that it is the logical National Capital. For Honolulu in truth lies halfway between Maine and Manila; half-way between Alaska and Samoa. It is literally the central city of the United States of America, as it is of the Pacific Ocean, tributary to which dwell two-thirds of the population of the globe!

Why not?

Amongst the many social events we attended, that are the life of the Island metropolis, there were days and nights when we met Prince Cupid and our First Princess, at Sam Parker’s. The old Colonel’s devoted girls, Eva Woods and Helen Widemann, entertained informally, and we saw the gallant spendthrift host of other days failing, failing.... It was the year before, one of the last days he ever left the house, that in our Beach Walk cottage we had Colonel Parker for luncheon, together with his life-long friend, that good Bohemian and gentleman, Frank Unger, both old comrades, since dead. The two wore about their Panama hats orange leis of ilima, now so rarely seen in these days of careless paper imitations, which they presented to Jack and me. And it is these cherished garlands of wilted flower-gold that now wreathe their friend’s ashes in the Valley of the Moon.

A fine gentleman was Colonel Samuel (Kamuela) Parker, if ever I saw one—courtly in manner yet bearing himself with that careless, debonair sweetness we so rarely have the privilege of knowing. He combined all the geniality and large-heartedness of his double heritage. He died on March 19, 1920. Less than a week before, he had pressed my hand in farewell.

The seven days in which the body lay in his house in Kapiolani Park, where he had peacefully slipped into unconsciousness, was characteristic of the stately observance attending Hawaii’s distinguished dead. The spacious living-room was banked with orchids and roses, its walls entirely covered with the floral tribute. Four-hour watches, by daylight and dark, were kept by members of the Chiefs of Hawaii, who first sent the Tabu Stick of deep yellow chrysanthemums to stand at the head of the bier. At the foot hung the faithful replica of a feather cape, made of the same royal-hued blossoms, with a pattern traced in blood-red carnations.

For one night, in regal splendor of real yellow-feather mantle, Ahuala, and feather-lei upon her blue-black hair, there sat Princess David (Abigail) Kawananakoa, a picture of mourning, at the head of her friend’s coffin. Behind her was a young Hawaiian maiden; and to right and left two helmeted Warriors, each with upright spear in hand, stood motionless. Between these and two similar impressive figures at the foot of the dead chief, were ranged on either side in full regalia the highest in rank of the Daughters of Warriors.

Certain ancient men and women, with rigid discipline in the matter of chiefly precedence, maintained the ceremonial of that splendidly somber week of honor to the alii. The music, chanted, or played upon ukulele and guitar, that wove softly into the spirit of the occasion, was mostly old meles of the days of the monarchy.

In high contrast to these traditional rites was one day of service by the Church of Christ, Scientist, in whose faith this man had gone to sleep. His Masonic Chapter also held its ceremony.

Colonel Parker’s body was taken “home” to Mana on the Parker Ranch. There, beneath the cypresses of the quaint family graveyard, his casket, swathed in the choicest blooms that grow, was laid in the vault with his first wife, Panana, and their daughter, Hattie.

So ended one of the monarchy’s most picturesque careers—that of a man once accounted remarkable by those of more than many countries, for his extraordinary good fellowship, the gracious kindliness of his heart, and his grandeur of physique and address.

A little story, and I am done. It is too gentle a thing, too simple and illuminating of the past and present of Polynesia and all mankind, to lay aside with the countless notes no book of reasonable length can encompass. It comes to me through one who accompanied the funeral party, composed of representatives from the different branches of the Parker family, from Honolulu to Mahukona on Hawaii. There they disembarked with the coffin, en route to Mana.

The passage through Oahu channel and Molokai channel was extremely rough, and the Mauna Kea “labored woundily.” The woman fell asleep, and dreamed that she saw Kahaleahu, once valet to Sam Parker; a cultured Hawaiian who had traveled about the world with the Colonel, and who, when the young folk of Parker Ranch had their vacations from school in Honolulu, would be dispatched to escort them home to Mana. The dreamer addressed Kahaleahu:

“Ino maoli ke kai!” (The sea is so rough!)

Kahaleahu replied:

“It will be calm in a little while, for the guide of the night is the mother of the Boy.”

Awakening, in Hawaiian she told her cabin-mate the dream. “But it was a vision, a sign,” she believes. “Do you not see?—Kilia, a chieftess of Hana, Maui, Sam Parker’s mother, was lost in the channel between Hawaii and Maui. She had come from Hana in a canoe, to marry Sam’s father, Eben Parker, at Kawaihae; and when she was old, in her was a great longing to see again her old home in Hana, and her people. And she must go in a canoe, as she had come forty years before. She set out in the canoe, and was never heard from.... She was guide of that night, and sent Kahaleahu to give me the sign that The Boy, ka keiki, her boy, should come safely ashore at Mahukona.”

Now Sam Parker to his retainers had never been Sam (Kamuela), in the usual native way, but was always referred to as ka keiki, The Boy—even at forty years and over; that being, in their etiquette, a mark of attention to superior birth.

To the prophecy of the vision: The Mauna Kea’s pitching and rolling began speedily to abate, and in due course she came to anchor off Lahaina in an unrippled calm, to send ashore and take aboard passengers and freight. This calm, under a cloudless sky, continued clear to Mahukona, where the landing from ship’s boats is habitually made difficult by a heavy swell, and passengers must watch their chance to avoid a ducking when leaping from boat to jetty. Never, in all the dreamer’s interisland voyaging, girl and woman, had she known the water of this open roadstead so like a millpond. It was a sign.

Up the long acclivity, at Kahua, Frank Woods had a great fire burning, and fine mats spread to receive the casket of his father-in-law; while in another room an abundant feast of “funeral baked meats” was spread—pig, and fowl, and fish, and all that goes therewith in this goodly land. After partaking of it, the mourners sat out the night, amongst the flowers, with their dead; and with the morning started upon the day-long journey over Kohala’s mountains to Waimea, on up Mauna Kea’s giant flank to Mana and the house of death.

“It was a vision, not a dream,” they believe. And why not? “Sam died,” they say, “on the anniversary of the birth of Panana, his youth’s bride. And was not that nineteenth day of March also the anniversary of the death of their first daughter?”

What would you?

There were times when we twain were included in affairs that were solely Hawaiian except for the few who had married into the families—as at Charles W. Booth’s beautiful house, Halewa, one night in Pauoa Valley. There a hundred sat down to a great banquet, with a dance to follow in the vine-screened lanai to music from instruments invisible in the fragrant shrubbery; from which one could see up the valley the hundreds of tended acres that were as a back-garden of the estate. Mrs. Booth, herself part Hawaiian, and daughter of a Maui chief, let us roam about the absorbing apartments, each a veritable museum of treasure trove inherited from her aunt, Malie Kahai, a celebrated beauty—feather leis, tapas, calabashes, finest of mats, and, prize of all, a feather cape that had belonged to her princely father. Some of the furniture had come from the palace of the king and from Queen Emma’s residence. Here we met Stella Keomailani, Mrs. Kea, “Stella” to her intimates, last living descendant of the high chiefs of the Poohoolewaikala line—a sort of royal Hawaiian clan descended from kings. Blue-blooded pure Hawaiian, she is a remarkable type—tall, slender with brown hair and hazel eyes and a skin as of ivory washed with pale gold. On her father’s side she is cousin to Queen Emma, and one of the heirs mentioned in the Queen’s will.

But there—to mention all who blessed us with their friendship would be almost to quote our Honolulu telephone directory, which hangs now at my elbow, with its markings desolately reminiscent of the roof under which Jack London dwelt those seven months on Kalia Road.

Eager for the criticism of Honoluluans upon certain stories he Was writing at this period, “On the Makaloa Mat,” “The Water Baby,” “When Alice Told Her Soul,” “The Bones of Kahekili,” Jack often had me telephoning for a party to come for luncheon or drop around for tea under the hau, for the reading, with a swim to follow. Other new stories he wrote and read aloud—“The Kanaka Surf,” “The Message,” “The Princess,” and “Like Argus of the Ancient Times.” With the exception of “The Kanaka Surf,” which was a haole tale placed in Honolulu, none of these latter are Hawaiian fiction. The next novel he contemplated settling down to was to bear the title of “Cherry”—a Japanese heroine with an Islands setting and a potent racial motif. And this work, “Cherry,” was the broken thing he left behind when he died on November 22.

One morning Jack was obliged to have me call in Doctors Herbert and Walters, for he had been seized with the agonies of kidney stone. Shortly before, he had been very ill all night, as if from ptomaine poisoning. “Don’t worry,” he would usually brush aside attempts to diagnose or to call in medical advice. “It will pass—look at me: I am in good weight, and shall live many happy years, my dear.” But there was that in his face which brought me white nights, and caused his friends to ask, “What ails Jack? He looks well enough, but there’s something about him... his eyes...”

And so the gay wheel turned in Honolulu, as the golden days and star-blue nights came and went. And yet, for all Jack courted more or less excitement—I quote from my pocket diary, and the date is June 14, 1916: “Mate said to-night that this has been the happiest day he ever spent in the Islands. And what did he do? Write, read me what he had composed; and we lunched and dined conjugally alone together, with a little swim in between whiles; and in the evening he read to me from George Sterling’s latest book of poems, ‘The Caged Eagle,’ just received from George, and broke down in the reading before the deathless beauty of the poem called ‘In Autumn.’”

Before we sailed for home, which was on July 26, that Jack might attend the Bohemian Jinks, we put our heads together with Mary Low’s for the planning of a luau, just before our departure, under our own roof and hau tree for our own Hawaiian friends, with a night of dancing and music and cards to follow. The only haoles to be bidden were their close connections. Forty they sat at the great board that was entirely covered with deep layers first of ti-leaves and then ferns, strewn with flowers and fruit of every description, native and imported. It was a feast served by Hawaiian women whose business it was to see that every detail was in the most approved native fashion.

To Mary Low must be given the praise for the success of this occasion, for under her superintendence it was produced. And upon her unerring wisdom and tact the place-cards, bearing embossed the royal coat-of-arms of Hawaii, were laid. The ends of the enormous table were seated in this wise: Jack center, with Princess Cupid to his right, and Mrs. Stella Kea left. Myself at opposite end, with Prince Cupid on my right, and Mayor Lane at my other side, while his wife, Alice, sat at the Prince’s right—she of the beautiful hands that are her husband’s pride, exquisitely modeled by a mother’s early manipulation, lomilomi, after the charming Hawaiian practise. A characteristic of many well-born Hawaiians is the straight, high back-head; and the mothers here, as with the hands, have exercised their patient modeling. Full thighs were also deemed a mark of superior beauty, and much attention was given to massaging and developing the limbs of the young wahines.

Our friends will not, I am sure, be offended if I mention a laughable incident that all took in jovial good part. Next the Princess, Senator “Bob” Shingle, best of toastmasters, had concluded his opening speech, and sat down amidst hearty applause. But his sitting was not of a permanence that was to be expected, being in fact an entire disappearance to those at my end of the long table, and alarm widened the eyes of Muriel, his wife, sister to Princess David Kawananakoa. Alack, the floor of the aged lanai had not upborne such weight of Polynesian aristocracy these many years, and the hind-legs of even this medium-sized haole’s chair had gone incontinently through the rotten planking.

Hardly had the bubble of merriment subsided when, to my speechless horror, Prince Cupid vanished from my side in a clean back-somersault. He was on his nimble feet almost before he struck the sand nearly a foot below the lanai-level—not for nothing had he learned football tactics in his university days. His good-natured mirth put all at ease, and the alert nervousness of Senator Charles Chillingworth and others of his stature and avoirdupois called forth much funning. There were fortunately no more accidents, and the speech-making in appreciation of Jack and his services to Hawaii was gratifying in the extreme.

I can see Jack now, as he rose, all in white save for his black soft tie, hesitating half-diffidently with the fingers of one hand absently caressing the flowers on the ti-leaves, before lifting his eyes, black-blue and misted with feeling. At first his voice, low and clear, shook slightly, but gathered, with his beautiful, Greek face, a solemnity that increased as he spoke his heart to these people among whom he loved to dwell.

Secondarily to the pure aloha motive of this luau, we had assembled our friends for the christening of the Jack London Hula, chanted stanza by stanza, each repeated by Ernest Kaai and his perfect Hawaiian singers with their instruments. Mary Low was the mother of this mélé, for in her fertile brain was conceived the idea of immortalizing, for Hawaii, Jack London himself and more specifically his progress around the Big Isle of Mounts, as was done for the chiefs of old by their bards and minstrels.

The Hawaiian woman best fitted, in Mary’s judgment, to recite the saga, was Rosalie (Lokalia) Blais-dell, who had helped in the versifying; and all Lokalia asked in return for the long evening’s effort, which with lofty sweetness she assured us was her honor and pleasure, was a copy each of Jack’s “Cruise” and my “Log” of the Snark.

Thus, during the eating of the hundred and one tropic delicacies that a swarm of pretty girls prepared and served from the kitchen, never was the gayety so robust that it did not silence instantly when Lokalia’s voice rose intoning above the lilting wash of reef waters against the sea wall thirty feet away, followed by the succession of Kaai’s lovely music to the mele. Each long stanza, carrying an incident of the progress around Hawaii and those who welcomed Jack, closed with two lines:

“Hainaia mai ana ka puana,

No Keaka Lakana neia inoa.”

“This song is then echoed,

’Tis in honor of Jack London.”

Listened critically all those qualified to judge, and now and again a low “Good,” or “Perfect,” or “Couldn’t be better, Mary,” or “All honor to Mary Kipikane!” would be forthcoming from Prince or Mayor or Senator. And there was in the mélé a swaying Spanish dance song for Lakana Wahine—Kaikilani Poloku, which is myself; for kind hearts gave me that name of a beloved queen of the long gone years, whose meaning is passing sweet to me.

Laden to the eyes with no false leis by the hands of Hawaii, we looked down from the high steamer deck into the upturned faces of the people of our Aloha Land, standing ankle-deep in flowers and serpentine. The Matsonia cast off hawsers, and, moving ahead majestical-slow, parted the veil of serpentine and flowers woven from her every deck to the quay.

“Of all lands of joy and beauty under the sun...” Jack began, the words trailing into eloquent silence. He had approached Hawaii with gifts of candor and affection in hands, and eyes, and lips. And real Hawaii, impermeable to meanness or harboring of grudge over franknesses that had but voiced a grave interest in her, has been the greater giver, in that she granted him the joy and satisfaction of realizing that they had not known each other in vain.