"Now Nan is off," laughed Mary Lee. "You touch her in her tenderest spot when you offend her artistic or musical taste."
"Speaking of music," said Nan, not at all offended, "I want to hear the song of the fishermen. Mrs. Beaumont says it is very weird and interesting."
"And I want to go to a luau," Mary Lee declared.
"I think that may be possible," Miss Helen said, "for Mrs. Beaumont has promised to be on the lookout for any festivity which might interest us and will let us know."
"She was a true discovery," Nan went on. "I am so glad she happened to be on board our steamer. Those wreaths that the natives wear around their hats and necks they call leis. Isn't it a pretty fashion?"
"The flowers are really wonderful," said Mary Lee, "but oh, such commonplace looking shops, with canned things on the shelves just as at home. In such a summery, balmy climate I should think they could raise almost anything."
"So they could, but they don't," her aunt told her. "Everything almost, in the way of fruit particularly, is brought from the coast. Sugar is the great crop here. There are some coffee plantations, and rice is raised. Pineapples and bananas receive some attention, but the possibilities for cultivating other things seem to be unconsidered except by a very few."
"The natives eat poi," said Nan. "It must be horrid stuff from the description of it. It is made from a tough root something like a sweet potato. They mash it, or grind it up, mix it with water into a sort of paste, and sometimes they let it ferment before they dish it up in a calabash. Then the family sits around to eat this appetizing dish with their fingers. Mary Lee, how should you like to dine out with some of the Hawaiian gentry and be asked to join in a dip into the all-sufficing calabash with dried tentacles of an octopus as a dainty accompaniment?"
"Ugh!" Mary Lee looked disgusted.
Yet the next day when Mrs. Beaumont appeared to bear them all off to a luau they were all quite as eager to go as if they had not discussed poi to its disadvantage.