April 19, 1916.
Pearl Harbor, Oahu,
Territory of Hawaii,
Tuesday, May 21.
Come tread with me a little space of Paradise. Many pleasant acres have I trod hitherto, but never an acre like this. It is so beautiful and restful and green. Green upon green. With blue-depthed shadows imposed from green-depthed foliage of great trees upon thick deep lawn that cushions underfoot. Bare foot. For one somehow dissociates the idea of footwear with an acre of Elysium. It is one of the paradisal blessings of this new Sweet Home of ours that we may blissfully pace it unshod, and for the most part unobserved.
The street is a mere white, meandering, coral-powdered by-way; no thing less inquisitive than the birds abides in the adjoining garden, where a rustic dwelling shows but vaguely amidst a riot of foliage; and on our southern boundary is a tropic tangle of uninhabited wildwood, fronting upon a native fishpond—an elongated bit of bay inclosed by a low wall of masonry of such antiquity that no tradition of Hawaii can place its origin.
Bayward the outlook is a shadowy coral reef, swept by tepid pea-green tides; and to its outer rim extends a slender wooden jetty, at the end of which our ship’s boat can lie even at low tide.
An eighth of a mile beyond in the rippling chrysoprase flood of Pearl Harbor, “Dream Harbor” Jack loves to call it, swings our Boat of Dreams, our little Snark, anchored in the first port of call on her mission of pure golden adventure—a gallant foolishness, perhaps, but if we be fools, let us be gallant ones. Whenever my eyes come to rest on her shining shape, I feel them growing big with visions of the coming years on her deck; and then, remembering vivid incidents of the voyage, drift back to the present with a pleased sense of several laps of adventure already run. Not the least of these is mere living in a shady nook of Paradise where one’s eyes must quest twice in the green gloom among the big trees to discover, near the waterside, the habitation—a very small, very rustic, very simple brown bungalow of three rooms.
Already, in swimming suits, we have ventured the reef at high tide, with unbounded delight in the sun-washed liquid silk. Our goal for to-morrow is the yacht, as there is scant danger from man-eating sharks in this sheltered harbor.