You! All whiteskins who would learn Ford’s rejuvenescent royal sport, take warning that the “particular star” which illumes our world, despite its insidiousness, is particularly ardent in Hawaiian skies.
Pearl Lochs, June 6.
Home in our Dream Harbor, after a full week away. The burning hours at Waikiki were beguiled with cool cloths and reading aloud, Jack taking his turn when I grew nervous with my own distressed cuticle and an aching ear from diving. Out of his grip of varied reading matter, he had selected Lilian Bell’s “The Under Side of Things”—I wonder if with reference to his fried-and-turned-over condition! A Bulletin reporter lightened a half hour in an interview upon our unplotted future around the globe, and told us that our erstwhile sailing master, leaving yesterday for the Coast on the Sierra, had given the impression that he considered the Snark unsafe.
“He built her!” was Jack’s only comment.
“And sailed over two thousand miles in her,” the newspaper man grinned.
On Tuesday, waiving all discussion, Jack got into his clothing, the operation (not an unappropriate word) accompanied by running commentary on things as they were, which would be both interesting and instructive in a biographical sense, did one dare the editorial censor. Neither of us was this day “admirin’ how the world was made,” and my widest sympathy was with his fevered sentiments concerning astronomy, geology, the starry hereafter, mid-Pacific watering places—and Alexander-Hume-Fords.
“But I warned you, and warned you!” fended poor Ford, suppressing a snicker as the fervid cripple, now on his feet, essayed a step or two. “And you’re luckier than I was the first time I got burned—worse than you are—and by mistake used capsicum vaseline!—And anyway, I really did think you had become toughened a bit on your month at sea.”
With stiff-crooked legs, for he could neither unbend nor further bend the knees, and feet pitched some twenty inches apart, Jack’s action was perforce unlike that of any known biped. So enamored did he become of the wonder of it that he insisted upon employing it to progress to the lanai for luncheon, where his most pitying acquaintances failed to keep back their mirth. Be assured he enjoyed it all as much as they, for the lessening hurt made him very happy. An hour face-downward on the beach that fateful afternoon had not improved my own carriage, but I was not unwilling to risk it on a short trip along Kalakaua Avenue to the Aquarium, which Jack, from his memories, had pronounced a world-wonder. In the cool many-roomed grotto, built of quarried lava, we forgot all earthly dole, spellbound before the incredible forms and colors of the sentient rainbows.
It is impossible to communicate an adequate idea of these color organisms. If an object could be laughably lovely, any one of these fish would serve; Striped Roman scarf effects showed behind the glass as if in a shop window display; polka-dot patterns in color schemes beyond imagining; against the crystal lay figured designs that manufacturers would make no mistake in copying. And all were possessed of an iridescent quality that made one expect them to melt into the shifting greens of their element, as they faded into the farther spaces of the tanks. But presently they would intensify, coming on larger and brighter like marine headlights in Elfland.
One fish was an aquatic bird-of-paradise for hues, with a long spine like an aigrette springing from midway of a body almost as round as a coin and not much larger, with golden-brown beak and bold black eye. His name was the kihi-kihi. The hinaleanukuiwi was a turquoise-blue, five-inch shuttle, terminating in a peacock-blue wisp of tail, with fins like ruffles tipped with stripes of yellow and black, and a long blue needle for beak. The fins back of and below its beaded eyes were tiny azure butterflies striped two ways with purple and gold; and on each side the turquoise body a splotch of opaque gold rested like a sunbeam. Around this bright blue marvel slowly wove one of magenta as vivid, and half as long, of familiar shape but with the bulging eye of a frog shaded by a thick ruby lid, two pale-pink fins shaped like center-boards, and a dorsal fin carrying five smartly raked masts.