A Yankee in the Far East

by George Hoyt Allen

I snitched it from a folder put out by the Hawaiian Promotion Society

What I can't understand is, that there are only 191,000 inhabitants on these islands, with room for several times that many; and something over a billion in the rest of the world. I don't know why I'm not living here myself, and for the life of me I don't know why I leave them—my ultimate aim has been to get to Heaven.

I can only account for it on one theory: I own a house and lot and some land in Central New York, and I'm so busy shoveling snow outdoors and coal indoors from some time in November to some time in April, and during May and June getting some stuff started, hoping it won't get nipped by the late frosts, and working it along before September frost gets it—in the meantime saving it from more bugs than a fellow, if he saves his crop, can take time to learn the names of—what with hustling that stuff through between frosts and saving it from pests, and planning the while to be in shape to get some coal to keep from freezing to death the coming winter—a fellow tied up like that can't come to Hawaii to live. I suppose that billion or so who are not living in the Hawaiian Islands are all fixed in some such a way.

A fellow tied up that way can't come to the Hawaiian Islands to live

But I feel a little sore at that Hawaiian booster. He didn't tell about the fish they have here. There is an aquarium in Naples, Italy, said to be the finest in the world. I've been through that Naples aquarium several times, and it is a drab affair compared with the aquarium here at Honolulu. In the Honolulu aquarium may be seen fish of odd shapes and so brilliantly and beautifully colored that no artist could show these colors with paint and brush. There is the Humuhumu for instance. A fish six or seven inches long. It has bright green fins, and a stripe of jet black starting in a narrow band at the top of its back, broadening out diagonally around its body. On its side, set in the band of black, is a bright red spot. Rearwards of the black band its body is a bright red, and forward of the band the body is bright red shading off to white. Its tail is striped, red, yellow and black. Somewhat bass-shaped, its eyes are not in its head, but set on top of its back.

A man not knowing such a fish existed, if he were fishing in one of our ponds in New York State, if he should pull up a Humuhumu, he would stop fishing. He certainly would. And he wouldn't stop to land it, either. Just one look at that fish and he'd yell and drop fish, line and pole right back in the pond, and hunt up the chairman of the temperance movement in his town and sign the pledge.

Then there is the Lae-Nihi. A fish about eight inches long, all blue. You can't know how bright and beautiful blue can be until you see a Lae-Nihi swimming in the water. Dozens of other odd-shaped fish, wonderfully marked in brilliant variegated patterns, are in the aquarium.