At a big white hotel that night hundreds of people sat in a brilliantly lighted open-air garden with a stone floor and stone balustrade, and heard an Hawaiian band of many nationalities play the tunes of all nations, and two women give vent to that adaptation of the Methodist hymn that passes for an Hawaiian song.
Every possible human mixture of blood I had seen that day, I fancied, but of the morals that caused the mixture I will not speak, for the looseness of them is climatic and easily explained. I am told that after five or six years the molecules even in the granite of the New England character begin to get restless. Still there seems to be hope on the horizon.
At midnight a bibulous gentleman descended from a hack in front of the hotel.
"Roderick Random," he said to his Portuguese driver, "this is a bum-m town," spelling the word out thickly. Roderick smiled with polite acquiescence. The bibulous gentleman spoke likewise to the watchman at the door.
"Quite right, sir," said the watchman.
The elevator got the same blighting criticism from the visitor, whose good-night to the clerk at the desk still was:
"This is a bum-m town."
The clerk, too, agreed, and the man turned away in disgust.
"I can't get an argument out of anybody on that point," he said—all of which would seem to cast some doubt on the public late-at-night flaunting of vice in Honolulu.