I was abroad early one Sunday morning, headed for the Chinese section. Lost in thought, I went along, gazing on the ground. Had Charlie Chaplin's feet suddenly come into my range of vision I should not have been more surprised than I was when two tiny shoes, hardly bigger than those of a large-sized doll, and with some of that stiff, automatic movement of the species mechanicus, dissipated my reflections. I raised my eyes slowly, as when waking, up, up, up,—hem of skirt, knees, waist-line, flat bosom, narrow shoulders, sallow face, and slit eyes! A Chinese woman! She was as big as a fourteen-year-old girl, but her feet were a third of their due proportion. How many thousands of years of natural selection went into the making of those little feet? Yet she was a rare enough exception to astound my abstracted mind. About her strolled hundreds of others of her race, who would have given much of life to possess those two little feet.
MILES AWAY ROSE THE FUMES OF KILAUEA
During the day they were ashen and at night like rose dawn
THE LARGEST CAULDRON OF MOLTEN ROCK ON EARTH
Eight hundred feet below it seethed
Differences abound in Hawaii. The Chinese is no twin brother of the Japanese. In fact, there is probably as much relationship between the Hawaiian and the Japanese as there is between these two "Oriental" races. The major part of the Japanese being Malay and the Polynesian Hawaiians having at least lived with the Malays some hundreds of years ago and infused some of their Caucasic ingredients into them, there is more of "home-coming" when "Jap" meets "Poly," than when he meets "Chink." But notwithstanding proximity and propinquity, over which diplomatic letter-writers labor hard, when the Chinese and the Japanese and the Hawaiian come together, the Hawaiian "vanishes like dewdrops by the roadside," the Chinese jogs along, and the Japanese runs motor-cars and raises children. The Japanese obtrudes himself much more upon the life of the community than the other two races, but with no more relinquishment of his own ways. He drives the cars and he drives white men to more activity than they really enjoy. And the Hawaiian sells necklaces of luscious flowers under the shaded porticoes of the buildings along the waterfront.
Aside from the adoption of our trousers and coat and hat, and a few other unimportant aspects of our civilization, the observer on the streets of Honolulu sees no mingling of races. The only outward sign of this mixing is the Salvation Army. There, large as life, with the usual circular crowd about them, stood these soldiers of misfortune, praising the Lord in English. A row of unlimited Oriental offspring upon the curb; a few grown-ups on the walk; a converted Japanese who looked as though his Shinto father had disowned him; a self-conscious white boy who confessed to having been converted just recently; two indifferent-looking soldiers; a distrustful-looking leader and a hopeless-visaged white woman. Twenty feet away, a saloon. I wonder what the Salvation Army is going to do now that that object of attraction is no more.
Photo, Otto C. Gilmore
A RIVER OF ROCK POURING OUT INTO THE SEA