The remaining month of my stay passed in peace and quietness. The need for my assistance was less after the expulsion of so many girls, but I remained in order that Miss G—— might take a short vacation and the rest she so much needed. During her absence Miss P—— and I carried on the school. A few days after the storm a little native boy brought to the seminary the shawl which had been washed from my shoulders the night I went through the river. He had found it lying on the beach half a mile below the ford. It had been washed out to sea and returned again by the waves. After that we called it "the travelled shawl." Every Monday morning the toot of the postman's horn was heard in the village, and one of us immediately went across to get the mail. The bridge being gone, we had to wade the river at the shallowest place, near the sea. When I waded across on such occasions I usually found on the opposite shore a group of half-naked little natives who drew near to watch with silent interest the process of buttoning my shoes with a button-hook. The whole school waded across to church on Sundays.
The population of the village, with the exception of two or three families, was composed of natives and half-whites of the lower class. Heathen superstition mingled with modern vice. In some instances men and women lived together without the ceremony of marriage. Beyond the village the cane-fields began, and beyond them, at the foot of the mountains, lived a better class of natives, moral and industrious. Here, too, were the cane-mills and the residences of the planters. I remember one pretty little cottage with walls of braided grass and wooden roof and floor, surrounded by cool, vine-shaded verandas. It stood in the middle of a cane-plantation, and was the home of an Englishman and his wife, both highly cultivated and genial, companionable people. He was a typical Englishman in appearance, stout and ruddy, and wore a blue flannel suit and the white head-covering worn by his countrymen in India. She was a graceful little creature with appealing dark eyes, and looked too frail to have ever borne hardship or cruelty, yet she had known little else all her early life. She had been left an orphan in England, and had been sent out to Australia to make her living as a governess. She was thrown among brutal, coarse-mannered people, and received harsh treatment and suffered many vicissitudes of fortune. Finally, her husband met and loved and married her, and lifted her out of that hard life into one which appeared by contrast a heaven of peace and kindness and affection. She often said frankly, "That was the happiest event of my life. I can never be thankful enough to him or love him enough. Sometimes I dream I am back again enduring that dreadful life in Australia, and when I wake and realize that I am here in our own little cottage, thousands of miles from Australia, I am freshly happy and grateful."
Near the foot of the mountains was a Catholic church and a school, round which a little village had grown up. The self-sacrificing efforts of the teachers have been productive of good among the natives, but there seems little hope of any co-operation between the Protestant missionaries and them.
When the time came for me to return to Honolulu, Miss P—— offered to accompany me, and suggested that instead of returning by the way I came we should take the longer way and complete the circuit of the island. As the road lay directly along the sea-coast the entire distance, there was no danger of our losing our way. Miss P—— rode Calico, the missionary steed, and I hired a white horse of Nakaniella (Nathaniel), one of the patrons of the school, choosing it in preference to a bay brought for my inspection the night before we started by a sullen-looking native from the village. When we had gone two or three miles on our way we heard the sound of furious galloping behind us, and looking back saw this native, with a face like a thunder-cloud, approaching us on his bay horse. Reaching us, he insisted on my dismounting and taking his horse, saying that I had promised to hire it the night before. Miss P——, being able to speak Hawaiian, answered for me without slackening our pace. She said, in reply to his demands, that the wahine haole had not promised to take his horse; that she would not pay him for his time and trouble in bringing over the horse that morning and riding after us; that he might ride all the way to Honolulu with us or go to law about the matter, both of which he threatened. Fuming with wrath, he rode along with us for a mile or two, breathing out threatenings and slaughter in vigorous Hawaiian: then, uttering the spiteful wish, "May your horses throw you and break your necks!" he turned and rode back toward Waialua.
We passed through the ruins of a once-populous village: stone walls bordered the road for a mile or more, and back of them were the stone foundations of native houses and heiaus (temples). Pandanus trees, with roots like stilts or props that lifted them two or three feet from the ground, grew inside the deserted enclosures: long grass waved from the chinks and crevices. It was a mournful reminder of the decay of the Hawaiian race. Just beyond the ruined village a sluggish creek flowed into the sea. At the mouth of the valley whence it issued stood two or three native huts. A man wearing a malo was up on the roof of one, thatching it with grass. Riding near, we hailed him and inquired about a quicksand which lay just ahead and which we must cross. He told us to avoid the makai side and keep to the mouka side. We followed his directions, and crossed in safety. For all practical purposes there are but two directions in the islands—mouka, meaning toward the mountains, and makai, toward the sea.
We rode all the forenoon over a level strip of grassy open country bordering the sea, with here and there a native hut near a clump of cocoanuts or a taro-patch. Toward noon we passed fenced pastures in which many horses were grazing, and came in sight of a picturesque cottage near the shore. Miss G—— had told us that on the lawn in front of this cottage were two curious old stone idols which had been discovered in a fish-pond, and we rode up to the gate intending to ask permission to enter and look at them. A Chinese servant let us in, and the owner, an Englishman who lived here during part of the year, came and showed us the idols, and then invited us inside his pretty cottage and gave us a lunch of bread and butter and guava jelly and oranges. The walls and ceilings were of native wood, of the kinds used in delicate cabinet-work and were polished until they shone. The floor was covered with fine straw matting, and around the room were ranged easy-chairs and sofas of willow and rattan. In one corner stood a piano in an ebony case, and on a koa-wood centre-table were a number of fine photographs and works of art. Hanging baskets filled with blooming plants hung in each window and in the veranda. Altogether, it was the prettiest hermitage imaginable.
Riding along that afternoon through a country much like that we had passed over in the morning, we heard from a native hut the sound of the mournful Hawaiian wail, "Auea! auea!" (pronounced like the word "away" long drawn out). To our inquiry if any one was dead within, a woman answered, "No, but that some friends had come from a distance on a visit." I have frequently seen two Hawaiian friends or relations who had not met for a long time express their emotions at seeing one another again, not by kissing and laughing and joyful exclamations, but by sitting down on the ground and wailing. Perhaps it was done in remembrance of their long separation and of the changes that had taken place during that time. The native mode of kissing consists in rubbing noses together.
Not far from this place we passed a Mormon settlement, a little colony sent out from Utah. The group of bare white buildings was some distance back from the road, and we did not stop to visit them. Near by was a hou-tree swamp, a spongy, marshy place where cattle were eating grass that grew under water. They would reach down until their ears were almost covered, take a mouthful and lift up their heads while they chewed it. Thus far on our journey there had been a level plain two or three miles wide between the sea and the mountains, but here the mountains came close down to the sea, leaving only a little strip of land along the beach. High, stern cliffs with strange profiles, such as a lion, a canoe and a gigantic hen on her nest, frowned upon us as we rode along their base. We passed a cold bubbling spring which had worn a large basin for itself in the rock. It had formerly been the bathing-place of a chief, and therefore taboo to the common people. In one of our gallops along the beach my stirrup-strap broke, and we stopped in front of a solitary hut to ask for a stout string. A squid was drying on a pole and scenting the air with its fishy odors. In answer to our call an old man in a calico shirt came out of the hut, and, taking some strips of hou-bark, twisted them into a strong string and fastened the stirrup. I gave him a real, and he exclaimed "Aloha!" with apparently as much surprise and delight as if we had enriched him for life.
We rode through a little village at the mouth of a beautiful green valley, forded a river that ran through it, and passing under more high cliffs came about four in the afternoon to Kahana, our stopping-place for the night. It was a little cluster of houses at the head of a bay or inlet of the sea, where the lovely transparent water was green as grass, and stood in the opening of a valley enclosed by high, steep mountain-walls, with sharp ridges down their sides clothed with rich forests. All around us grew delicate, luxuriant ferns, of which there are one hundred and fifty varieties in the islands. Along the shores of the bay some women were wading, their dresses held above their knees, picking shellfish and green sea-moss off the rocks for supper. We rode up to the cottage of Kekoa, a native minister who had studied under Miss P——'s father. His half-Chinese, half-native wife was in a grass hut at the back of the house, and she came immediately to take our horses, saying that her husband was at the church, but would be at home soon. Then opening the door, she told us to go inside and rest ourselves. It was a pretty cottage, with floors and walls of wood and a grass roof. Braided mats of palm and pandanus-leaves were on the floor, and on the walls hung portraits of the Hawaiian royal family and Generals Lee and Grant. It had two rooms—a sitting-room and a bedroom—the first furnished with a table and chairs, the latter with a huge high-posted bedstead with a canopy over it. Altogether, it was much above the common native houses, and was evidently not used every day, but kept for the reception of guests—travelling ministers and the like.
When Kekoa came he welcomed us warmly on account of the attachment he had for Miss P——'s father, and told us to consider the house ours as long as it pleased us to stay. He sent his wife to catch a chicken, and soon set before us on the table in the sitting-room a supper consisting of boiled chicken, rice, baked taro, coarse salt from the bay, and bananas. We overlooked the absence of bread, which the natives know not of, and shared the use of the one knife and fork between us. Our host waited on us, his wife bringing the food to the door and handing it to him. After supper other natives came in, and Miss P—— conversed with them in Hawaiian. Being tired and stiff from my long ride, I went into the next room and lay down on the bed. Mrs. Kekoa came in presently and began to lomi-lomi me. She kneaded me with her hands from head to foot, just as a cook kneads dough, continuing the process for nearly an hour, although I begged her several times to stop lest she should be tired. At the end of that time all sensation of fatigue and stiffness was gone and I felt fresh and well. Kekoa and his wife slept in a grass hut several rods farther up the valley, and Miss P—— and I had the house to ourselves. In the middle of the night we were awakened by the sound of a man talking in through the open window of our room. We both thought for a moment that it was our persecutor of the morning who had followed us as he had threatened, but it proved to be a native from the head of the valley who wanted to see Kekoa. Miss P—— directed him to the grass hut where our host slept, and he went away, and we were not disturbed again. Next morning we had breakfast like the supper, and asked for our horses. Kekoa and his wife begged us to stay longer, but we could not, and parted from them with much regret. We afterward sent them some large photographs of scenes in Honolulu, and received an affectionate message from them in return. I look back to Kahana as a sort of Happy Valley, and dream sometimes of going back and seeing again its beautiful pale-green bay, its glittering blue sea, its grand mountain-walls clothed in richest verdure, and renewing my acquaintance with its kind-hearted people. Several natives gathered to say good-bye, and two of them rode with us out of the valley and saw us fairly on our way.