"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. Two pictures only I carried away of the many I hoped to see--the Hawaiian swimmers, bronzed and perfect as statues, who floated out to meet us and dive for coins, and a crowd of little yellow fellows, each on the swaying branch of the monkey-pod tree, black hair shaking in the wind, white teeth flashing, faces merry, and mouths stretched wide with song. Thence eleven long, long days to that sunset entrance into the Land of the Rising Sun--where Perry came to throw open to the world the long-shut sea portals of Japan. The Japanese way of revealing heart-beats is not the way of the Occidental world, and seeing no signs of war, this correspondent, at least, straightway forgot the mission on which he had come, and straightway was turned into an eager student of a people and a land which since childhood he had yearned to see. On a certain bluff sits a certain tea-house--you can see it from the deck of the ship. It is the tea-house of One Hundred and One Steps, and the mistress of it is O-kin-san, daughter of the man who was mayor when Perry opened the sea portals at the mouth of the cannon, whose guest Perry was, and whose friend. O-kin-san's people lost their money once, and she opened the tea-house, as the American girl under similar circumstances would have taken to the typewriter and the stenographer's pen. The house has a year of life for almost every one of the steps that mount to it, which is ancient life for Japan, where fires make an infant life of three years for the average Japanese home. The tea-girls are O-kin-san's own kin. Everything under her roof is blameless, and the women of any home in any land can be taken there fearlessly. An American enthusiast--a voluntary exile, whom I met later--told me that O-kin-san's Japanese was as good as could be found in the empire; that her husband was one of the best-educated men he had ever known, and had been a great help and inspiration to Lafcadio Hearn. There were all the pretty courtesies, the pretty ceremonies, and the gentle kindness of which the world has read.