[Illustration: Diamond Head, Honolulu. The town lies in the bay about halfway between the two headlands.] On the third night we got into smoother water and stopped while the Chief and his assistants repaired the damage. The next morning at breakfast the deserted saloon began to fill up. So far I and a fellow-traveller from Chicago had had the corner table to ourselves. By lunch-time it was full of lady missionaries going to China and Japan. For three or four of them that was destined to be their last voyage. The nicest and most pleasantly spoken of them was travelling many thousands of miles to meet an unspeakable fate at the hands of the Boxers. On the fourth morning great blue-grey masses of land began to rise up to port and ahead of us, and that day we spent steaming through summer seas under a lovely sky, between shores whose beauty may well have led Captain Cook’s sailors to believe that they had at last reached the long-dreamed-of Islands of the Blest. For all that, I must confess that I was disappointed with the approach to Honolulu. Even the most patriotic Hawaiian would, I think, agree with me that the capital has not been placed either on the most beautiful of the islands or in the most picturesque position possible. Still, you would travel far before you found a fairer sea-flanked city than Honolulu itself. It is a city of broad, tree-shaded streets, of buildings which are dignified without being pretentious, of palaces and Government offices built on a scale of splendour which argues eloquently for the financial conceptions of former monarchs and a belief in their destinies which the sceptical Fates and the American Republic have since declined to justify. There are, of course, many churches and schools in Honolulu. Your Hawaiian takes his or her religion in a cheerfully earnest fashion, and sings hymns with keener delight than any one else on earth. Still, the schools and churches of Honolulu were not built wisely. Where everything else is beautiful, softly lined, and tree-embowered, they are hard, bare, and angular, even after the fashion of the Ebenezers of the Midlands and the North of England. The very gaol looks nice in comparison with them.