“But here we are at the grand Hawaiian Hotel, a fine verandahed building, standing back from the road in a pretty garden, the green lawn, cool deep shade, and trickling fountain of which are doubly grateful after the glare of the scorching sunlight, scorching even though it is not yet seven a.m. The theatre, half‐hidden by its wealth of honeysuckle and fan‐palm, is not fifty yards distant, but is quite thrown into insignificance by the hotel. This was built by Government, at a cost of £25,000, and is admirably planned and appointed.” Its large airy rooms and cool verandahs, shaded with masses of passion flowers, its excellent food and iced American drinks, all combine to make it a capital resting‐place. In the streets Mr. Guillemard noted bevies of gaily‐attired girls on horseback, their robes being gathered in at the waist with bright scarves, which fling their folds far over the horses’ tails. Their jaunty straw hats were wreathed with flowers, and now and then some dark‐eyed beauty would be found wearing a necklace of blossoms. The girls rode astride up and down the main streets, making them ring again with their merry laughter. Mosquitoes were abundant, and, as some compensation, so also were delicious melons, guavas, mangoes, bananas, and commoner fruit. The sugar‐cane was first grown on these islands in 1820; now over 20,000,000 pounds of sugar are produced annually by the aid of Hawaiian and Chinese labour and steam‐mills. Not a quarter of the land suitable for this purpose is yet under cultivation, though some of the plantations are of thousands of acres in extent. Hides and wool are staple exports. A few hours’ sail from Honolulu some of the largest and most wonderful volcanoes in the world are to be found. Two of them, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, are each over 13,000 feet in elevation. The eruptions from the great crater of Kilauea, which is _ten miles_ in circumference, are something fearful. One explosion ejected streams of red mud three miles, killing thirty‐one people and 500 head of cattle. This was followed by several earthquakes, which destroyed a number of houses. These, again, were succeeded by a great earthquake wave, during the continuance of which three villages were swept away and seventy people killed. Next a new crater formed upon Mauna Loa, from which rose four fountains of red‐hot lava to a height of 600 feet. A lava stream, eight to ten miles long, and half a mile wide in some places, carried all before it. In one place it tumbled, in a molten cataract of fiery liquid, over a precipice several hundred feet in height. The interior of Hawaii is a vast underground lake of fire, and were it not for the safety‐valves provided by Nature in the form of craters, it would be shaken to pieces by successive earthquakes. [Illustration: THE VOLCANOES OF MAUNA LOA AND MAUNA KEA, SANDWICH ISLANDS (FROM THE SEA).]