Japanese women who work on the sugar plantations may be seen sometimes knee-deep in muddy-watery soil near the flumes, or again out in the driest, hottest part of a newly plowed field. They have discarded their usual Japanese dress for a mixed costume, consisting of a close-fitting waist of dark, figured, Japanese cotton crêpe, a scant skirt to the knee, khaki gaiters, and their own heavy cotton "bootees." To protect their hair from dust and their necks from the sun, they wear a piece of Japanese toweling, which is tied across the back of the head and hangs down on the shoulders. On top of this is perched a cheap American sailor hat. The effect is certainly startling. Some take their tiny babies in bright-figured swaddling clothes with them, and put up a little shelter tent of cloth and sticks, where the youngsters lie and sleep. Most of the women who do agricultural work are Japanese. A few years ago, when a ship-load of people came from Madeira, the women told the immigration authorities that they had come to work on the plantations. But, after a very short time, they retired from this sort of labour for the much pleasanter and more remunerative business of making Madeira embroidery. Among the Chinese the women rarely go out of their own homes to work, although Oriental servants prevail all over these Islands. Some of the younger generation of Portuguese girls go out as nursemaids in white families, but the majority of that race make sewing and dressmaking or "clerking" their means of support. It is surprising, indeed, to see how few of the employees in any store are "white"; bookkeepers, clerks, etc., are usually young part-Hawaiians or part-Chinese. From the beginning, when sugar was ready for export, it was rarely shipped from the Hawaiian Islands in any but American bottoms. The American-Hawaiian Steamship Company--the largest fleet sailing under the Stars and Stripes and numbering twenty-eight vessels--the Oceanic Steamship Company, and the Matson Navigation Company, were all formed largely because of the favourable contracts they were able to make for carrying sugar, and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which plied between California and the Far East, stopped at Honolulu because of the profit to be made by carrying freight from the Islands. American shipping on the Pacific, however, has always been at a disadvantage, because foreign ships can be built more cheaply than ours and are usually subsidized.