On nights such as this, warm and sultry, when the trade wind was not over strong, the smell from the Chinese and Japanese stores would come out into the streets with added intensity. The Chinese merchants, in the shadow of their open front stores, would entertain their families and friends of an evening with interminable jabberings that must have been mighty interesting to them. I used to wonder what these industrious law abiding citizens found to talk about; now I realize that, except to those who were blind or deaf, the Honolulu nights could hardly be long enough for them to discuss half of the peculiar doings of the daffy white people residing in that busy little town, in those stirring days of the Republic. To a foremast hand, a common sailor in the fo'c'sle of a deepwaterman, the point of view is almost on a level with that of the perpetually unassimilated Oriental. The sailor sees, he hears, and if he is gifted with brains that think, he must needs wonder at the strange ways of folks who dress themselves so well, who live on the most appetizing foods, perform very little hard work, and who do themselves to the height of their ability. That we had a few philosophers among the crowd forward goes without saying; men who had lived, and who had had their fling, and for all I know to the contrary are having it again. I wager Hitchen, if not killed by this time, has mounted to more enlightened planes; perhaps back to a station from which he temporarily stepped down to sign articles in the ship _A. J. Fuller_ for the voyage around Cape Horn. We did a lot of swapping of books and magazines among the craft in the harbor. The poor starved crowd from the _British Monarch_ were first over the side with bundles of old magazines, paper covered novels, and mind destroying sheets called "Tit Bits," and "Snappy Bits," periodicals of a peculiar type. After reading one of them for an hour (and the funny part is you keep on reading and reading), it is a sort of mental dope, nothing remains but a vague idea of a lot of short paragraphs full of piffle. We got a number of Clark Russell stories in this exchange, though we really had little to give in return. All hands read these yarns and while there was much grumbling about "too much skirt," the sailor was recognized.