The concerts in the grounds of the Royal Hotel were a sort of dual function so far as I was concerned. When attending them in the company of Mr. Mclnerny I walked boldly into the lobby of the hotel and lolled about on the verandah like a gentleman. When out with Hitchen, Frenchy, Axel, or Tommy, and on the single occasion when we induced Old Smith to forsake the waterfront, I stopped on the lowly outskirts of the crowd among the natives, and the groups of Chinamen, Portuguese, and Japs. We enjoyed the music and had as good a time as the folks on the verandah; in fact we were more comfortable, for we dressed in cool clean dungaree with our cotton shirts unstarched and open at the throat. Pipes were always in order, lavish conversation was indulged in, and we got to be accepted on an equal footing by many of the natives. Nigger, the hatch man, a sort of top boss among these people, was one of the best of Kanakas, which is saying much; a white man under his skin, and a gentleman every inch of him. He introduced us to as exclusive a society as there is in the islands, and we always swore by him in spite of the way he treated us the first few days of our stay in port, but then, as he explained, it was the Republicans he was after, and of course us white fellows could look out for ourselves. On Sundays, when I was not out driving with Mr. Mclnerny, Frenchy and Axel and myself would wander about the city looking at the strange sights. Tommy got to be one of the sightseers later on, and in our different excursions on foot we covered the place pretty well. The Palace (from the outside), the statue of Kamehameha I, the Museum, and the cottage in which Stevenson lived at Waikiki, were some of the points of interest visited. We also made a long hike out to the Pali. All of this is uninteresting but simply spread upon the record to show that the sailor-man of the old deepwater days, of which I write, was liable at times to enjoy many of the milder forms of dissipation now almost exclusively indulged in by Cook tourists and the winners of voting contests sent abroad by enterprising newspapers. CHAPTER XVII A DINNER ASHORE With all due respect to Chow, and he moved in the best silk-shirted circles of oriental society, we could never say that his regular bill of fare on board the _Fuller_ was exactly epicurean. He was bound to remember that sailors were the ultimate destination of his efforts and he guided himself accordingly.