certainly for a mile and a half or more there are many very
comfortable-looking dwellings, very attractive to the eye, with an
ease and imperturbable serenity of demeanour as if they had nothing
to fear from heat, cold, wind, or criticism. Their architecture is
absolutely unostentatious, and their one beauty is that they are
embowered among trailers, shadowed by superb exotics, and surrounded
by banks of flowers, while the stately cocoanut, the banana, and the
candlenut, the aborigines of Oahu, are nowhere displaced. One house
with extensive grounds, a perfect wilderness of vegetation, was
pointed out as the summer palace of Queen Emma, or Kaleleonalani,
widow of Kamehameha IV., who visited England a few years ago, and
the finest garden of all was that of a much respected Chinese
merchant, named Afong. Oahu, at least on this leeward side, is not
tropical looking, and all this tropical variety and luxuriance which
delight the eye result from foreign enthusiasm and love of beauty
and shade.

When we ascended above the scattered dwellings and had passed the
tasteful mausoleum, with two tall Kahilis, {28} or feather plumes,
at the door of the tomb in which the last of the Kamehamehas
received Christian burial, the glossy, redundant, arborescent
vegetation ceased. At that height a shower of rain falls on nearly
every day in the year, and the result is a green sward which England
can hardly rival, a perfect sea of verdure, darkened in the valley
and more than half way up the hill sides by the foliage of the
yellow-blossomed and almost impenetrable hibiscus, brightened here
and there by the pea-green candlenut. Streamlets leap from crags
and ripple along the roadside, every rock and stone is hidden by
moist-looking ferns, as aerial and delicate as marabout feathers,
and when the windings of the valley and the projecting spurs of