high up among the ferns and trailers, and drowning for a time the
endless baritone of the surf, which is never silent through the
summer years. Cascades in numbers took one impulsive leap from the
cliffs into the sea, or came thundering down clefts or "gulches,"
which, widening at their extremities, opened on smooth green lawns,
each one of which has its grass house or houses, kalo patch,
bananas, and coco-palms, so close to the broad Pacific that its
spray often frittered itself away over their fan-like leaves. Above
the cliffs there were grassy uplands with park-like clumps of the
screw-pine, and candle-nut, and glades and dells of dazzling green,
bright with cataracts, opened up among the dark dense forests which
for some thousands of feet girdle Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, two vast
volcanic mountains, whose snowcapped summits gleamed here and there
above the clouds, at an altitude of nearly 14,000 feet. Creation
surely cannot exhibit a more brilliant green than that which clothes
windward Hawaii with perpetual spring. I have never seen such
verdure. In the final twenty-nine miles there are more than sixty
gulches, from 100 to 700 feet in depth, each with its cataracts, and
wild vagaries of tropical luxuriance. Native churches, frame-built
and painted white, are almost like mile-stones along the coast, far
too large and too many for the notoriously dwindling population.
Ten miles from Hilo we came in sight of the first sugar plantation,
with its patches of yet brighter green, its white boiling house and
tall chimney stack; then more churches, more plantations, more
gulches, more houses, and before ten we steamed into Byron's, or as
it is now called Hilo Bay.

This is the paradise of Hawaii. What Honolulu attempts to be, Hilo
is without effort. Its crescent-shaped bay, said to be the most
beautiful in the Pacific, is a semi-circle of about two miles, with