The
air was full of a busy, noisy din of insects, and snakes,
locusts, wasps, flies, and grasshoppers were all rioting in the
torrid heat.
Would the sublime philosophy of Thomas a Kempis,
I wondered, have given way under this? All day I seemed to hear
in mockery the clear laugh of the Hilo streams, and the drip of
Kona showers, and to see as in a mirage the perpetual Green of
windward Hawaii. I was driven back to the cabin in the late
afternoon, and in the evening listened for two hours to abuse of
my own country, and to sweeping condemnations of all religionists
outside of the brotherhood of "Psalm-singers." It is jarring and
painful, yet I would say of Chalmers, as Dr. Holland says of
another: -
If ever I shall reach the home in heaven,
For whose dear rest I humbly hope and pray,
In the great company of the forgiven
I shall be sure to meet old Daniel Gray.
The night came without coolness, but at daylight on Monday
morning a fire was pleasant. You will now have some idea of my
surroundings. It is a moral, hard, unloving, unlovely,
unrelieved, unbeautified, grinding life. These people live in a
discomfort and lack of ease and refinement which seems only
possible to people of British stock. A "foreigner" fills his
cabin with ingenuities and elegancies, and a Hawaiian or South
Sea Islander makes his grass house both pretty and tasteful.
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