The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
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It Was Very Slippery, But My Mule Deftly Gathered Her
Feet Under Her, And Slid When She Could Not Walk.
From Onomea to
the place where we expected to find the guide, we kept going up and
down the
Steep sides of ravines, and scrambling through torrents
till we reached a deep and most picturesque gulch, with a primitive
school-house at the bottom, and some grass-houses clustering under
palms and papayas, a valley scene of endless ease and perpetual
afternoon. Here we found that D.'s uncle, who was to have been our
guide, could not go, because his horse was not strong enough, but
her cousin volunteered his escort, and went away to catch his horse,
while we tethered ours and went into the school-house.
This reminded me somewhat of the very poorest schools connected with
the Edinburgh Ladies' Highland School Association, but the teacher
had a remarkable paucity of clothing, and he seemed to have the
charge of his baby, which, much clothed, and indeed much muffled,
lay on the bench beside him. For there were benches, and a desk,
and even a blackboard and primers down in the deep wild gulch, where
the music of living waters, and the thunderous roll of the Pacific,
accompanied the children's tuneless voices as they sang an Hawaiian
hymn. I shall remember nothing of the scholars but rows of gleaming
white teeth, and splendid brown eyes. I thought both teacher and
children very apathetic. There were lamentably few, though the
pretty rigidly enforced law, which compels all children between the
ages of six and fifteen to attend school for forty weeks of the
year, had probably gathered together all the children of the
district.
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