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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The Men
Displayed Their Lithe, Graceful Figures To The Best Advantage In
White Trousers And Gay Garibaldi Shirts.
A few of the women wore
coloured handkerchiefs twined round their hair, but generally both
men and women wore
Straw hats, which the men set jauntily on one
side of their heads, and aggravated their appearance yet more by
bandana handkerchiefs of rich bright colours round their necks,
knotted loosely on the left side, with a grace to which, I think, no
Anglo-Saxon dandy could attain. Without an exception the men and
women wore wreaths and garlands of flowers, carmine, orange, or pure
white, twined round their hats, and thrown carelessly round their
necks, flowers unknown to me, but redolent of the tropics in
fragrance and colour. Many of the young beauties wore the gorgeous
blossom of the red hibiscus among their abundant, unconfined, black
hair, and many, besides the garlands, wore festoons of a sweet-
scented vine, or of an exquisitely beautiful fern, knotted behind
and hanging half-way down their dresses. These adornments of
natural flowers are most attractive. Chinamen, all alike, very
yellow, with almond-shaped eyes, youthful, hairless faces, long
pigtails, spotlessly clean clothes, and an expression of mingled
cunning and simplicity, "foreigners," half-whites, a few negroes,
and a very few dark-skinned Polynesians from the far-off South Seas,
made up the rest of the rainbow-tinted crowd.
The "foreign" ladies, who were there in great numbers, generally
wore simple light prints or muslins, and white straw hats, and many
of them so far conformed to native custom as to wear natural flowers
round their hats and throats.
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