The Ladies Are Most Charming; Essentially Womanly, And Fulfil All Domestic And Social Duties In A Way Worthy Of Imitation Everywhere.

The kindness and hospitality, too, are unbounded, and these cover "a multitude of sins."

There are very few strangers here now. It is the "dead season." I have met with none except Mr. Nordhoff, who is writing on the islands for Harper's Monthly, and his charming wife and children. She is a most expert horsewoman, and has adopted the Mexican saddle even in Honolulu, where few foreign ladies ride "cavalier fashion."

My friends all urge me to write on Hawaii, on the ground that I have seen the islands and lived the island life so thoroughly; but possibly they expect more indiscriminate praise than I could conscientiously bestow!

Honolulu is in the midst of the epidemic of letter writing which sets in on the arrival of the steamer from "the coast," and people walk and drive as if they really had business on hand: and the farewell visits to be made and received, the pleasant presence of Mr. Thompson, and Mr. and Mrs. Severance, of Hilo, and the hasty doing of things which have been left to the last, make me a sharer in the spasmodic bustle, which, were it permanent, would metamorphose this dreamy, bowery, tropical capital. The undeserved and unexpected kindness shown me here, as everywhere on these islands, renders my last impressions even more delightful than any first. The people are as genial as their own sunny skies, and in more frigid regions I shall never sigh for the last without longing for the first. . . . .

up to here S.S. COSTA RICA. August 7th.

We sailed for San Francisco early this afternoon. Everything looked the same as when I landed in January, except that many of the then strange faces among the radiant crowd are now the faces of friends, that I know nearly everyone by sight, and that the pathos of farewell blended with every look and word. The air still rang with laughter and alohas, and the rippling music of the Hawaiian tongue; bananas and pineapples were still piled in fragrant heaps; the drifts of surf rolled in, as then, over the barrier reef, canoes with outriggers still poised themselves on the blue water; the coral divers still plied their graceful trade, and the lazy ripples still flashed in light along the palm-fringed shore. The head-ropes were let go, we steamed through the violet channel into the broad Pacific, Lunalilo, who came out so far with Chief Justice Allen, returned to the shore, and when his kindly aloha was spoken, the last link with the islands was severed, and half an hour later Honolulu was out of sight. . . . .

. . . . The breeze is freshening, and the Costa Rica's head lies nearly due north. The sun is sinking, and on the far horizon the summit peaks of Oahu gleam like amethysts on a golden sea. Farewell for ever, my bright tropic dream! Aloha nui to Hawaii-nei! I.L.B.

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