After Plodding All Day Over Stony Soil In The Changeless Sunshine, As The Shadows Lengthened, We Turned Directly Up Towards The Mountains And Began A Two Hours Ascent.

It was delicious.

They were so cool, so green, so varied, their grey pinnacles so splintered, their precipices so abrupt, their ravines so dark and deep, and their lower slopes covered with the greenest and finest grass; then dark ohias rose singly, then in twos and threes, and finally mixed in dense forest masses, with the pea-green of the kukui.

It became yet lovelier as the track wound through deep wooded ravines, or snaked along the narrow tops of spine-like ridges; the air became cooler, damper, and more like elixir, till at a height of 1500 feet we came upon Makaueli, ideally situated upon an unequalled natural plateau, a house of patriarchal size for the islands, with a verandah festooned with roses, fuchsias, the water lemon, and other passion flowers, and with a large guest-house attached. It stands on a natural lawn, with abrupt slopes, sprinkled with orange trees burdened with fruit, ohias, and hibiscus. From the back verandah the forest-covered mountains rise, and in front a deep ravine widens to the grassy slopes below and the lonely Pacific, - as I write, a golden sea, on which the island of Niihau, eighteen miles distant, floats like an amethyst.

The solitude is perfect. Except the "quarters" at the back, I think there is not a house, native or foreign, within six miles, though there are several hundred natives on the property.

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