Bananas Are An Important Article Of Diet, And Sliced Guavas, Eaten With Milk And Sugar, Are Very Good.

The cooking is always done in detached cook houses, in and on American cooking stoves.

As to clothing. I wear my flannel riding dress for both riding and walking, and a black silk at other times. The resident ladies wear prints and silks, and the gentlemen black cloth or dark tweed suits. Flannel is not required, neither are puggarees or white hats or sunshades at any season. The changes of temperature are very slight, and there is no chill when the sun goes down. The air is always like balm; the rain is tepid and does not give cold; in summer it may be three or four degrees warmer. Windows and doors stand open the whole year. A blanket is agreeable at night, but not absolutely necessary. It is a truly delightful climate and mode of living, with such an abundance of air and sunshine. My health improves daily, and I do not consider myself an invalid.

Between working, reading aloud, talking, riding, and "loafing," I have very little time for letter writing; but I must tell you of a delightful fern-hunting expedition on the margin of the forest that I took yesterday, accompanied by Mr. Thompson and the two elder boys. We rode in the mauka direction, outside cane ready for cutting, with silvery tassels gleaming in the sun, till we reached the verge of the forest, where an old trail was nearly obliterated by a trailing matted grass four feet high, and thousands of woody ferns, which conceal streams, holes, and pitfalls. When further riding was impossible, we tethered our horses and proceeded on foot. We were then 1,500 feet above the sea by the aneroid barometer, and the increased coolness was perceptible. The mercury is about four degrees lower for each 1,000 feet of ascent - rather more than this indeed on the windward side of the islands. The forest would be quite impenetrable were it not for the remains of wood-hauling trails, which, though grown up to the height of my shoulders, are still passable.

Underneath the green maze, invisible streams, deep down, made sweet music, sweeter even than the gentle murmur of the cool breeze among the trees. The forest on the volcano track, which I thought so tropical and wonderful a short time ago, is nothing for beauty to compare with this "garden of God." I wish I could describe it, but cannot; and as you know only our pale, small-leaved trees, with their uniform green, I cannot say that it is like this or that. The first line of a hymn, "Oh, Paradise! oh, Paradise!" rings in my brain, and the rustic exclamation we used to hear when we were children, "Well, I never!" followed by innumerable notes of admiration, seems to exhaust the whole vocabulary of wonderment. The former cutting of some trees gives atmosphere, and the tumbled nature of the ground shows everything to the best advantage. There were openings over which huge candle-nuts, with their pea-green and silver foliage, spread their giant arms, and the light played through their branches on an infinite variety of ferns. There were groves of bananas and plantains with shiny leaves 8 feet long, like enormous hart's-tongue, the bright-leaved noni, the dark-leaved koa, the mahogany of the Pacific; the great glossy-leaved Eugenia - a forest tree as large as our largest elms; the small-leaved ohia, its rose-crimson flowers making a glory in the forests, and its young shoots of carmine red vying with the colouring of the New England fall; and the strange lauhala hung its stiff drooping plumes, which creak in the faintest breeze; and the superb breadfruit hung its untempting fruit, and from spreading guavas we shook the ripe yellow treasures, scooping out the inside, all juicy and crimson, to make drinking cups of the rind; and there were trees that had surrendered their own lives to a conquering army of vigorous parasites which had clothed their skeletons with an unapproachable and indistinguishable beauty, and over trees and parasites the tender tendrils of great mauve morning glories trailed and wreathed themselves, and the strong, strangling stems of the ie wound themselves round the tall ohias, which supported their quaint yucca-like spikes of leaves fifty feet from the ground.

There were some superb plants of the glossy tropical-looking bird's- nest fern, or Asplenium Nidus, which makes its home on the stems and branches of trees, and brightens the forest with its great shining fronds. I got a specimen from a koa tree. The plant had nine fronds, each one measuring from 4 feet 1 inch to 4 feet 7 inches in length, and from 7 to 9 inches in breadth. There were some very fine tree-ferns (Cibotium Chamissoi?), two of which being accessible, we measured, and found them seventeen and twenty feet high, their fronds eight feet long, and their stems four feet ten inches in circumference three feet from the ground. They showed the most various shades of green, from the dark tint of the mature frond, to the pale pea green of those which were just uncurling themselves. I managed to get up into a tree for the first time in my life to secure specimens of two beautiful parasitic ferns (Polypodium tamariscinum and P. Hymenophylloides?). I saw for the first time, too, a lygodium and the large climbing potato-fern (Polypodium spectrum), very like a yam in the distance, and the Vittaria elongata, whose long grassy fronds adorn almost every tree. The beautiful Microlepia tenuifolia abounded, and there were a few plants of the loveliest fern I ever saw (Trichomanes meifolium), in specimens of which I indulged sparingly, and almost grudgingly, for it seemed unfitting that a form of such perfect beauty should be mummied in a herbarium. There was one fern in profusion, with from 90 to 130 pair of pinnae on each frond; and the fronds, though often exceeding five feet in length, were only two inches broad (Nephrolepis pectinata). There were many prostrate trees, which nature has entirely covered with choice ferns, specially the rough stem of the tree-fern.

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