There are two stores on the beach, and at these and at the
Court-house they aggregate, for lack of club-house and exchange.
Business is not here a synonym for hurry, and official duties are
light; so light, that in these morning hours I see the governor, the
sheriff, and the judge, with three other gentlemen, playing an
interminable croquet game on the Court-house lawn. They purvey
gossip for the ladies, and how much they invent, and how much they
only circulate can never be known!
There is a large native population in the village, along the beach,
and on the heights above the Wailuku River. Frame houses with
lattices, and grass houses with deep verandahs, peep out everywhere
from among the mangoes and bananas. The governess of Hawaii, the
Princess Keelikalani, has a house on the beach shaded by a large
umbrella-tree and a magnificent clump of bamboos, 70 feet in height.
The native life with which one comes constantly in contact, is very
interesting.
The men do whatever hard work is done in cultivating the kalo
patches and pounding the kalo. Thus kalo, the Arum esculentum,
forms the national diet. A Hawaiian could not exist without his
calabash of poi. The root is an object of the tenderest solicitude,
from the day it is planted until the hour when it is lovingly eaten.
The eating of poi seems a ceremony of profound meaning; it is like
the eating salt with an Arab, or a Masonic sign.
