ches on the level of the shed or
among the goods upon the counter; they came and went, they talked and
waited; they opened, skimmed, and pocketed half-read, their letters;
they opened the journal, and found a moment, not for the news, but for
the current number of the story: methought, I might have been in France,
and the paper the _Petit Journal_ instead of the _Nupepa Eleele_. On
other islands I had been the centre of attention; here none observed my
presence. One hundred and ten years before, the ancestors of these
indifferents had looked in the faces of Cook and his seamen with
admiration and alarm, called them gods, called them volcanoes; took
their clothes for a loose skin, confounded their hats and their heads,
and described their pockets as a "treasure door, through which they
plunge their hands into their bodies and bring forth cutlery and
necklaces and cloth and nails," and to-day the coming of the most
attractive stranger failed (it would appear) to divert them from Miss
Porter's _Scottish Chiefs_: for that was the novel of the day.

My host returned, and led me round the shore among the mules and donkeys
to his house. Like all the houses of the hamlet, it was on the European
or, to be more descriptive, on the American plan. The parlour was fitted
with the usual furniture and ornamented with the portraits of Kamehameha
the third, Lunalilo, Kalakaua, the queen consort of the isles, and Queen
Victoria. There was a Bible on the table, other books stood on a shelf.
A comfortable bedroom was placed at my service, the welcome afforded me
was cordial and unembarrassed, the food good and plentiful. My host, my
hostess; his grown daughters, strapping lassies; his young hopefuls,
misbehaving at a meal or perfunctorily employed upon their school-books:
all that I found in that house, beyond the speech and a few exotic
dishes on the table, would have been familiar and exemplary in Europe.

I walked that night beside the sea. The steamer with its lights and
crowd of tourists was gone by; it had left me alone among these aliens,
and I felt no touch of strangeness. The trim, lamp-lit houses shining
quietly, like villas, each in its narrow garden; the gentle sound of
speech from within; the room that awaited my return, with the lamp, and
the books, and the spectacled householder studying his Bible:--there was
nothing changed; it was in such conditions I had myself grown up, and
played, a child, beside the borders of another