rs over and
above the wages due him.

The firm of Ah Chun and Ah Yung was prospering. There was no need for Ah
Chun longer to be a cook. There were boom times in Hawaii. Sugar was
being extensively planted, and labour was needed. Ah Chun saw the
chance, and went into the labour-importing business. He brought
thousands of Cantonese coolies into Hawaii, and his wealth began to grow.
He made investments. His beady black eyes saw bargains where other men
saw bankruptcy. He bought a fish-pond for a song, which later paid five
hundred per cent and was the opening wedge by which he monopolized the
fish market of Honolulu. He did not talk for publication, nor figure in
politics, nor play at revolutions, but he forecast events more clearly
and farther ahead than did the men who engineered them. In his mind's
eye he saw Honolulu a modern, electric-lighted city at a time when it
straggled, unkempt and sand-tormented, over a barren reef of uplifted
coral rock. So he bought land. He bought land from merchants who needed
ready cash, from impecunious natives, from riotous traders' sons, from
widows and orphans and the lepers deported to Molokai; and, somehow, as
the years went by, the pieces of land he had bought proved to be needed
for warehouses, or coffee buildings, or hotels. He leased, and rented,
sold and bought, and resold again.

But there were other things as well. He put his confidence and his money
into Parkinson, the renegade captain whom nobody would trust. And
Parkinson sailed away on mysterious voyages in the little _Vega_.
Parkinson was taken care of until he died, and years afterward Honolulu
was astonished when the news leaked out that the Drake and Acorn guano
islands had been sold to the British Phosphate Trust for three-quarters
of a million. Then there were the fat, lush days of King Kalakaua, when
Ah Chun paid three hundred thousand dollars for the opium licence. If he
paid a third of a million for the drug monopoly, the investment was
nevertheless a good one, for the dividends bought him the Kalalau
Plantation, which, in turn, paid him thirty per cent for seventeen years
and was ultimately sold by him for a million and a half.

It was under the Kamehamehas, long before, that he had served his own
country as Chinese Consul--a position that was not altogether
unlucrative; and it was under Kamehameha IV that he changed his
citizenship, becoming an Hawaiian subject in order to marry Stella
Allend