d noticed that delicious rhythmic, breathing. Each morning I
had watched the sea-breeze begin at the shore and slowly extend seaward
as it blew the mildest, softest whiff of ozone to the land. It played
over the sea, just faintly darkening its surface, with here and there and
everywhere long lanes of calm, shifting, changing, drifting, according to
the capricious kisses of the breeze. And each evening I had watched the
sea breath die away to heavenly calm, and heard the land breath softly
make its way through the coffee trees and monkey-pods.

"It is a land of perpetual calm," I said. "Does it ever blow here?--ever
really blow? You know what I mean."

Cudworth shook his head and pointed eastward.

"How can it blow, with a barrier like that to stop it?"

Far above towered the huge bulks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, seeming to
blot out half the starry sky. Two miles and a half above our heads they
reared their own heads, white with snow that the tropic sun had failed to
melt.

"Thirty miles away, right now, I'll wager, it is blowing forty miles an
hour."

I smiled incredulously.

Cudworth stepped to the _lanai_ telephone. He called up, in succession,
Waimea, Kohala, and Hamakua. Snatches of his conversation told me that
the wind was blowing: "Rip-snorting and back-jumping, eh? . . . How
long? . . . Only a week? . . . Hello, Abe, is that you? . . . Yes, yes .
. . You _will_ plant coffee on the Hamakua coast . . . Hang your wind-
breaks! You should see _my_ trees."

"Blowing a gale," he said to me, turning from hanging up the receiver. "I
always have to joke Abe on his coffee. He has five hundred acres, and
he's done marvels in wind-breaking, but how he keeps the roots in the
ground is beyond me. Blow? It always blows on the Hamakua side. Kohala
reports a schooner under double reefs beating up the channel between
Hawaii and Maui, and making heavy weather of it."

"It is hard to realize," I said lamely. "Doesn't a little whiff of it
ever eddy around somehow, and get down here?"

"Not a whiff. Our land-breeze is absolutely of no kin, for it begins
this side of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. You see, the land radiates its
heat quicker than the sea, and so, at night, the land breathes over the
sea. In the day the land becomes warmer than the sea, and the sea
breathes over the land . . . Listen! Here comes the land-breath now, the
mountain wind."

I could hear it coming, rustling softly through the coff