, Fords, Buicks, Packards, line the pavement. The
shops are filled with all the necessities of American civilisation.
Every third house is a bank and every fifth the agency of a steamship
company.

Along the streets crowd an unimaginable assortment of people. The
Americans, ignoring the climate, wear black coats and high, starched
collars, straw hats, soft hats, and bowlers. The Kanakas, pale brown,
with crisp hair, have nothing on but a shirt and a pair of trousers; but
the half-breeds are very smart with flaring ties and patent-leather
boots. The Japanese, with their obsequious smile, are neat and trim in
white duck, while their women walk a step or two behind them, in native
dress, with a baby on their backs. The Japanese children, in bright
coloured frocks, their little heads shaven, look like quaint dolls. Then
there are the Chinese. The men, fat and prosperous, wear their American
clothes oddly, but the women are enchanting with their tightly-dressed
black hair, so neat that you feel it can never be disarranged, and they
are very clean in their tunics and trousers, white, or powder blue, or
black. Lastly there are the Filipinos, the men in huge straw hats, the
women in bright yellow muslin with great puffed sleeves.

It is the meeting-place of East and West. The very new rubs shoulders
with the immeasurably old. And if you have not found the romance you
expected you have come upon something singularly intriguing. All these
strange people live close to each other, with different languages and
different thoughts; they believe in different gods and they have
different values; two passions alone they share, love and hunger. And
somehow as you watch them you have an impression of extraordinary
vitality. Though the air is so soft and the sky so blue, you have, I
know not why, a feeling of something hotly passionate that beats like a
throbbing pulse through the crowd. Though the native policeman at the
corner, standing on a platform, with a white club to direct the traffic,
gives the scene an air of respectability, you cannot but feel that it is
a respectability only of the surface; a little below there is darkness
and mystery. It gives you just that thrill, with a little catch at the
heart, that you have when at night in the forest the silence trembles on
a sudden with the low, insistent beating of a drum. You are all
expectant of I know not what.

If I have dwelt on the incongruity of Honolulu, it is because just thi