by the
native boy who milked the cows for us and took Calico, Miss G----'s
riding horse, to water and to pasture. One day, when one of the girls
had started a fire in the stove, a fragrance like incense diffused
itself through the house. Hastening to the kitchen, I pulled out a
half-burned piece of sandal-wood and put it away in my collection of
shells and island curiosities. A few days afterward an old native man
named Ka-hu-kai (Sea-shore), who lived in one of the grass huts near the
front gate, came to sell me a piece of fragrant wood of another kind. He
had learned that I attached a value to such things, and expected to get
a good price. He inquired for the _wahine haole_ (foreign woman), and
presented his bit of wood, saying that he would sell it for a dollar. I
declined to purchase. He walked down through the garden and across the
lawn, but paused at the big gate for several minutes, then retraced his
steps. Holding out the wood again, he said, "This is my thought: you may
have it for a real." I gave him a real, and he went away satisfied.

Every Sunday we crossed the bridge that spanned Waialua River near the
ford, and made our way to the huge old-fashioned mission-church, which
stood in an open field surrounded by prickly pears six or eight feet
high. The thorny prickly pears were stiff and ungraceful, but a delicate
wild vine grew all over them and hung in festoons from the top. While
Pai-ku-li, the native minister, preached a sermon in Hawaiian, I, not
understanding a word, looked at the side pews where the old folks sat,
and tried to picture the life they had known in their youth, when the
great Kamehameha reigned. In the pew next to the side door sat Mr.
Sea-shore, straight and solemn as a deacon, and his wife, a fat old
woman with a face that looked as if it had been carved out of knotty
mahogany, but which was irradiated with an expression of kindness and
good-nature. She wore a long black holoku, and on her head was perched a
little sailor hat with a blue ribbon round it, which would have been
suitable for a girl six or eight years old, but which looked decidedly
comical and out of place on Mrs. Sea-shore. She was barefooted, as I
presently saw. Two or three times during the sermon a red-eyed,
dissipated-looking dog with a baked taro-root in his mouth had come to
the door, and seemed about to enter, but Mrs. Sea-shore, without
disturbing the devotions, had kept him back by threatening gestures. But
when