the bright yellow of the sand,
the dark rich green of the trees, and, looking into the garden below,
the flame-scarlet blossoms of the pomegranates, the rose-pink flowers of
the oleanders and the cream-white clusters of the limes and oranges.

It seemed a land for poetry, for romance, for day-dreaming, and the
transition from the attic-window to the prosaic realities of house and
school-room work was like a sudden awakening. I was destined before
leaving the place to have a still more violent awakening to the reality
that underlies appearances. Nature in these beautiful islands is fair
and lovely, but deceitful. During long months of sunny weather the waves
gently kiss the shore, the green slopes smile, the mountains decorate
themselves with cloud-wreaths and rainbows; but there comes a dreadful
day when the green and flowery earth yawns in horrid chasms, when Mauna
Loa trembles and belches forth torrents of blood-red lava, when the
ocean, receding from the shore, returns in a tidal wave that sweeps to
the top of the palms on the beach and engulfs the people and their
homes.

And the human nature here is somewhat similar. The Hawaiians are
pleasing in form and feature, graceful, polite, fond of music and
dancing and wreathing themselves with flowers, and possess withal a deep
fund of poetry, which finds expression in their own names, the names
they have bestowed upon waterfalls and valleys and green peaks and
sea-cliffs, and in the _meles_ or native songs which commemorate events
of personal interest or national importance. But they too have their
volcanic outbursts, their seasons of fury and destruction. The last
public display of this side of their character was on the occasion of
the election of the present king. The supporters of Queen Emma, the
defeated candidate, burst into the court-house, broke the heads of the
electors or threw them bodily out of the windows, and raised a riot in
the streets of Honolulu which was quelled only by the assistance of the
crews of the men-of-war then in the harbor--the English ship Tenedos and
the United States vessels Portsmouth and Tuscarora.

I come now to the rebellion which broke forth in Waialua school when I
had been there three weeks. A month or two before one of the
school-girls had died after a brief illness. The old heathen
superstition about praying to Death had been revived by the lower class
of natives in the place, who were not friendly to the school, and had
been