The Hawaiian Archipelago - Six Months Among The Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, And Volcanoes Of The Sandwich Islands By Isabella L. Bird
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The Ever-Increasing Cost Of Food With
Us Makes Free-Hearted Hospitality An Impossibility, And Withers Up
All Those Kindly Instincts Which Find Expression In Housing And
Feeding Both Friends And Strangers.
I.L.B.
LETTER XXII.
LIHUE. KAUAI.
I rode from Makaueli to Dr. Smith's, at Koloa, with two native
attendants, a luna to sustain my dignity, and an inferior native to
carry my carpet-bag. Horses are ridden with curb-bits here, and I
had only brought a light snaffle, and my horse ran away with me
again on the road, and when he stopped at last, these men rode
alongside of me, mimicking me, throwing themselves back with their
feet forwards, tugging at their bridles, and shrieking with
laughter, exclaiming Maikai! Maikai! (good).
I remained several days at Koloa, and would gladly have accepted the
hospitable invitation to stay as many weeks, but for a cowardly
objection to "beating to windward" in the Jenny. The scenery in the
Koloa woods is exquisitely beautiful. Such supreme beauty produces
on me some of the effects which fine music has upon those who have
an exquisite sense of it. It speaks in a language of its own, like
music, and is equally untranslatable.
One day, the girls asked me to go with them to the forests and
return by moonlight, but they only spoke of them as the haunts of
ferns, because they supposed that I should think nothing of them
after the forests of Australia and New Zealand! They were not like
the tropical woods of Hawaii, and owe more to the exceeding
picturesqueness of the natural scenery.
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