AN ORIGINAL GEM.

243

on his back, is the LOCUM TENENS and landlord of the place.

Near by is a luxuriant shading grape-vine, which possesses not a little interest, when one comes to know that it was the occasion of a beautiful Hawaiian mele, song, from the aged chief woman, Kekupuohi, one of the wives of Kalaniopuu, the reigning king of Hawaii when the island was first visited by Captain Cook. She was on a visit to Mr. Ruggles when she composed this song, the portion of which following is found translated in the Memoirs of Lucy G. Thurston. It is worth preserving, as a specimen of the old style of Hawaiian poetry Christianized, and suggested, probably, to the mind of this ancient survivor of heathenism by the New Testament figure of Christ as the true vine.

Once only hath that appeared which is glorious;
It is wonderful, it is altogether holy;

It is a blooming glory; its nature is unwithering;
Rare is its stock, most singular, unrivaled,

One only true vine. It is the Lord.

The branch that adheres to it becomes fruitful;
The fruit comes forth fruit; it is good fruit,
Whence its character is clearly made known.
Let the branch merely making fair show be cut off,
Lest the stock should be injuriously encumbered;
Lest it be also, by it, wrongfully burdened.

This woman was said, in the days of heathenism, to have been the wahine of some forty different husbands, and of several of them at the same time. Upon hearing the Gospel, she was one of the first on Hawaii to give heed to it, and to befriend its teachers. In her eagerness to learn to read the word of God, she

entered school as a pupil; but from her advanced age, her dullness, and unretentive memory, she found it difficult to get even the alphabet, so as to remember it.

Before she could read at all, the missionaries, having the supervision of thousands, advised her to give up the attempt to learn. But not satisfied with remaining unable to read the Scriptures, and choosing one of her younger female attendants for her teacher, she strenuously persevered till the mystic art was acquired, and the palapala hemolele (sacred writings) became thenceforth her daily companion to the end of life. Reared in the untold depravities of heathenism, and continuing therein to old age, as if to prove that nothing in the line of human regeneration is too hard for grace divine, she was then chosen to illustrate the transforming power of the Gospel, by putting on Christianity as a conscientious Christian, and dying at last with good hope in Christ.

How true now of this heavenly metamorphosis of a gray relic of idolatry are those lines in The Task, that proclaim the nature and necessity of such a change in every son and daughter of Adam!

The still small voice is wanted. He must speak,
Whose word leaps forth at once to its effect;
Who calls for things that are not, and they come.
Grace makes the slave a freeman. 'Tis a change

That turns to ridicule the turgid speech
And stately tone of moralists, who boast,
As if, like him of fabulous renown,

They had, indeed, ability to smooth

The shag of savage nature, and were each
An Orpheus, and omnipotent in song:
But transformation of apostate man

SCENES IN THE

WOODS.

245

From fool to wise, from earthly to divine,

Is work for Him that made him. He alone,
And he by means, in philosophic eyes,
Trivial and worthy of disdain, achieves
The wonder; humanizing what is brute
In the lost kind; extracting from the lips
Of asps their venom; overpowering strength
By weakness, and hostility by love.

From Kuapehu one may ride, by a horse-path, three or four miles up into the mountain, through belts of gigantic ferns and brakes, that have formed, in their decay, a very deep and rich vegetable mold. It is matter of curious interest to the traveler to mark the progress and change of productions with the different zones, till you get into the region of koa forests, from which the natives procure their canoes, and timber for all other purposes. One admires there the tangled woods and mosses, and wild bowers made by the convolvuli and other larger vines o'ermantling both decayed and living trees, as in the woods of Florida and Louisiana. Birds, too, carol there with joy, secure from molestation by Indian's arrow or hunter's rifle.

I have visited a little school in the woods not far from that region, where the instructor was knowingly teaching geography by a globe he had made out of a calabash; covering it over with cotton cloth, then marking meridians, parallels, and names with ink and native dyes, and besmearing all with a coat of varnish (to keep it from being devoured by cockroaches) made of a native gum they call pi-lali, not unlike gum Arabic. His earth was considerably flattened at the poles, and rather too pursy at the equator; but for all that, it turned easier on its axis than many a fat alderman

could on his heel, whom ease and good living have formed into an oblate spheroid, not unlike the honest Hawaiian teacher's earth. I have no doubt many a bright-eyed, tawny urchin, the Flibbertegibbet of his native village, will learn more from it of the round world he treads on than was ever known to Aristotle or Plato.

THE PILGRIM PARTING.

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CHAPTER XII.

CANOEING BY SEA AND SURVEY OF VOLCANOES BY LAND.

WINGS have we, and as far as we can go

We may find pleasure; wilderness and wood,
Blank ocean and mere sky, support that mood,

Which with the lofty sanctifies the low:

Dreams, books are each a world; and books, we know,

Are a substantial world, both pure and good.

Hence have I genial seasons, hence have I

Smooth passions, smooth discourse, and joyous thought:
And thus from day to day my little boat

Rocks in its harbor or puts out to sea.

WORDSWORTH.

LIKE a bird of passage, again am I on the wing, spirits refreshed and health recruited by nestling so long in the happy missionary dove-cot at Kealakekua. Four days ago, at one o'clock in the morning, my boat and I put out again to sea from that quiet harbor, where pen, and books, and prayer, and confiding Christian converse, together with true hospitality, combined to constitute one of those genial seasons in the life of a traveler which are like a pilgrim's rest in one of the arbors erected by the Lord of the Way.

The memory of this grateful episode in my life's drama, and of the friends that made it so, will be always fresh and green. How could it, then, be otherwise than with reluctance that I resumed my wanderings, though under favorable auspices, and commended to God and the word of his grace by those