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63

throws him out upon the deep, where he must say, with Peter, "Lord, save; I perish." Then at once he loses despair; he surmounts the difficulty; he breaks his prison; he mounts up as on eagles' wings; now the pinions of Faith and Love nobly sustain him, and bear him away aloft; and he wonders at the nightmare of doubt and fear that kept him from using them before. He is ashamed of the wrong thoughts of God that had begun to gather and darken in his mind. He sees that God was infinitely wise and good in appointing the discipline to which he has been subjected, and he flies all the higher and better for it in holiness now. Like the Ancient Mariner, who has served us for illustration once before,

He goes like one that hath been stunn'd,

And is of sense forlorn;

A better and a wiser man

He'll rise to-morrow morn.

CHAPTER III.

HONOLULU AND ITS ENVIRONS.

The constant sun

Had run his faithful round, and duly sunk
Beneath the crystal wave of this calm sea;
And centuries had fill'd their measure up
With quiet morns and peaceful eventides:
An unclad tawny race, age after age,

Had roved the woods and waters, all unchanged.
But men of other lip from a far land
Had brought religion, enterprise, and law.
The merchant's eye, with expectation large,
As oft it scann'd the far-outstretching point
Of this most charming isle, with anxious gaze,
Was often feasted with returning bark,
From coast barbaric, or from unknown isle,
Freighted with ocean's wealth, those pearly drops,

A growth indigenous beneath the flood;

Or laden with the spoil of mammoth brutes,

That roam the vast Pacific's liquid fields.—Anon.

THIRTY-FIVE Mornings and evenings from Callao, and our anchor is scratching the outer reef round the island heart of the Pacific. This is a sailing distance of more than five thousand miles. Including the time in which we were becalmed in the Doldrums, the seamen's name for those parts of the sea directly under the Equator, where they have neither northeast nor southeast trades, but baffling winds and calms, we have averaged more than one thousand miles a week; a rate of progress which before, when we were so

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OF SCURVY.

65

crank and heavy at the head with those ill-stowed naval stores, none of us would believe the snail-paced Wales could ever make.

At times the trades have been so strong that we could not carry top-gallant sails. It was luxurious sailing for our disabled seamen, with symptoms of the scurvy, who could sleep on deck all the while, the temperature of the air for three successive weeks being indicated by the thermometer at eighty-three or eighty-four, while that of the ocean was seventy-seven or seventy-eight.

The aspect of Oahu, at first approach, is hardly more inviting to the mariner than purgatory was to Dante and Beatrice in the Inferno. For aught your eye can see of verdure, you would think, if there be

* It seems to have been discovered of late that the true source of scorbutic disease, as it shows itself in our ships and prisons, is the want of potash in the blood; that salted meat contains little more than half the potash in fresh meats; and that, while an ounce of rice contains only five grains of potash, an ounce of potato contains one thousand eight hundred and seventy-five grains, which accounts for the great increase of the disease since the scarcity of the potato. In patients under this disease, the blood is found to be deficient in potash; and it has been ascertained by repeated experiments, that whatever be the diet, such patients speedily recover if a few grains (from twelve to twenty) of some salt of potash be given daily. Lime-juice is regularly ordered in the navy as a specific for the disease, and the reason of its efficacy is not the acid, but the amount of potash, being eight hundred and forty-six grains in an ounce. On these facts it seems possible to found a slight, but very salutary, improvement in the navy. Let a portion of tartrate of potash be ordered regularly to be mixed with the lime-juice that is given out for use, and let arrangements be adopted for boiling the salt meat in steam. A large portion of the salt would thus be eliminated, and the food made more wholesome. A similar course might be adopted in work-houses and prisons.

inhabitants, that the azure ocean which laves their coast must be also the garden that yields their food, did there not blow ever and anon, from off shore, grateful odors like the heliotrope,

"That tell you whence their fragrance is supplied."

Huge waves are ever breaking over the coral reef that incloses the harbor of Honolulu, and rolling along both sides of the channel till they are lost in deep water inside, but not without infusing a stranger who may be rowing in from a ship outside with the sedative fear of being capsized as he mounts the ridges of those broad-backed rollers.

To the right, and directly in front as you enter the harbor, rise the frowning craters of Leahi and Puawai, now called-my readers may say whether more euphoniously or not-Punch-bowl Hill and Diamond Point. These once vomited their combustible and fueled entrails upon the plains and into the sea; but they have long since gone to sleep, and "green grow the rushes O" in their concave and smooth basins, where it is to be taken for granted almost every classic visitor at Honolulu has taken lessons as we have in stone-rolling, and scanning Virgil to the sound,

Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum. On the flats at their base are the extensive cocoa and palm groves of Waikiki, and the beautiful valleys of Nuuanu and Manoa, verdant with patches of kalo, and other creations of the tropics-terrace upon terrace, and sparkling all along with squares and diamonds of the flowing brook by which they are irrigated.

A stranger coming into port, however, sees nothing of all this, but only a dusty, arid plain, lying four or five

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miles along the shore, and from one to two miles inland, occupied in its western extremity, for about three quarters of a mile, with a singularly promiscuous array of low hay-stack houses for seven or eight thousand people, to whose dry grass-thatching one thinks he has only to hold a torch in order to wrap the whole village in smoke and flame. It is the wonder of every new observer that a town built of such fire-inviting materials, and the houses often so close together, is not daily consumed in a general conflagration.

The fort, which the French, under Admiral Trommelin, have recently dismantled, is built upon a small, low promontory in front of the town, and furnished with fifty-two guns that command the channel and inner harbor. It is itself again commanded in the rear by a battery of fourteen guns on Punch-bowl Hill, at an elevation of five hundred and fifty feet above the sea. Some of the government offices, the custom-house, a large four-story edifice, the Romish Cathedral, and a few of the warehouses, stores, and dwellings of the foreigners, are well-made structures of coral, either shingled or covered with zinc, and furnished with lookouts on the top for descrying approaching sails and vessels in the outer roadstead.

The greater part of the habitations of foreigners and of natives that are looking up in the world are constructed after the style of building prevalent on the coast of Spanish America. The common soil, pulverized and wet like clay for brick-making, is then mixed up with dry grass and put into molds of a large size, usually eighteen inches or two feet long, a foot wide, and from six to eight inches thick. These are dried