A Womans Impression of the Philippines | Page 6

schoolteachers lost no time when the boat was once tied up at the dock, for it was given out that some trifling repairs were to be made to the boat's engines and that we should sail the next day. We sailed, in point of fact, just ten days later, for the engines had to be taken down to be repaired. As the notice of departure within twenty-four hours was pasted up every day afresh, it held our enthusiasm for sight-seeing at a feverish pitch.

CHAPTER III
Our Ten Days' Sightseeing
The Fish Market--We Are Treated to Poi--We Visit the Stores--Hawaiian Curiosities--The Southern Cross--Our Trip to the Dreadful Pali--The Rescue--The Flowers and Trees of Honolulu--The Mango Tree and Its Fruit.
My first impressions of Honolulu were disappointing. I had been, in my childhood, a fascinated peruser of Mark Twain's "Roughing It," and his picture of Honolulu--or rather my picture formed from his description of it--demanded something novel in foliage and architecture, and a great acreage of tropical vegetation. What we really found was a modern American city with straight streets, close-clipped lawns, and frame houses of various styles of architecture leaning chiefly to the gingerbread, and with a business centre very much like that of a Western town. Only after three or four days did the charm and individuality of Honolulu make themselves felt.
To leave the dock, we had to pass through the fish market, which looked like any other fish market, but seemed to smell worse. When we looked at the fish, however, we almost forgot the odors, for they were as many tinted as a rainbow. Coral red, silver, blue, blue shot with purple, they seemed to tell of sun-kissed haunts under wind-ruffled surfaces or of dusky caves within the underworld of branching coral. It is hard to be sentimental about fish, but for the space of two minutes and a half we quite mooned over the beauty fish of Honolulu.
Leaving the market, we came upon a ley woman who wanted to throw a heavy wreath of scented flowers about the neck of each of us at a consideration of twenty cents per capita. She was a fat old woman who used many alluring gestures and grinned coquettishly; but we were adamant to her pleadings, and seeing a street car jingling toward us--one of the bobtailed mule variety--we left her to try her wiles on a fresh group from our boat, and hailed the street car. As we entered, one passenger remarked audibly to another, "I see another transport is in," which speech lowered my spirits fifty degrees. I hate to be so obvious.
Under that nightmare of threatened departure we went flying from place to place. In the first store which we entered we were treated to _poi_--a dish always offered to the stranger as a mark of hospitality--and partook of it in the national manner; that is, we stuck our forefingers in the poi, and each then sucked her own digit. Poi is made from taro root, and tastes mouldy. It is exceedingly nasty--nobody would want two dips.
The stores were just like those of the United States, and the only commercial novelties which we discovered were chains made of exquisitely tinted shells, which came from somewhere down in the South Seas, and other chains made of coral and of a berry which is hard and red and looks like coral. At the Bishop Museum, however, we found an interesting collection of Malaysian curios and products--birds, beasts, fishes, weapons, dress, and domestic utensils. Among the dress exhibits were cloaks made of yellow feathers, quite priceless (I forget how many thousand birds were killed to make each cloak); and among the household utensils were wooden bowls inlaid with human teeth. It was a humorous conceit on the part of former Hawaiian kings thus to compliment a defunct enemy.
There was a dance that night at the Hawaiian Hotel in honor of our passengers, most of whom attended, leaving me almost a solitary passenger aboard. Those happy sinners from Radcliffe went off in their best frocks. I lay in a steamer chair on the afterdeck, scanning the heavens for the Southern Cross. I counted, as nearly as I can remember, about eight arrangements of stars that might have been said to resemble crosses. Not one of them was it, however. Later, I made acquaintance with the Cross, and I must say it has been much overrated by adjective-burdened literature. It does not blaze, and it is lop-sided, and it is not magnificent in the least. It consists of five stars in the form of an irregular diamond, and it is not half so cross-like as the so-called False Cross.
Next morning the military band came down and gave us an hour's concert on the promenade deck. We sat about under the awnings with our novels or our