Everybody was pleased, though there was some little anxiety to know the cause of this disregard of orders and of our turning a thousand miles out of our course.  In an ordinary merchant ship doubtless somebody would have been found with the temerity to ask the captain or some other officer what was the matter, but nobody was fool enough to do that on an army transport.  The “ranking” officer aboard was rather intimate with the quartermaster captain, and we hoped something might be found out through him; but if the quartermaster made any confidences to the officer, that worthy kept them to himself.  We women went to bed with visions of fire in the hold, or of “tail shafts” ready to break and race.  The night passed tranquilly, however, and the next morning there was no perceptible anxiety about the officers.  As the Buford’s record runs were about two hundred and sixty miles a day, the remembrance that something was wrong had almost faded before Honolulu was in sight.

We arrived at Honolulu during the night, and, the steward afterwards said, spent the second half of it “prancing” up and down outside the bar, waiting for the dawn.  A suspicion that the staid Buford could prance anywhere would have brought me out of bed.  I did rise once on my elbow in response to an excited whisper from the upper berth, in time to see a dazzle of electric lights swing into view through the porthole and vanish as the vessel dipped.

I dressed in time to catch the last of the sunrise, but when I went on deck, found that nearly half the passengers had been more enterprising than I. We were at anchor in the outer harbor, and Honolulu lay before us in all the enchantment of a first tropical vision.  A mountain of pinky-brown volcanic soil—­they call it Diamond Head—­ran out into the sea on the right, and, between it and another hill which looks like an extinct crater and is called the Punch Bowl, a beach curved inward in a shining line of surf and sand.  Back of this line lay some two or three miles of foreshore, covered with palm-trees and glossy tropical vegetation, from which peeped out the roofs and towers of the residence portion of the city.  There were mountains behind the town, jagged sierra-like peaks with clefts and gorges between.  They were terraced half-way up the sides and were covered with the light green of crops and the deeper green of forests.  Tatters of mist draped them here and there, while clouds lowered in half a dozen spots, and we could see the smoky lines of as many showers in brisk operation.

On our left the shipping lay clustered about the wharfs, sending its tracery of masts into the clear sky; and all around glowed the beauty of a shallow harbor, coral-fringed.  From the sapphire of the water in our immediate vicinity, the sea ranged to azure and apple green, touched by a ray of sunlight into a flashing mirror here, heaping into snow wreaths of surf there; and against this play of color loomed the swart bulk of the Pacific Mail steamer Coptic, flying her quarantine flag.