Of course none but a happy ending of the story would be accepted by the jury; the finish must find Brown in high credit with the ladies, his behavior without blemish, his modesty unwounded, his character for self sacrifice maintained, the Old People rescued through him, their benefactor, all the party proud of him, happy in him, his praises on all their tongues.

We tried to arrange this, but it was beset with persistent and irreconcilable difficulties.  We saw that Brown’s shyness would not allow him to give up the lap-robe.  This would offend Mary and her mother; and it would surprise the other ladies, partly because this stinginess toward the suffering Old People would be out of character with Brown, and partly because he was a special Providence and could not properly act so.  If asked to explain his conduct, his shyness would not allow him to tell the truth, and lack of invention and practice would find him incapable of contriving a lie that would wash.  We worked at the troublesome problem until three in the morning.

Meantime Mary was still reaching for the lap-robe.  We gave it up, and decided to let her continue to reach.  It is the reader’s privilege to determine for himself how the thing came out.

CHAPTER III.

It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

On the seventh day out we saw a dim vast bulk standing up out of the wastes of the Pacific and knew that that spectral promontory was Diamond Head, a piece of this world which I had not seen before for twenty-nine years.  So we were nearing Honolulu, the capital city of the Sandwich Islands—­those islands which to me were Paradise; a Paradise which I had been longing all those years to see again.  Not any other thing in the world could have stirred me as the sight of that great rock did.

In the night we anchored a mile from shore.  Through my port I could see the twinkling lights of Honolulu and the dark bulk of the mountain-range that stretched away right and left.  I could not make out the beautiful Nuuana valley, but I knew where it lay, and remembered how it used to look in the old times.  We used to ride up it on horseback in those days —­we young people—­and branch off and gather bones in a sandy region where one of the first Kamehameha’s battles was fought.  He was a remarkable man, for a king; and he was also a remarkable man for a savage.  He was a mere kinglet and of little or no consequence at the time of Captain Cook’s arrival in 1788; but about four years afterward he conceived the idea of enlarging his sphere of influence.  That is a courteous modern phrase which means robbing your neighbor—­for your neighbor’s benefit; and the great theater of its benevolences is Africa.  Kamehameha went to war, and in the course of ten years he whipped out all the other kings and made himself master of every