the way, and were sumptuously plumed with varied foliage, in places, and in places swathed in waving ferns.  Passing shreds of cloud trailed their shadows across these shining fronts, mottling them with blots; billowy masses of white vapor hid the turreted summits, and far above the vapor swelled a background of gleaming green crags and cones that came and went, through the veiling mists, like islands drifting in a fog; sometimes the cloudy curtain descended till half the canon wall was hidden, then shredded gradually away till only airy glimpses of the ferny front appeared through it—­then swept aloft and left it glorified in the sun again.  Now and then, as our position changed, rocky bastions swung out from the wall, a mimic ruin of castellated ramparts and crumbling towers clothed with mosses and hung with garlands of swaying vines, and as we moved on they swung back again and hid themselves once more in the foliage.  Presently a verdure-clad needle of stone, a thousand feet high, stepped out from behind a corner, and mounted guard over the mysteries of the valley.  It seemed to me that if Captain Cook needed a monument, here was one ready made—­therefore, why not put up his sign here, and sell out the venerable cocoanut stump?

But the chief pride of Maui is her dead volcano of Haleakala—­which means, translated, “the house of the sun.”  We climbed a thousand feet up the side of this isolated colossus one afternoon; then camped, and next day climbed the remaining nine thousand feet, and anchored on the summit, where we built a fire and froze and roasted by turns, all night.  With the first pallor of dawn we got up and saw things that were new to us.  Mounted on a commanding pinnacle, we watched Nature work her silent wonders.  The sea was spread abroad on every hand, its tumbled surface seeming only wrinkled and dimpled in the distance.  A broad valley below appeared like an ample checker-board, its velvety green sugar plantations alternating with dun squares of barrenness and groves of trees diminished to mossy tufts.  Beyond the valley were mountains picturesquely grouped together; but bear in mind, we fancied that we were looking up at these things—­not down.  We seemed to sit in the bottom of a symmetrical bowl ten thousand feet deep, with the valley and the skirting sea lifted away into the sky above us!  It was curious; and not only curious, but aggravating; for it was having our trouble all for nothing, to climb ten thousand feet toward heaven and then have to look up at our scenery.  However, we had to be content with it and make the best of it; for, all we could do we could not coax our landscape down out of the clouds.  Formerly, when I had read an article in which Poe treated of this singular fraud perpetrated upon the eye by isolated great altitudes, I had looked upon the matter as an invention of his own fancy.