Honolulu, June 27, 1866 . . . . with a gill of water a day to each man.  I got the whole story from the third mate and two of the sailors.  If my account gets to the Sacramento Union first, it will be published first all over the United States, France, England, Russia and Germany—­all over the world; I may say.  You will see it.  Mr. Burlingame went with me all the time, and helped me question the men—­throwing away invitations to dinner with the princes and foreign dignitaries, and neglecting all sorts of things to accommodate me.  You know how I appreciate that kind of thing—­especially from such a man, who is acknowledged to have no superior in the diplomatic circles of the world, and obtained from China concessions in favor of America which were refused to Sir Frederick Bruce and Envoys of France and Russia until procured for them by Burlingame himself—­which service was duly acknowledged by those dignitaries.  He hunted me up as soon as he came here, and has done me a hundred favors since, and says if I will come to China in the first trip of the great mail steamer next January and make his house in Pekin my home, he will afford me facilities that few men can have there for seeing and learning.  He will give me letters to the chiefs of the great Mail Steamship Company which will be of service to me in this matter.  I expect to do all this, but I expect to go to the States first—­and from China to the Paris World’s Fair.

Don’t show this letter. 
                                   Yours affly
          
                                        Sam.

P. S. The crown Princess of this Kingdom will be buried tomorrow with great ceremony—­after that I sail in two weeks for California.

This concludes Mark Twain’s personal letters from the islands.  Of his descriptive news letters there were about twenty, and they were regarded by the readers of the Union as distinctly notable.  Re-reading those old letters to-day it is not altogether easy to understand why.  They were set in fine nonpareil type, for one thing, which present-day eyes simply refuse at any price, and the reward, by present-day standards, is not especially tempting.

The letters began in the Union with the issue of April the 16th, 1866.  The first—­of date March 18th—­tells of the writer’s arrival at Honolulu.  The humor in it is not always of a high order; it would hardly pass for humor today at all.  That the same man who wrote the Hawaiian letters in 1866 (he was then over thirty years old) could, two years later, have written that marvelous book, the Innocents Abroad, is a phenomenon in literary development.

The Hawaiian letters, however, do show the transition stage between the rough elemental humor of the Comstock and the refined and subtle style which flowered in the Innocents Abroad.  Certainly Mark Twain’s genius was finding itself, and his association with the refined and cultured