This has something of the flavor of the man we were to know later;
     the quaint, gentle resignation to disappointment which is one of the
     finest touches in his humor.

Further on he says:  “I had not shaved since I left San Francisco.  As soon as I got ashore I hunted up a striped pole, and shortly found one.  I always had a yearning to be a king.  This may never be, I suppose, but, at any rate, it will always be a satisfaction to me to know that, if I am not a king, I am the next thing to it.  I have been shaved by the king’s barber.”

Honolulu was a place of cats.  He saw cats of every shade and variety.  He says:  “I saw cats—­tomcats, Mary-Ann cats, bobtailed cats, blind cats, one-eyed cats, wall-eyed cats, cross-eyed cats, gray cats, black cats, white cats, yellow cats, striped cats, spotted cats, tame cats, wild cats, singed cats, individual cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, and lazy, and sound asleep.”  Which illustrates another characteristic of the humor we were to know later—­the humor of grotesque exaggeration, in which he was always strong.

He found the islands during his periods of inaction conducive to indolence.  “If I were not so fond of looking into the rich mass of green leaves,” he says, “that swathe the stately tamarind right before my door, I would idle less, and write more, I think.”

The Union made good use of his letters.  Sometimes it printed them on the front page.  Evidently they were popular from the beginning.  The Union was a fine, handsome paper—­beautiful in its minute typography, and in its press-work; more beautiful than most papers of to-day, with their machine-set type, their vulgar illustrations, and their chain-lightning presses.  A few more extracts: 

“The only cigars here are those trifling, insipid, tasteless, flavorless things they call Manilas—­ten for twenty-five cents—­and it would take a thousand of them to be worth half the money.  After you have smoked about thirty-five dollars’ worth of them in the forenoon, you feel nothing but a desperate yearning to go out somewhere and take a smoke.”

“Captains and ministers form about half the population.  The third fourth is composed of Kanakas and mercantile foreigners and their families.  The final fourth is made up of high officers of the Hawaiian government, and there are just about enough cats to go round.”

In No. 6, April the 2d, he says:  “An excursion to Diamond Head, and the king’s cocoanut grove, was planned to-day, at 4.30 P. M., the party to consist of half a dozen gentlemen and three ladies.  They all started at the appointed hour except myself.  Somebody remarked that it was twenty minutes past five o’clock, and that woke me up.  It was