In the afternoon Mr. Aiken drove us back to his home farm, where we again passed a very pleasant night.  In the morning I walked with him through his pineapple plantation.  It was a new kind of farming and fruit-growing to me.  I forget now how many hundred thousand plants his field contained.  They are set and cultivated much as cabbage is with us, but present a strangely stiff and forbidding aspect.  The first cutting is when the plants are about eighteen months old, one large solid apple from each plant.  The second crop is called the “raggoon” crop, and yields two apples from each plant, but smaller and less valuable than the first.  The field is then reset.  I also walked with Mr. Aiken over some new land he was getting ready for pineapples.  It had been densely covered with lantana scrub, and clearing it and grubbing it out had been an heroic task.  The lantana takes complete possession of the soil, grows about four or five feet high, and makes a network of roots in the soil that defies anything but a steam plow.  The soil is a red, heavy clay, and it made the farmer in me sweat to think of the expenditure of labor necessary to turn a lantana bush into a pineapple field.  The redness of this volcanic soil is said to be owing to the fact that the growth of vegetation brings the iron into new combinations with organic acids.

Later in the day we visited the large Baldwin pineapple-canning plant, and were shown the whole process of preparing and canning the fruit, and all but surfeited with the most melting and delicious pineapples it was ever my good luck to taste.  The Hawaiian pineapple probably surpasses all others in tenderness and lusciousness, and it loses scarcely any of these qualities in the cans.  Ripened in the field, where it grew on the flanks of great Haleakala, and eaten out of hand, it is a dream of tropic lusciousness.  The canning is done by an elaborate system of machinery managed by Japanese men and women, the naked hand never coming in contact with the peeled fruit, but protected from it by long, thin rubber gloves.  There ought to be a great future for this industry, when Eastern consumers really find out the superior quality of the Hawaiian product.

From Mr. Aiken’s house one has a view of the great wall of mountains that form the western and older—­older geologically—­end of the island, in which lies the famous Iao Valley, which I have already described.  We judge, from the much deeper marks of rain erosion, that this end of the island is vastly older than the butt end upon which Haleakala is situated.  Haleakala is eroded comparatively little.  On all its huge northern slope there is only one considerable gash or gully, and this is probably not many thousand years old; but the northwestern end of the island is worn and carved in the most striking manner.  Looking at it that morning, I compared it to my extended, relaxed hand, the northern end being gashed and grooved like the sunken spaces between the fingers, while the southwest