end, not more than ten miles distant, was only slightly grooved and more like the solid wrist and back hand.  All the rains brought by the northeast trades fall upon the northeast end of the islands.  The mountain-peaks on the end hold the clouds and strip them dry, so that little or no rain falls upon the south and southwest sides.  This is true of all the islands.  One end of each is arid and barren, while the other is wet and verdant.  One of the smaller islands, Kahoolawe, I believe, dominated by Maui on the northeast, is said to be drying up and blowing away by inches.

What a spell the mountains do lay upon the clouds everywhere,—­the robber mountains,—­in these islands exacting the last drop of water of all the ocean-born vapors that pass over them!  On the northeast side of the Lahaina district there are valleys four or five thousand feet deep; on the southwest side there are no valleys worth mentioning.  The difference in this respect was forcibly brought home to me when, later in the day, we made an automobile trip from Wailuku to Lahaina on the southwest side; in going less than twenty miles we quickly passed from the region of verdant valleys and mountain-slopes into a hard, raw, barren, unweathered region, where there was no soil, and where the rocks looked as crude and forbidding as they must have looked the day they flowed out from the depths as molten lava.  In outline the island of Maui suggests a truncated statue, the west end representing the head, very old and wrinkled and grooved by time and trouble, the peninsula the well-proportioned neck, and broad-breasted Haleakala forming the trunk.  What a torso it is, fire-born and basking there in the tropic seas!

The oldest island of the Hawaiian group is Kauai, called the garden island, because it has much the deepest and most fertile soil.  It shows much more evidence of erosion than any of the other islands.  The next in point of erosion, and hence in point of age, is Oahu, upon which Honolulu is situated.  Then come Molokai and Maui, the two ends of the latter being of vastly unequal age.  Hawaii, the largest of them all, nearly as large as Connecticut, is the youngest of the group, and shows the least effects of erosion.  When it is as old as Kauai is now, its two huge mountains, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, will probably be cut up into deep valleys and canons and sharp, high ridges, as are the mountains of Kauai and Oahu.  The lapse of time required to bring about such a result is beyond all human calculation.  Whether one million or two millions of years would do it, who knows?  Those warm tropical rains, aided by the rank vegetation which they beget and support, dissolve the volcanic rock slowly but inevitably.

Through the courtesy of Mr. Lowell, the superintendent, we had that day the pleasure of going through a large sugar-making plant at Paia—­one that turns out nearly fifty thousand tons of sugar a year.  We saw the cane come in from the fields in one end of the plant, and the dry, warm product being put up in bags at the other.  All the latest devices and machinery for sugar-making we saw here in full operation, affording a contrast to the crude and wasteful methods I had seen in the island of Jamaica a few years before.