e of these families--the
owners of the little island of Niihau, who have also a charming residence
in the mountains of Kauai. They came to Honolulu ten or twelve years
ago from New Zealand in a ship of their own, containing not only their
household goods, but also some valuable sheep. Thus fitted out they were
sailing over the world, looking for such a little empire to own as they
found in Niihau; and here they settled, selling their ship; and here they
remain, prospering, and living a quiet, peaceful, Arcadian life, with
cattle and sheep on many hills, and with a pleasant, hospitable house,
where children and grandchildren are clustered together, and where the
stranger receives the heartiest of welcomes. It was a curious adventure to
undertake, this sailing over the great Pacific to seek out a proper home;
and I did not tire of listening to the account of their voyage and their
settlement in this new and out-of-the-way land, from the cheery and
delightful grandmother of the family, a Scotch lady, full of the sturdy
character of her country people, and altogether one of the pleasantest
acquaintances I made on the Islands.

[Illustration: WAIALUA FALLS, ISLAND OF KAUAI.]

Kauai has many German residents, mostly, like these Scotch people I
have spoken of, persons of education and culture, who have brought their
libraries with them, and on whose tables and shelves you may see the best
of the recent literature, as well as the best of the old. A New Yorker who
imagines, cockney-like, that civilization does not reach beyond the sound
of Trinity chimes is startled out of this foolish fancy when he finds
among the planters and missionaries here, as in other parts of these
Islands, men and women of genuine culture maintaining all the essential
forms as well as the realities of civilization; yet living so free
and untrammeled a life that he who comes from the high-pressure social
atmosphere of New York can not help but envy these happy mortals, who seem
to have the good without the worry of civilization, and who have caught
the secret of how to live simply and yet gently.

Kauai has four or five sugar-plantations, some of which are now
successful, though they were not always so. Success has been attained by
a resolute expenditure of money in irrigation ditches, which have made
the land yield constant and remunerative crops. But I could see here, as
elsewhere, that close and careful management--the eye of the master and
the hand