HOUSE, HONOLULU.]

Their patient and effective labors seem to me, now that I have seen the
results, to have been singularly undervalued at home. No intelligent
American can visit the islands and remain there even a month, without
feeling proud that the civilization which has here been created in so
marvelously short a time was the work of his country men and women; and if
you make the acquaintance of the older missionary families, you will not
leave them without deep personal esteem for their characters, as well as
admiration of their work. They did not only form a written language
for the Hawaiian race, and painfully write for them school-books, a
dictionary, and a translation of the Scriptures and of a hymn-book; they
did not merely gather the people in churches and their children into
schools; but they guided the race, slowly and with immense difficulty,
toward Christian civilization; and though the Hawaiian is no more a
perfect Christian than the New Yorker or Massachusetts man, and
though there are still traces of old customs and superstitions, these
missionaries have eradicated the grosser crimes of murder and theft so
completely, that even in Honolulu people leave their houses open all
day and unlocked all night, without thought of theft; and there is not a
country in the world where the stranger may travel in such absolute safety
as in these islands.

The Hawaiian, or Sandwich Islands, were discovered--or rediscovered, as
some say--by Captain Cook, in January, 1778, a year and a half after
our Declaration of Independence. The inhabitants were then what we call
savages--that is to say, they wore no more clothing than the climate
made necessary, and knew nothing of the Christian religion. In the
period between 1861 and 1865 this group had in the Union armies a
brigadier-general, a major, several other officers, and more than one
hundred private soldiers and seamen, and its people contributed to the
treasury of the Sanitary Commission a sum larger than that given by most
of our own States.

[Illustration: MRS. LUCY G. THURSTON.]

In 1820 the first missionaries landed on the shores of these islands, and
Mrs. Lucy G. Thurston, one of those who came in that year, still lives, a
bright, active old lady, with a shrewd wit of her own. Thirty-three years
afterward, in 1853, the American Board of Missions determined that "the
Sandwich Islands, having been Christianized, shall no longer receive aid
from the Board;" and