able distances, and carriages are
easily obtainable.

One of the pleasant surprises which meet a northern traveler in these
islands is the number of strange dishes which appear on the table and in
the bill of fare. Strawberries, oranges--the sweetest and juiciest I have
eaten anywhere, except perhaps in Rio de Janeiro--bananas and cocoa-nuts,
you have at will; but besides these there are during the winter months the
guava, very nice when it is sliced like a tomato and eaten with sugar and
milk; taro, which is the potato of the country and, in the shape of poi,
the main subsistence of the native Hawaiian; bread-fruit; flying-fish,
the most tender and succulent of the fish kind; and, in their season,
the mango, the custard-apple, the alligator-pear, the water-melon, the
rose-apple, the ohia, and other fruits.

Taro, when baked, is an excellent and wholesome vegetable, and from its
leaves is cooked a fine substitute for spinach, called _luau_. Poi also
appears on your hotel table, being the national dish, of which many
foreigners have become very fond. It is very fattening and easily
digested, and is sometimes prescribed by physicians to consumptives.
As you drive about the suburbs of Honolulu you will see numerous taro
patches, and may frequently see the natives engaged in the preparation of
poi, which consists in baking the root or tuber in underground ovens, and
then mashing it very fine, so that if dry it would be a flour. It is
then mixed with water, and for native use left to undergo a slight
fermentation. Fresh or unfermented poi has a pleasant taste; when
fermented it tastes to me like book-binder's paste, and a liking for it
must be acquired rather than natural, I should say, with foreigners.

[Illustration: HAWAIIAN POI DEALER.]

So universal is its use among the natives that the manufacture of poi is
carried on now by steam-power and with Yankee machinery, for the sugar
planters; and the late king, who was avaricious and a trader, incurred the
dislike of his native subjects by establishing a poi-factory of his own
near Honolulu. Poi is sold in the streets in calabashes, but it is also
shipped in considerable quantities to other islands, and especially to
guano islands which lie southward and westward of this group. On these
lonely islets, many of which have not even drinking-water for the laborers
who live on them, poi and fish are the chief if not the only articles of
food. The fish, of course, are caught on