ale, herself a subject of the brown-skinned king, though more of
Anglo-Saxon blood ran in her veins than of Polynesian. In fact, the
random breeds in her were so attenuated that they were valued at eighths
and sixteenths. In the latter proportions was the blood of her great-
grandmother, Paahao--the Princess Paahao, for she came of the royal line.
Stella Allendale's great-grandfather had been a Captain Blunt, an English
adventurer who took service under Kamehameha I and was made a tabu chief
himself. Her grandfather had been a New Bedford whaling captain, while
through her own father had been introduced a remote blend of Italian and
Portuguese which had been grafted upon his own English stock. Legally a
Hawaiian, Ah Chun's spouse was more of any one of three other
nationalities.

And into this conglomerate of the races, Ah Chun introduced the Mongolian
mixture. Thus, his children by Mrs. Ah Chun were one thirty-second
Polynesian, one-sixteenth Italian, one sixteenth Portuguese, one-half
Chinese, and eleven thirty-seconds English and American. It might well
be that Ah Chun would have refrained from matrimony could he have
foreseen the wonderful family that was to spring from this union. It was
wonderful in many ways. First, there was its size. There were fifteen
sons and daughters, mostly daughters. The sons had come first, three of
them, and then had followed, in unswerving sequence, a round dozen of
girls. The blend of the race was excellent. Not alone fruitful did it
prove, for the progeny, without exception, was healthy and without
blemish. But the most amazing thing about the family was its beauty. All
the girls were beautiful--delicately, ethereally beautiful. Mamma Ah
Chun's rotund lines seemed to modify papa Ah Chun's lean angles, so that
the daughters were willowy without being lathy, round-muscled without
being chubby. In every feature of every face were haunting reminiscences
of Asia, all manipulated over and disguised by Old England, New England,
and South of Europe. No observer, without information, would have
guessed, the heavy Chinese strain in their veins; nor could any observer,
after being informed, fail to note immediately the Chinese traces.

As beauties, the Ah Chun girls were something new. Nothing like them had
been seen before. They resembled nothing so much as they resembled one
another, and yet each girl was sharply individual. There was no
mistaking one for another. On the