the cigarette-and
cigar-smoking officers and civilians on the broad verandas or in the
smoking room.

Ah Chun occupied a unique position in Honolulu. Though he did not appear
in society, he was eligible anywhere. Except among the Chinese merchants
of the city, he never went out; but he received, and he always was the
centre of his household and the head of his table. Himself peasant, born
Chinese, he presided over an atmosphere of culture and refinement second
to none in all the islands. Nor were there any in all the islands too
proud to cross his threshold and enjoy his hospitality. First of all,
the Achun bungalow was of irreproachable tone. Next, Ah Chun was a
power. And finally, Ah Chun was a moral paragon and an honest business
man. Despite the fact that business morality was higher than on the
mainland, Ah Chun outshone the business men of Honolulu in the scrupulous
rigidity of his honesty. It was a saying that his word was as good as
his bond. His signature was never needed to bind him. He never broke
his word. Twenty years after Hotchkiss, of Hotchkiss, Morterson Company,
died, they found among mislaid papers a memorandum of a loan of thirty
thousand dollars to Ah Chun. It had been incurred when Ah Chun was Privy
Councillor to Kamehameha II. In the bustle and confusion of those
heyday, money-making times, the affair had slipped Ah Chun's mind. There
was no note, no legal claim against him, but he settled in full with the
Hotchkiss' Estate, voluntarily paying a compound interest that dwarfed
the principal. Likewise, when he verbally guaranteed the disastrous
Kakiku Ditch Scheme, at a time when the least sanguine did not dream a
guarantee necessary--"Signed his cheque for two hundred thousand without
a quiver, gentlemen, without a quiver," was the report of the secretary
of the defunct enterprise, who had been sent on the forlorn hope of
finding out Ah Chun's intentions. And on top of the many similar actions
that were true of his word, there was scarcely a man of repute in the
islands that at one time or another had not experienced the helping
financial hand of Ah Chun.

So it was that Honolulu watched his wonderful family grow up into a
perplexing problem and secretly sympathized with him, for it was beyond
any of them to imagine what he was going to do with it. But Ah Chun saw
the problem more clearly than they. No one knew as he knew the extent to
which he was an alien in his family. His