sh words and harsher blows were struck. There
were such things as flower pots being thrown to add emphasis to winged
words. And suits for libel arose that dragged their way through the
courts and kept Honolulu agog with excitement over the revelations of the
witnesses.

In his palace, surrounded by all dear delights of the Orient, Ah Chun
smokes his placid pipe and listens to the turmoil overseas. By each mail
steamer, in faultless English, typewritten on an American machine, a
letter goes from Macao to Honolulu, in which, by admirable texts and
precepts, Ah Chun advises his family to live in unity and harmony. As
for himself, he is out of it all, and well content. He has won to peace
and repose. At times he chuckles and rubs his hands, and his slant
little black eyes twinkle merrily at the thought of the funny world. For
out of all his living and philosophizing, that remains to him--the
conviction that it is a very funny world.

THE SHERIFF OF KONA

"You cannot escape liking the climate," Cudworth said, in reply to my
panegyric on the Kona coast. "I was a young fellow, just out of college,
when I came here eighteen years ago. I never went back, except, of
course, to visit. And I warn you, if you have some spot dear to you on
earth, not to linger here too long, else you will find this dearer."

We had finished dinner, which had been served on the big _lanai_, the one
with a northerly _exposure_, though exposure is indeed a misnomer in so
delectable a climate.

The candles had been put out, and a slim, white-clad Japanese slipped
like a ghost through the silvery moonlight, presented us with cigars, and
faded away into the darkness of the bungalow. I looked through a screen
of banana and lehua trees, and down across the guava scrub to the quiet
sea a thousand feet beneath. For a week, ever since I had landed from
the tiny coasting-steamer, I had been stopping with Cudworth, and during
that time no wind had ruffled that unvexed sea. True, there had been
breezes, but they were the gentlest zephyrs that ever blew through summer
isles. They were not winds; they were sighs--long, balmy sighs of a
world at rest.

"A lotus land," I said.

"Where each day is like every day, and every day is a paradise of days,"
he answered. "Nothing ever happens. It is not too hot. It is not too
cold. It is always just right. Have you noticed how the land and the
sea breathe turn and turn about?"

Indeed, I ha