his folded, fingerless hands.

GOOD-BYE, JACK

Hawaii is a queer place. Everything socially is what I may call topsy-
turvy. Not but what things are correct. They are almost too much so.
But still things are sort of upside down. The most ultra-exclusive set
there is the "Missionary Crowd." It comes with rather a shock to learn
that in Hawaii the obscure martyrdom-seeking missionary sits at the head
of the table of the moneyed aristocracy. But it is true. The humble New
Englanders who came out in the third decade of the nineteenth century,
came for the lofty purpose of teaching the kanakas the true religion, the
worship of the one only genuine and undeniable God. So well did they
succeed in this, and also in civilizing the kanaka, that by the second or
third generation he was practically extinct. This being the fruit of the
seed of the Gospel, the fruit of the seed of the missionaries (the sons
and the grandsons) was the possession of the islands themselves,--of the
land, the ports, the town sites, and the sugar plantations: The
missionary who came to give the bread of life remained to gobble up the
whole heathen feast.

But that is not the Hawaiian queerness I started out to tell. Only one
cannot speak of things Hawaiian without mentioning the missionaries.
There is Jack Kersdale, the man I wanted to tell about; he came of
missionary stock. That is, on his grandmother's side. His grandfather
was old Benjamin Kersdale, a Yankee trader, who got his start for a
million in the old days by selling cheap whiskey and square-face gin.
There's another queer thing. The old missionaries and old traders were
mortal enemies. You see, their interests conflicted. But their children
made it up by intermarrying and dividing the island between them.

Life in Hawaii is a song. That's the way Stoddard put it in his "Hawaii
Noi":--

"Thy life is music--Fate the notes prolong!
Each isle a stanza, and the whole a song."

And he was right. Flesh is golden there. The native women are sun-ripe
Junos, the native men bronzed Apollos. They sing, and dance, and all are
flower-bejewelled and flower-crowned. And, outside the rigid "Missionary
Crowd," the white men yield to the climate and the sun, and no matter how
busy they may be, are prone to dance and sing and wear flowers behind
their ears and in their hair. Jack Kersdale was one of these fellows. He
was one of the busiest men I ever met. He was a sev