ea. We all came
on deck and took our fourteen laps--or less--around the promenade
deck before breakfast. The first two or three nights, with a sort of
congregational impulse, we drifted forward under the promenade awnings,
and sang to the accompaniment of the cornetist on the troop deck. The
soldiers sang too, and many an American negro melody, together with "On
the Road to Mandalay" and other modern favorites, floated melodiously
into the starlit silence of the Pacific. Our huge windsail flapped
or bellied as the breeze fell or rose; the waves thumped familiarly
against the sides; the masthead lantern burned clear as a star;
and the real stars swung up and down as the bowsprit curtsied to
each wave. In the intervals between songs a hush would fall upon us,
and the sea noises were like effects in a theatre.

In a few days, however, our shyness and strangeness wore off. We no
longer sang with the soldiers, but segregated ourselves into congenial
groups; and under the electric lights the promenade deck looked,
for all the world, like the piazza of a summer hotel.

CHAPTER II

From San Francisco to Honolulu

We Change Our Course and Arrive at Honolulu--The City Viewed from
the Sea--Its Mixed Population--We Are Detained Ten Days For Engine
Repairs.

When we were a week out from San Francisco and were eight hundred or
a thousand miles north of the Hawaiian Islands, the _Buford_ stopped
one evening just at sunset, and for at least twenty minutes slopped
about in the gentle swell. There is a curious sense of dulness when the
engines cease droning and throbbing; and the passengers, who had just
come up from dinner, were affected by the unusual silence. We hung over
the rail, talking in subdued tones and noting the beauty of the sunset.

Behind us the sea lay purple and dark, with the same sad, sweet
loneliness that a prairie has in the dusk; but between us and the sun
it resembled a molten mass, heaving with sinister power. Our bowsprit
pointed straight at the fiery ball hanging on the sky rim, above which
a pyramidal heaping of clouds aped the forms of temples set on rocky
heights. And from that fantastic mingling of gold and pink and yellow
the sky melted into azure streaked with pearl, and faded at the zenith
into what was no color but night--the infinity of space unlighted.

When the engines started up, the gorgeous picture swung around until
it stood on what is technically called the starboard beam, whereup