s.
Crossing several bright little streams, it climbed to the summit of an
eminence which commanded on the one side a prospect of a picturesque
waterfall, on the other side of a deep ravine. A river issuing from a
narrow cleft in the rock takes but one mad leap from the edge of the
precipice into the valley below, a leap of 600 feet. "First one sees the
rush of blue water, gradually changing in its descent to a cloud of
white spray, which in its turn is lost in a rainbow of mist. Imagine
that from beneath the shade of feathery palms and broad-leaved bananas
through a network of ferns and creepers you are looking upon the
Staubbach, in Switzerland, magnified in height, and with a background of
verdure-clad mountains, and you will have some idea of the fall of
Fuatawah."[32]

With no spot that she touched at in her long ocean wanderings does Lady
Brassey seem to have been so delighted as with Tahiti. "Sometimes," she
says, "I think that all I have seen must be only a long vision, and that
too soon I shall awaken to the cold reality; the flowers, the fruit, the
colours worn by every one, the whole scene and its surroundings, seem
almost too fairy-like to have an actual existence." Human nature is, of
course, the same everywhere: vice and sorrow prevail at Tahiti as in the
reeking slums and lanes of great cities. It is only of the outward
aspect of things that Lady Brassey speaks, for she saw none other, and
assuredly at Tahiti that is fair exceedingly, and well calculated to
charm a cultivated taste, to fill a refined mind with memories of
beauty.

* * * * *

From Tahiti we pass on to Hawaii, the chief island of the Sandwich
group, and the centre of a civilization that may one day influence the
direction of the great currents of commerce in the Pacific. The
_Sunbeam_ arrived there on the 22nd of December.

"It was a clear afternoon. The mountains, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa,
could be plainly seen from top to bottom, their giant crests rising
nearly 14,000 feet above our heads, their tree and fine clad slopes
seamed with deep gulches or ravines, down each of which a fertilizing
river ran into the sea. Inside the reef the white coral shore, on which
the waves seemed too lazy to break, is fringed with a belt of cocoa-nut
palms, amongst which, as well as on the hillside, the little white
houses are prettily dotted. All are surrounded by gardens, so full of
flowers that the bright patches of colo