and it was plain to see that the young girls were
taking note of what each other had on, as naturally as if they had always
lived in a land of Bibles and knew what churches were made for; here was
the evidence of a dawning civilization. The spectacle which the
congregation presented was so extraordinary and withal so moving, that
the missionaries found it difficult to keep to the text and go on with
the services; and by and by when the simple children of the sun began a
general swapping of garments in open meeting and produced some
irresistibly grotesque effects in the course of re-dressing, there was
nothing for it but to cut the thing short with the benediction and
dismiss the fantastic assemblage.

In our country, children play "keep house;" and in the same high-sounding
but miniature way the grown folk here, with the poor little material of
slender territory and meagre population, play "empire." There is his
royal Majesty the King, with a New York detective's income of thirty or
thirty-five thousand dollars a year from the "royal civil list" and the
"royal domain." He lives in a two-story frame "palace."

And there is the "royal family"--the customary hive of royal brothers,
sisters, cousins and other noble drones and vagrants usual to monarchy,
--all with a spoon in the national pap-dish, and all bearing such titles as
his or her Royal Highness the Prince or Princess So-and-so. Few of them
can carry their royal splendors far enough to ride in carriages, however;
they sport the economical Kanaka horse or "hoof it" with the plebeians.

Then there is his Excellency the "royal Chamberlain"--a sinecure, for his
majesty dresses himself with his own hands, except when he is ruralizing
at Waikiki and then he requires no dressing.

Next we have his Excellency the Commander-in-chief of the Household
Troops, whose forces consist of about the number of soldiers usually
placed under a corporal in other lands.

Next comes the royal Steward and the Grand Equerry in Waiting--high
dignitaries with modest salaries and little to do.

Then we have his Excellency the First Gentleman of the Bed-chamber--an
office as easy as it is magnificent.

Next we come to his Excellency the Prime Minister, a renegade American
from New Hampshire, all jaw, vanity, bombast and ignorance, a lawyer of
"shyster" calibre, a fraud by nature, a humble worshipper of the sceptre
above him, a reptile never tired of sneering at the land of his birth or