tion. 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
glorifying the ten-acre kingdom that has adopted him--salary, $4,000 a
year, vast consequence, and no perquisites.

Then we have his Excellency the Imperial Minister of Finance, who handles
a million dollars of public money a ye