h frosty nights, but on Saturday night it changed,
and I have not felt anything like the heat of Sunday since I left New
Zealand, though the mercury was not higher than 91 degrees. It was
sickening, scorching, melting, unbearable, from the mere power of the
sun's rays. It was an awful day, and seemed as if it would never come
to an end. The cabin, with its mud roof under the shade of the trees,
gave a little shelter, but it was occupied by the family, and I longed
for solitude. I took the Imitation of Christ, and strolled up the
canyon among the withered, crackling leaves, in much dread of snakes,
and lay down on a rough table which some passing emigrant had left, and
soon fell asleep. When I awoke it was only noon. The sun looked
wicked as it blazed like a white magnesium light. A large tree-snake
(quite harmless) hung from the pine under which I had taken shelter,
and looked as if it were going to drop upon me. I was covered with
black flies. The air was full of a busy, noisy din of insects, and
snakes, locusts, wasps, flies, and grasshoppers were all rioting in the
torrid heat. Would the sublime philosophy of Thomas a Kempis, I
wondered, have given way under this? All day I seemed to hear in
mockery the clear laugh of the Hilo streams, and the drip of Kona
showers, and to see as in a mirage the perpetual Green of windward
Hawaii. I was driven back to the cabin in the late afternoon, and in
the evening listened for two hours to abuse of my own country, and to
sweeping condemnations of all religionists outside of the brotherhood
of "Psalm-singers." It is jarring and painful, yet I would say of
Chalmers, as Dr. Holland says of another:--

If ever I shall reach the home in heaven,
For whose dear rest I humbly hope and pray,
In the great company of the forgiven
I shall be sure to meet old Daniel Gray.

The night came without coolness, but at daylight on Monday morning a
fire was pleasant. You will now have some idea of my surroundings. It
is a moral, hard, unloving, unlovely, unrelieved, unbeautified,
grinding life. These people live in a discomfort and lack of ease and
refinement which seems only possible to people of British stock. A
"foreigner" fills his cabin with ingenuities and elegancies, and a
Hawaiian or South Sea Islander makes his grass house both pretty and
tasteful. Add to my surroundings a mighty canyon, impassable both
above and below, and walls of mountains with an opening som