liuokalani and a hundred others went to pay her their
respects. It was at a reception she was giving to Liliuokalani--which,
by the way, she gave in the hope of arousing favourable interest in
the Queen's mission to Washington to seek justice--that she first met
David Bispham, and first heard him sing, too, in a rather unusual way.
Some one--I think it was Gelett Burgess--said to the Queen, "Will your
Majesty please issue a royal command? We have never heard one."
Whereupon her Majesty pointed her finger at Bispham and said, "The
bard is commanded to sing!"

When the Stevenson Society of San Francisco held their yearly meetings
of commemoration on Louis's birthday she was the honoured guest, and
it was characteristic of her to remember to invite his old friend,
Jules Simoneau of Monterey, for these occasions. When she first asked
the old man to come he shrugged his shoulders and said: "What! Will
you take me to see your fine friends in this old blouse? I have no
other clothes." "Your clothes are nothing," she replied. "All that
matters to me is that you were my husband's dear friend." So he went,
and was entertained in her house with as much consideration as though
he had been a prince of the blood. On the evening of the dinner given
by the Society at the old restaurant which had once been frequented by
Stevenson, she took Simoneau in her carriage, and when a fashionable
young lady in her party objected to this arrangement she was rebuked
by being sent home in a street-car.

Among other public functions to which she was invited to do her honour
as the widow of Stevenson was a banquet given by the St. Andrews
Society, which included nearly all the Scotchmen in San Francisco. In
conversation with three of them she remarked that she had the sugar
bowl from which Bobby Burns had sweetened his toddy when he went to
see Robert Stevenson,[69] and, after inviting them to call, promised
to mix a toddy for them and sweeten it from the same historic sugar
bowl. About a week later the three appeared, exceedingly Scotch in
their long black coats and silk hats, and each carrying a formal
bouquet. They had a delightful time, drinking their toddy, which was
duly sweetened from the hallowed bowl, and reciting Burns's poems to
her in such broad Scotch that she could not understand a word of it.
But she loved the sound of it all the same.

[Footnote 69: Robert Louis Stevenson's grandfather.]

It was soon after her return