Of course none but a happy ending of the story would
be accepted by the jury; the finish must find Brown
in high credit with the ladies, his behavior without
blemish, his modesty unwounded, his character for self
sacrifice maintained, the Old People rescued through
him, their benefactor, all the party proud of him,
happy in him, his praises on all their tongues.
We tried to arrange this, but it was beset with persistent
and irreconcilable difficulties. We saw that
Brown’s shyness would not allow him to give
up the lap-robe. This would offend Mary and her
mother; and it would surprise the other ladies, partly
because this stinginess toward the suffering Old People
would be out of character with Brown, and partly because
he was a special Providence and could not properly
act so. If asked to explain his conduct, his
shyness would not allow him to tell the truth, and
lack of invention and practice would find him incapable
of contriving a lie that would wash. We worked
at the troublesome problem until three in the morning.
Meantime Mary was still reaching for the lap-robe.
We gave it up, and decided to let her continue to
reach. It is the reader’s privilege to
determine for himself how the thing came out.
CHAPTER III.
It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do
right.
—Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s New Calendar.
On the seventh day out we saw a dim vast bulk standing
up out of the wastes of the Pacific and knew that
that spectral promontory was Diamond Head, a piece
of this world which I had not seen before for twenty-nine
years. So we were nearing Honolulu, the capital
city of the Sandwich Islands—those islands
which to me were Paradise; a Paradise which I had
been longing all those years to see again. Not
any other thing in the world could have stirred me
as the sight of that great rock did.
In the night we anchored a mile from shore.
Through my port I could see the twinkling lights of
Honolulu and the dark bulk of the mountain-range that
stretched away right and left. I could not make
out the beautiful Nuuana valley, but I knew where
it lay, and remembered how it used to look in the
old times. We used to ride up it on horseback
in those days —we young people—and
branch off and gather bones in a sandy region where
one of the first Kamehameha’s battles was fought.
He was a remarkable man, for a king; and he was also
a remarkable man for a savage. He was a mere
kinglet and of little or no consequence at the time
of Captain Cook’s arrival in 1788; but about
four years afterward he conceived the idea of enlarging
his sphere of influence. That is a courteous
modern phrase which means robbing your neighbor—for
your neighbor’s benefit; and the great theater
of its benevolences is Africa. Kamehameha went
to war, and in the course of ten years he whipped out
all the other kings and made himself master of every
Copyrights
Following the Equator from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
