Roughing It eBook

Toward midnight a fine breeze sprang up and the schooner soon worked herself into the bay and cast anchor.  The boat came ashore for us, and in a little while the clouds and the rain were all gone.  The moon was beaming tranquilly down on land and sea, and we two were stretched upon the deck sleeping the refreshing sleep and dreaming the happy dreams that are only vouchsafed to the weary and the innocent.

CHAPTER LXXII.

In the breezy morning we went ashore and visited the ruined temple of the last god Lono.  The high chief cook of this temple—­the priest who presided over it and roasted the human sacrifices—­was uncle to Obookia, and at one time that youth was an apprentice-priest under him.  Obookia was a young native of fine mind, who, together with three other native boys, was taken to New England by the captain of a whaleship during the reign of Kamehameha I, and they were the means of attracting the attention of the religious world to their country.  This resulted in the sending of missionaries there.  And this Obookia was the very same sensitive savage who sat down on the church steps and wept because his people did not have the Bible.  That incident has been very elaborately painted in many a charming Sunday School book—­aye, and told so plaintively and so tenderly that I have cried over it in Sunday School myself, on general principles, although at a time when I did not know much and could not understand why the people of the Sandwich Islands needed to worry so much about it as long as they did not know there was a Bible at all.

Obookia was converted and educated, and was to have returned to his native land with the first missionaries, had he lived.  The other native youths made the voyage, and two of them did good service, but the third, William Kanui, fell from grace afterward, for a time, and when the gold excitement broke out in California he journeyed thither and went to mining, although he was fifty years old.  He succeeded pretty well, but the failure of Page, Bacon & Co. relieved him of six thousand dollars, and then, to all intents and purposes, he was a bankrupt in his old age and he resumed service in the pulpit again.  He died in Honolulu in 1864.

Quite a broad tract of land near the temple, extending from the sea to the mountain top, was sacred to the god Lono in olden times—­so sacred that if a common native set his sacrilegious foot upon it it was judicious for him to make his will, because his time had come.  He might go around it by water, but he could not cross it.  It was well sprinkled with pagan temples and stocked with awkward, homely idols carved out of logs of wood.  There was a temple devoted to prayers for rain—­and with fine sagacity it was placed at a point so well up on the mountain side that if you prayed there twenty-four times a day for rain you would be likely to get it every time.  You would seldom get to your Amen before you would have to hoist your umbrella.