home life or sporting places in this enormous sea.  Only the flying fish disturb the silky scene and flutter with silver wings over the sparkling laces that glisten where the winds blow gently, and woo the billows to cast aside the terrors of other climes and match the sky of blue and gold in beauty; but, unlike the stars, the waves do not differ in glory, and the spread of their splendor, when they seem to roll over a conquered universe, appeals to the imagination with the solemn suggestion not that order rules but that old chaos settles in solemn peace.  The days terminate on this abyss in marvelous glories.  The glowing spectacle is not in the west alone, but the gorgeous conflagration of the palaces we build in dreams spreads all around the sky.  The scene one evening in the vicinity of the sun departing in Asia to light up the morning of the everlasting to-morrow touching America with magical riches, was that of Niagara Falls ten thousand times magnified and turned to molten gold, that burned with inconceivable luster, while the south and north and east were illuminated with strange fires and soft lights, fading and merged at last in the daffodil sky.  Then the west became as a forest of amazing growth, and the ship entered its dusky recesses like a hunter for game such as the world never saw—­and we looked upon the slow-fading purple islands that are the northern fringes of the greater one of the Philippines, and studied the rather faint and obscure Southern Cross and the stately sheen of the superb constellation of the Scorpion.  It is a pity to have to say that the Cross of the South is a disappointment—­has to be explained and made impressive by a diagram.  It is more like a kite than a cross; has a superfluous star at one corner, and no support at all of the idea of being like a cross unless it is worked up and picked into the fancy.  The North Star shines on the other side of the ship, and the Great Dipper dips its pointers after midnight, into the mass of darkness that is the sea when the sun and moon are gone.

The voyage from Honolulu to the farther Pacific was not so long that we forgot the American send-off we got in that Yankee city.  The national airs sounded forth gloriously and grand.  Flags and hankerchiefs fluttered from dense masses of spectators, and our colors were radiant above the roofs.  There was, as usual, a mist on the mountains, and over Pearl Harbor glowed the arch of the most vivid rainbow ever seen, and Honolulu is almost every day dipped in rainbows.  This was a wonder of splendor.  The water changed from a sparkling green to a darkly luminous blue.  From the moment the lofty lines of the coast—­our mountains now—­faded, till the birds came out of the west, the Pacific Ocean justified its name.  The magnificent monotony of its stupendous placidity was not broken except by a few hours of ruffled rollers that tell of agitations that, if gigantic, are remote.