Your guide for a journey ought to cost you a dollar a day, which includes his horse; when you stop for the day he unsaddles your horses and ties them out in a grass-field where they get sufficient nourishment.  For your accommodation at a native house, you ought to pay fifty cents for each person of your party, including the guide.  The proprietor of the Honolulu hotel is very obliging and readily helps you to make all arrangements for horses and guides; and if you have brought any letters of introduction, or make acquaintances in the place, you will find every body ready to assist you.  Riding is the pleasantest way of getting about; but on Oahu the roads are sufficiently good to drive considerable distances, and carriages are easily obtainable.

One of the pleasant surprises which meet a northern traveler in these islands is the number of strange dishes which appear on the table and in the bill of fare.  Strawberries, oranges—­the sweetest and juiciest I have eaten anywhere, except perhaps in Rio de Janeiro—­bananas and cocoa-nuts, you have at will; but besides these there are during the winter months the guava, very nice when it is sliced like a tomato and eaten with sugar and milk; taro, which is the potato of the country and, in the shape of poi, the main subsistence of the native Hawaiian; bread-fruit; flying-fish, the most tender and succulent of the fish kind; and, in their season, the mango, the custard-apple, the alligator-pear, the water-melon, the rose-apple, the ohia, and other fruits.

Taro, when baked, is an excellent and wholesome vegetable, and from its leaves is cooked a fine substitute for spinach, called luau.  Poi also appears on your hotel table, being the national dish, of which many foreigners have become very fond.  It is very fattening and easily digested, and is sometimes prescribed by physicians to consumptives.  As you drive about the suburbs of Honolulu you will see numerous taro patches, and may frequently see the natives engaged in the preparation of poi, which consists in baking the root or tuber in underground ovens, and then mashing it very fine, so that if dry it would be a flour.  It is then mixed with water, and for native use left to undergo a slight fermentation.  Fresh or unfermented poi has a pleasant taste; when fermented it tastes to me like book-binder’s paste, and a liking for it must be acquired rather than natural, I should say, with foreigners.

[Illustration:  Hawaiian poi dealer.]

So universal is its use among the natives that the manufacture of poi is carried on now by steam-power and with Yankee machinery, for the sugar planters; and the late king, who was avaricious and a trader, incurred the dislike of his native subjects by establishing a poi-factory of his own near Honolulu.  Poi is sold in the streets in calabashes, but it is also shipped in considerable quantities to other islands, and especially to guano islands which lie southward and westward of this group.  On these lonely islets, many of which have not even drinking-water for the laborers who live on them, poi and fish are the chief if not the only articles of food.  The fish, of course, are caught on the spot, but poi, water, salt, and a few beef cattle for the use of the white superintendents are carried from here.