Softer and more balmy grew the air every day, more and more placid and richly tinted grew the sea, till, on the morning of the sixth day, we saw ahead of us, low on the horizon, the dim outlines of the mountains of Molokai.  The island of Oahu, upon which Honolulu is situated, was soon in sight.  It was not long before we saw Diamond Head, a vast crater bowl, eight hundred feet high on its ocean side, and half a mile across, sitting there upon the shore like some huge, strange work of man’s hand, running back through the hills with a level rim, and seaward with a sloping base, brown and ribbed, and in every way unique and striking.

We were approaching a land the child of tropic seas and volcanic lava, and many of the features were new and strange to us.  The mountains looked familiar in outline, but the colors of the landscape, the soft lilacs, greens, and browns, and the whole atmosphere of the scene, were unlike anything we had ever before seen.  And Diamond Head, what a feature it was!  Had it only had a head, one could easily have seen in it a suggestion of a couchant lion, bony, huge, and tawny, looking seaward, and guarding the harbor of Honolulu which lies just behind it.  Into this harbor, in the soft morning air, our ship soon found its way, and the monotony of the vast, unpeopled sea was quickly succeeded by human scenes of the most varied and animated character, not the least novel of which were the swarms of half-amphibious native boys who surrounded the vessel as she lay at the wharf, and with brown, upturned faces and beckoning hands tempted the passengers to toss dimes into the water.  As the coins struck the surface they would dive with the ease and quickness of seals, and seize the silver apparently before it had gone a yard toward the bottom.  Holding the coins up to view between the thumb and finger, they would slip them into their mouths and solicit more.

On shore we were greeted with the music of the Royal Hawaiian Band, and a motley crowd of Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Americans, bearing colored leis, or wreaths of flowers, which they waved at friends on board, and with which they bedecked them as soon as they came off the gangplank.  It was a Babel of tongues in which the strange, vowel-choked language of the Hawaiians was conspicuous.

Honolulu is a beautiful city, clean, bright, well ordered, and well appointed,—­electric lights, good streets, electric cars, fine hotels and clubs, excellent fire protection, mountain water, libraries, parks, handsome buildings, attractive homes,—­in fact, all that we boast of in our home cities.  Embosomed in palms, with mangoes, and other tropical trees, with a profusion of gorgeously colored vines and hedges, with spacious, well-kept grounds about the large and comfortable houses in the residential portion—­these features, with the ready hospitality of the people, made our hearts warm towards it at once.