about some such person, oh, a very long time ago, when we were little. It was some one younger than Dad or Aunt Anna, with yellow hair like hers. He used to come up to the nursery to play with us, and then all of a sudden he did n't come any more and no one talked about him, so I just forgot." Nancy had turned out the light and had gone to the window to put up the curtain when she called her sister with a sudden cry. "Oh, look!" she cried in terror, as Beatrice came to her side. The big, ramshackle building on the next block, used as a meeting-place by the workmen, was plainly visible in the dark. Its shutters were thrown back and its doors wide open, as though the air within had become stifling beyond endurance. The place was . packed with men, but no orderly company as at an ordinary meeting. They were all standing, some of them had climbed upon the benches, and every one seemed to be shouting at once. In the depths of the hall, almost beyond where they could see, somebody was waving a red flag. Presently a group of men came rushing down the steps, then more and more, until the street was filled with a darkfaced, shouting throng, waving hats, bandanas and banners, and shouting together in such a babel of foreign tongues that it was impossible to guess what they said. "It is the strike!" Beatrice gasped. "Christina did not say it would come so soon or be SO so terrible." After a moment's pause she added, "That is her brother Thorvik at the head of them all. I wonder where he is leading them and what they mean to do." The man below, looking up suddenly, saw the girls in the window and gave them a scowling look of such fierce hatred that they shrank back into the room and did not look forth again until the last of the shouting, disorderly procession had passed. Then there was a moment of silence until Nancy sniffed suddenly and declared: "I smell smoke!" Before Beatrice could answer, they heard in the next room the voice of Aunt Anna, who had been awakened by the uproar. "It is just a public meeting breaking up," Beatrice reassured her, although the sharp smell of burning wood began to fill the room as the blue smoke drifted in at the open window. There was the crack of a revolver-shot in the distance, then another that sounded nearer. A moment later there came a thunderous knocking at the door below. "Shall I go down? Shall I answer it?" Beatrice wondered desperately. She looked at Aunt Anna, thin, weak, and exhausted, lying upon the bed, she heard outside the crash of falling timbers and a great roar of voices as a shower of red sparks went sailing past the window. Then she went slowly and hesitatingly down the stairs as the knocking grew louder and louder. "THE CHILDREN HAVE SUCH FUN PLAYING IN THE STREAMS" would send a shiver over my body, and I would hurry away from the frozen seas toward the countries nearer the equator, where, in sight and reach and sound of all, there were wonderful flowers and fruits and birds. Surely a child would be very happy in such surroundings! poisonous snakes and insects and fruits,always thickest where the things you wanted grew, that their presence took all the pleasure away. Perhaps I should have become accustomed to those things if I had been born among them. As it was, I almost gave up finding such a place as I had imagined. I journeyed on, however, and then-one day I found it! If you look on your map, along the tropic of Cancer, you will see it in the Pacific Ocean, almost midway between Mexico and the southern end of the Chinese Republic-a tiny group called the Hawaiian Islands. It never gets too cold there, yet it never gets so hot that it scorches the flowers and makes people uncomfortable. The sun shines even when it rains, and the rain is so pleasant that no one carries an umbrella or stays at home because of it. There are flowers everywhere you look, more wonderfully colored and perfumed than you could possibly imagine. They grow up into the trees; they creep over the ground; they cover the houses. I remember sitting up all one night, when I was a child, to see a rare plant bloom. It was in a flower-pot and had been cared for most tenderly, eagerly watched by our whole neighborhood. It was called a night-blooming cereus. At Honolulu, I found a hedge of those plants, a mile long and higher than my head, and a mass of gorgeous blossoms. fruits, and so many entirely new kinds, that one becomes utterly bewildered. Birds! Some of them so tiny that you have to look sharp to see them, and some of them delightfully unafraid; they dart about over HONOLULU CHILDREN OFF FOR A PICNIC Did you ever have all the bananas and cocoanuts you wanted? In Hawaii, they grow thirty different kinds of bananas, and they are all better than the ones we buy at home, because they are allowed to ripen on the plants in the sunshine. You see cocoanuttrees everywhere-tall, slender palms waving "CHINESE SCHOOL-GIRLS DOING A NATIVE DANCE" gracefully above the tops of the other trees. Then there are date-palms, and the trees that grow a delicious melon with a pink meat called papayas. At one place, I looked out over a large valley completely carpeted with pineapple plants. There are so many new ways in which they serve the old familiar your head, singing an endless variety of songs, almost as gorgeously colored as the flowers they hover over. The same can be said of the butterflies and other winged insects, as far as colors go; and the best part of it is that you can go anywhere among the tangled growth of ferns and vines, hunting flowers or birds' eggs, or butterflies, with never a thought concerning poisonous snakes and insects. It was this that made me so sure I had found the children's paradise at last. Little streams gurgle down from the snowcapped mountain tops into cool, shady glens, and the children have such fun playing in them, much as the little boy is doing in the picture. The streams and the waters of the bays are full of marvelously colored fish. Perhaps you live near an aquarium. If so, you may have seen some of the strangely shaped and tinted fish from these waters. The natives have an old myth which tells how an angry god condemned a lesser god to imprisonment beneath Diamond Head, which is a barren promontory, thrust out at one end of Honolulu Harbor-about the first thing you sight in approaching the island of Oahu. From his cave below the sea, the god has to catch the fish and paint them in gay colors-a never-ending task. The water is always delightfully warm, and the boys and girls of the islands learn to be as much at home in the water as they are on the land. They become remarkably skilful in handling their surf-boards and outrigger canoes. |