HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII 



fore noon. We passed a pleasant forenoon strolling 

 along the tree-fringed brink, looking down eight or 

 nine hundred feet upon its black lava floor, and 

 plucking ohelo berries, which grew there abund- 

 antly, a kind of large, red huckleberry that one could 

 eat out of hand, but that one could not get excited 

 over. They were better in a pie than in the hand. 

 Their name seemed to go well with the suggestion of 

 the scenes amid which they grew. Kilauea is a round 

 extinct crater about three miles across and seven 

 or eight hundred feet deep. It has been the scene 

 of terrific explosions in past ages, but it has now 

 dwindled to the small active crater of Halemaumau, 

 which is sunk near the middle of it like a huge pot, 

 two hundred or more feet deep and a thousand feet 

 across. 



In the mid-afternoon a party of eight or ten of us 

 on horseback set out to visit the volcano. The trail 

 led down the broken and shelving side of the crater, 

 amid trees and bushes, till it struck the floor of lava 

 at the bottom. In going down I was aware all the 

 time of a beautiful bird-song off on my left, a song 

 almost as sweet as that of our hermit thrush, but of 

 an entirely different order. I think it was the song 

 of one of the honey-suckers, a red bird with black 

 wings that in flight looked like our scarlet tanager. 



Our course took us out over the cracked and con- 

 torted lava-beds, where no green thing was growing. 

 The forms of the lava-flow suggested mailed and 



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