2 ee 
1892. | A Vacation in the Hawaiian Islands. 415 
melon in appearance when cut open, has a peculiar ‘‘squashy” 
flavor that suggested its having been kept a day too long. 
Many showy climbers are planted, some of which, like 
Stephanotis, Thunbergia and Allamanda, are superb; but there 
is one that is particularly obnoxious in color, Bougainvillea, 
whose magenta floral-bracts are an offense to the eye, form- 
ing a cataract of raw color. It looks, as some one observed, 
as if it had just come from a chemical bath. 
As soon as one gets fairly away from the city, it is at once 
seen that all the luxuriant vegetation is strange. Along the 
seashore is a plain gradually rising into low hills, both almost 
destitute of trees, except here and there a few cocoa palms 
along the shore. Of the strictly littoral plants among the 
most conspicuous is the curious Ipomeea pes-capre, withdeeply 
two-cleft leaves and purplish pink flowers. In the fertile low- 
lands near the sea are the principal cane and rice fields, which - 
with taro are the staple crops. The rice is cultivated entirely 
by Chinese, near Honolulu; but on the sugar plantations the 
Japanese are largely employed. To see a Chinese laboriously 
transplanting little handfuls of rice into straight rows, or — 
plowing in the mud and water with a primitive plow drawn 
_ by a queer Chinese buffalo are sights very foreign to an Amer- 
ican eye. Sugar cane is eminently productive in the islands, 
and, hitherto, has proved the main source of revenue; but 
now the Hawaiians are bewailing the depression caused by the 
free admission of sugar from other countries into the United 
States; as, hitherto, their product has enjoyed practically a 
monopoly of the American market, having been admitted by 
treaty free of duty. : 
I made several trips up the valleys back of the city, but 
ue Owing to the almost constant rain in many of them, these 
__ low milk-weed and the showy white A 
the most conspicuous.. As one procee 
_ two we pass between grass-covered hills, 
‘ Canna and a Clerodendron with double rosy- 
were not always agreeable. However, one is richly repaid by 
the luxuriance and variety of the vegetation. For a mile or 
or hills overgrown 
in places with the lantana, which, introduced as an ornamental 
plant, has become a great pest. This plant covers some of 
the hills with an absolutely impassable thicket and spreads 
very rapidly, so that it is a serious problem what is to be done 
with it. Of the common roadside plants, an orange and yel- 
rgemone Mexicana were 
ds farther, where more 
moi : g ickets of 
AOisture prevai variety becomes larger. Thi 
prevails, the y $ ‘s * 
