LETTER XVII. 



Beautiful Lahaina ! — The Leper Island — Sister Phcebe — A Family Schoo 

 — Gentle Discipline — Local Difficulties. 



Str. Kilauea. 



, . . I have been spending the day at Lahaina on Maui, 

 on my way from Kawaihae to Honolulu. Lahaina is thoroughly 

 beautiful and tropical looking, with its white latticed houses 

 peeping out from under coco palms, breadfruit, candlenut, 

 tamarinds, mangoes, bananas, and oranges, with the brilliant 

 green of a narrow strip of sugar-cane for a background, and 

 above, the flushed mountains of Eeka, riven here and there by 

 cool green chasms, rise to a height of 6000 feet. Beautiful 

 Lahaina ! It is an oasis in a dazzling desert, straggling for 

 nearly two miles along the shore, but compressed into a width 

 of half a mile. It was a great missionary centre, as well as a 

 great whaling station, but the whalers have deserted it, and 

 missions are represented now only by the seminary of La- 

 hainaluna on the hillside. An old palace, the remains of a fort, 

 a custom-house, and a native church are the most conspicuous 

 buildings. The stores and dwellings of the foreign residents 

 are scattered along the shore, and the light frame house, with 

 its green verandah, buried amid gorgeous exotics and shaded 

 by candlenut and breadfruit, looks as seemly and in keeping as 

 in far-off Massachusetts, under hickory and elm. The grass 

 houses of the natives cluster along the waters' edge, or in lanes 

 dark with mangoes and bananas, and fragrant with gardenia 

 fringing the cane-fields. These, with adobe houses and walls, 

 the flush of the soil, the gaudy dresses of the natives, the 

 masses of brilliant exotics, the intense blue of the sea, and the 

 dry blaze of the tropical heat, give a decided individuality to 

 the capital of Maui. The heat of Lahaina is a dry, robust, 

 bracing, joyous heat. The mercury stood at 8o°, the usual 

 temperature of the " flare " or sea level on the leeward side of 

 the islands ; but I strolled through the cane-fields and along 

 the glaring beach without suffering the least inconvenience from 



