My Hawaiian oracle, Kahéle, having posed himself in compact and chubby grace, awaited his golden opportunity, which was not long a-coming. I sat on the steps of L----'s verandah, and yawned frightfully, because life was growing tedious, and I did not know exactly what to do next. L----'s house was set in the nicest kind of climate, at the foot of a great mountain, just at that altitude where the hot air stopped dancing, though it was never cool enough to shut a door, or to think of wearing a hat for any other purpose than to keep the sun out of one's eyes. L----'s veranda ran out into vacancy as blank as cloudless sky and shadowless sea could make it; in fact, all that the eye found to rest upon was the low hill jutting off from one corner of the house beyond a jasmine in blossom; and under the hill a flat-sailed schooner rocking in a calm. I think there was nothing else down the slope of the mountain but tangled yellow grass, that grew brown and scant as it crept into the torrid zone, a thousand feet below us, and there it had not the courage to come out of the earth at all; so the picture ended in a blazing beach, with warm waves sliding up and down it, backed by blue-watery and blue-airy space for thousands and thousands of miles.
Why should not a fellow yawn over the situation? especially as L---- was busy and could not talk much, and L----'s books were as old as the hills and a good deal drier.
Having yawned, I turned toward Kahéle, and gnashed my teeth. The little rascal looked knowing; his hour had come. He fired off in broken English, and the effect was something like this:--
"Suppose we sleep in House of the Sun,--we make plenty good sceneries?"
Kahéle's little lump of a nose was jerked up toward the great mountain at the back of L----'s house. "Haleakala!"[A] cried he, triumphantly, for he saw he had resurrected my interest in life, and he felt that he had a thing or two worth showing, a glimpse of which might content me with this world, dull as I found it just then. "Haleakala--the House of the Sun--up before us," said Kahéle.
[A] Haleakala, an extinct crater in the Sandwich Islands, supposed to be the largest in the world.
"Make a good climb up, and go in from the top!"