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WOMEN AS THEY ARE AND SHOULD BE.

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ing that does not accomplish this, fails entirely, how much soever knowledge may be communicated, or art learned.

Let an Hawaiian female be only modest and industrious, and she will make a neat and prudent wife, and a better mother than ever Hawaiian boy has had yet. Many such, we cannot but hope, will be made under the management of the teachers of this institution. May God give them wisdom and skill, and permit them to see all, on whom they have bestowed pains, examples of womanly propriety to the females of Hawaii-nei!

It is impossible to see them going in a body to the sanctuary, uniformly apparelled, sitting orderly by themselves, attending, many of them, diligently to sermons, that they may sustain an examination on them, and looked upon with regard and interest by the rest of the congregation, without being convinced that the indirect influence of the institution is beneficial and great. Perhaps it is to be attributed to this, that the common schools in this district are reported the present year more favorably of, and as in a better state than in any other field from which a report is made.

There are twenty-five schools, and eight hundred and eight scholars. I have had the pleasure of seeing them collected at three or four different points for a quarterly examination by the pastor, and kahu-kula, (school superintendent.) They are dressed at such times in their best "bib and tucker," which, with the

boys, is a shirt and pantaloons, with perhaps a cotton handkerchief over their shoulders for a kihei; with the girls, their mother's, or some makamaka's, best robe and feather, lei, (wreath,) and any thing for a kihei they can muster, either a nice white kapa, or a breadth of silk, or something figured.

The prettiest thing of all is their flower-wreaths, especially those made of the yellow ilima. They string the blossoms on a stem of grass with much taste and skill, and no little patience. With these the girls wreathe their heads sometimes like a turban, and hang them round their necks, which, though they be redskinned, are sometimes erect and beautiful as that famous one of Mary Queen of Scots.

I like the Hawaiians for their fondness for flowers, or, rather, for decorating their persons with them. It is a pity a custom so innocent in itself should ever have to be discountenanced by their religious teachers. Some have thought it necessary to do so, because wearing of leis has been abused to purposes of vanity, and meretricior allurement and display. We can hardly believe, however, that much harm can ensue from putting lowers or feathers to such a use, while the taste is baght thereby into pleasurable exercise, and so far crtainly is good.

And while the bonnets of foreign ladies, now and then,. perhaps, of missionaries, are seen fluttering with gay ribbons and plumes, it is hardly fair to put a tabu on birds' feathers and wild-flowers for the heads of Hawaiian women. There are ways of wearing them which, it is

THE LESSONS TAUGHT BY FLOWERS.

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said, have a vicious meaning, for which church members have been sometimes disciplined; with how much propriety, the good men that have done it, and who may be supposed to know most of native customs and character, are the best judges. Poor human nature is wont to abuse to its injury almost every thing, whether evil or good. But I think the tempter must be brought to an unusual pinch before he would have recourse to so innocent and sweet a thing as flowers, whereby to teach men how to tempt and vitiate one another.

One whom I greatly honor and love says, though not for the world's eye, that

Flowers are books-the sweetest leaves

That Nature's wisdom ever weaves:

And wise and gentle hearts we need,

Their deep and varied lore to read.

Some melancholy lessons, too,

We would not have them hide from view.

And it was the queen of English female poets that sang of the flowers,

Bring flowers, fresh flowers, for the bride to wear !
They were born to blush in her shining hair.
She is leaving the home of her childhood's mirth,
She hath bid farewell to her father's hearth:

Her place is now by another's side,-
Bring flowers for the locks of the fair

young bride!

But farewell for a while to flowers, and to the maidens that wear them, for we are on a horseback excursion of thirty-five miles from Wailuku to the top of

Hale-a-ka-la, The House of the Sun. We make up our party at Rev. Mr. Green's, who resides two thousand feet up the gentle declivity of the mountain. From his house, at five in the morning, we start for the summit of the extinct volcano, eight of us in all mounted, and one native on foot.

To within five miles of the top, as far as an old bullock-pen, into which the Spaniards used to chase wild cattle, the path is distinct and quite good, and the ascent not steep. Thence it is very rugged and stony without any legible track.

Hills peep o'er hills,

And Alps o'er Alps arise,

as we advance; and when we think we see and shall soon reach the last, lo! there runs up before us another ridge-like wall, equally distant and high.

At length, by half past ten, we reach the crater's brim, and, dismounting from our tired horses, those of us who have been able to urge them so far, advance to the edge, and there suddenly opens upon us a deep, wide pit, twenty-five or thirty miles in circumference, and two or three thousand feet deep. We counted in it fourteen or sixteen basins of old volcanoes, volcano within volcano, as a wheel within a wheel. There are also two vast openings or sluice-gates in the lava walls, one on the northeast, and one on the southeast, out of which the molten lava and sand once poured down to the sea.

In this great pit a man would be dwarfed to the size

SPECTACLE OF GLORY FROM THE CRATER. 111

of an infant; and great silver-sword plants, (ensis argentea,) as large as a half-bushel, looked, away down on the sides of those volcanic cones, like little white pebbles. Its walls and ramparts are as huge and high, for aught I know, as those "Hell-bounds" in our great English Epic, that kept within the rebel angels. And if a man should once get down there, methinks he would look up oppressed, and feel like Sterne's starling, "I can't get out."

But if the view of the now extinct crater, once rolling its fiery surges, and vomiting from a score of mouths its igneous bowels, was vast and strange, a spectacle of far more grandeur was that immediately presented, as we looked afar over the crater to the northeast and west-a spectacle which neither the tongue, nor pen of angels or men, could ever so describe as to give to any mind an adequate conception of its magnificence and glory.

"O, 'twas an unimaginable sight!

Clouds, mists, streams, watery rocks, and emerald turf,
Clouds of all tincture, rocks, and sapphire sky,
Confused, commingled, mutually inflamed,

In fleecy folds voluminous enwrapped."

We had seen for a long time, as we kept ascending, the clouds gathering and rolling up beneath us at a distance of four thousand feet; for, owing to its rarification, the air is incapable of sustaining clouds beyond a certain height, and the principal masses are held at an average elevation above the level of the sea of five thousand two hundred and eighty feet, or one mile.

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