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HISTORY AND STATISTICS OF THE STATION. 145

Their first houses, also, were consumed by fire, with a great part of their furniture and goods. Two commodious stone dwelling-houses are now erected, and ten or twelve acres of excellent land given by government, are nearly inclosed.

To those who love to be out of the world, and who have health and heart to devote themselves to missionary work, the location presents many attractions. And for those who would like to visit there, a man need not be the son of a prophet to predict a cordial reception, pleasant society, and hospitable fare.

Mr. Rice, who was located here in 1841, to have charge of the schools, and who has himself taught an interesting school of boys, is removed to Punahou, to be devoted there to the children of the mission. He had built a fine house, which he has never occupied, and was just getting ready to labor with advantage. Rev. Mr. Whittlesey and wife have auspiciously entered into his labors; and, with a new teacher, a new religious interest has been awakened among the people.

Mr. Conde is pastor of the native church, which numbers five hundred members, having been organized in 1838 with fourteen. The walls of a new stone meeting-house are commenced, which is to be one hundred and fifteen feet long, and forty-eight wide. Many of the stones are from an old heiau. It is to be built by the people and pastor, and by contributions from other churches. The population of Mr. Conde's diocese (which from extreme end to end is sixty miles) is

about eight thousand. Seventeen hundred children are in schools. The missionary makes among them three or four tours a year.

The medical wants of the people are many, and to supply them is a great tax upon the pastor. The room where he meets the sick, and transacts business with the natives, he turns, when necessary, into a hospital. If an adult or child comes from a distance, that needs to be treated medicinally, he has a bed spread for them, and there administers proper food and medicine, until they are well or die. It is a practice which at all the stations might save many lives, especially of young children.

But it would necessarily involve an outlay of time and money that can rarely be commanded. A physician, to itinerate between Hana and Wailuku, and the Island of Molokai, is very much needed, and could do great good. If the Board send out celibates, they had better be physicians, who could go untrammelled from station to station, to assist and heal the sick.

The physical features of this region are more like some parts of the windward side of the great Island of Hawaii, than any thing that is to be seen elsewhere in the group. Cascades far up in the mountains, four or five thousand feet, and leaping precipices at once of eight hundred feet; numerous conical, green-sward hills, the work of old volcanoes; gentle slopes and copses, and woody dells; tracts of lava scarcely at all

PRODUCTIVENESS OF LAVA GROUNDS.

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disintegrated, yet covered with a luxuriant growth of grass, wild cane, the ki-plant, wauke, noni, and the hala-tree, (pandanus.)

The long leaves of the latter (which is a species of the palm, somewhat like the Palmetto of South Carolina) furnish the material for thatching; and the body of the male tree, which is very hard, and here grows tall and large, is used for posts.

Benignant Nature, on the windward side of these Islands, where there is much rain, soon mantles over the scarred path of an eruption with verdure. Mr. Coan told me that sweet potatoes were already growing in Puna, in the pathway of the lava of 1840; the natives having made basins in some parts of the loose lava, by taking out a few of the stones, putting in a little sand and grass, dropping a potato, and then covering it with dry grass. It soon makes for itself a mold, and shoots out its vines, and they raise* in this way the most mealy potatoes.

These, and upland kalo and bananas, are at present

* The method of cultivating Sweet Potatoes at the Sandwich Islands may very properly give a hint to agriculturists elsewhere. It answers more nearly to the process sometimes called mulching, than to any other practice known in the tillage of England or America. An American horticulturist thus describes the application of a similar process to the cultivation of gooseberries :

"The English gooseberry has always hitherto mildewed here; and I have been familiar with bushes of the best sorts for many years, without ever being able to gather any perfect fruit.

I have lately mulched some old bushes which had hitherto borne this worthless fruit. I covered the surface of the ground under them

the chief agricultural products of this region, although almost any thing may be made to grow, the soil being a comparatively recent decomposition of lava, exceedingly productive all the way up from the sea-side to the top of the mountain, the ascent of which is here so gradual and smoothly carpeted with green, that you can ride on horseback quite up to the clouds.

In a

Directly opposite the mission premises, which are only forty or fifty rods from the sea, there rises a high volcanic bluff four hundred and fifty feet, being the easternmost point of Maui, called Kauwiki. cave at its base, which I have visited, the now worldknown Queen Kaahumanu, whose portrait faces the title of this volume, first saw the light, in a time of

war.

In one of his preaching tours through this region, before there was a resident missionary, Mr. Armstrong called at this spot, and, from his acquaintance with the facts of history, he very naturally penned his meditations in these words :-"An individual is born at Hana, the very end of the earth, (for the house stood on the very extremity of the island, and not two rods from the water's edge,) of high, but heathen parents; brought up from childhood in perfect familiarity with all that is corrupting, degrading, hardening, and darkening; con

a foot deep with wet, half-rotten straw, extending this mulching as the branches grew.

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'Imagine my delight at finding the gooseberries on the bushes so mulched ripening off finely, the fruit twice as large as I have ever seen it before, and quite fair and free from mildew."

THE TWO EXTREMES OF HEATHENISM.

149

sequently, became one of the worst of human kindhaughty, filthy, lewd, tyrannical, cruel, wrathful, murderous, and almost every thing else that is bad. So she lived for perhaps fifty years; and then, while sitting Queen of this nation, feared and flattered by all, the grace of God reached her heart, and she put off the old man, with his deeds. She reigned a few years as a Christian, constraining the very enemies of truth to admire her integrity, her regard for the poor, and her wisdom as a ruler, and died in 1832, praising God and the Lamb."

Some of her last words audible were, as translated, thus: "I will go to Jesus, and shall be comforted.

Lo, here am I, O Jesus:

Grant me thy gracious smile!"

Well may we say, Wonderful, wonderful, to such an epitome of history as hers was from her cave to her grave! In this remarkable Hawaiian Queen, and the no less remarkable Hawaiian Preacher, we have exemplified at once the moral Heart of the Pacific, as it was and as it is. Two things here are almost equally strange in the Kingdom of Nature and the Kingdom of Grace. One is, that the volcano of depravity should ever have become extinct so entirely, and at about the same time, in those two extreme ends of heathensm, the despot Kaahumanu, and the slave Bartimeus! The other is, how, why, or when the belching volcano, at the foot of which Kaahumanu was born, ceased to burn.

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