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the warmest interest in the island population. Niihau is famous for its very fine mats, and for its necklaces of shell six yards long, as well as for the extreme beauty and variety of the shells which are found there.

“The household here consists, first and foremost, of its head, Mrs Sinclair, a lady of the old Scotch type, very talented, bright, humorous, charming, with a definite character which impresses its force upon everybody; beautiful in her old age, disdaining that servile conformity to prevailing fashion which makes many old people at once ugly and contemptible; speaking English with a slight old-fashioned, refined Scotch accent, which gives naïvetè to everything she says; up to the latest novelty in theology and politics; devoted to her children and grandchildren, the life of the family, and, though upwards of seventy, the first to rise and the last to retire in the house. She was away when I came, but some days afterwards rode up on horseback, in a large drawn silk bonnet, which she rarely lays aside, as light in her figure and step as a young girl, looking as if she had walked out of an old picture, or one of Dean Ramsay’s books.

“Then there are her elder son, a bachelor; two widowed daughters with six children between them; and a tutor, a young Prussian officer, who was on Maximilian’s staff up to the time of the Queretaro disaster, and is still suffering from Mexican barbarities. The remaining daughter is married to a Norwegian gentleman, who owns and resides on the next property. So the family is together, and the property is large enough to give scope to the grandchildren as they require it.

“They are thoroughly Hawaiianised. The young people all speak Hawaiian as easily as English, and the three young men, who are superb young fellows, about six feet high, not only emulate the natives in