Each house has a large garden or "yard," with lawns of
bright perennial greens and banks of blazing, many-tinted flowers,
and lines of Dracaena, and other foliage plants, with their great
purple or crimson leaves, and clumps of marvellous lilies,
gladiolas, ginger, and many plants unknown to me. Fences and walls
are altogether buried by passion-flowers, the night-blowing Cereus,
and the tropaeolum, mixed with geraniums, fuchsia, and jessamine,
which cluster and entangle over them in indescribable profusion. A
soft air moves through the upper branches, and the drip of water
from miniature fountains falls musically on the perfumed air. This
is midwinter! The summer, they say, is thermometrically hotter, but
practically cooler, because of the regular trades which set in in
April, but now, with the shaded thermometer at 80 degrees and the
sky without clouds, the heat is not oppressive.
The mixture of the neat grass houses of the natives with the more
elaborate homes of the foreign residents has a very pleasant look.
The "aborigines" have not been crowded out of sight, or into a
special "quarter." We saw many groups of them sitting under the
trees outside their houses, each group with a mat in the centre,
with calabashes upon it containing poi, the national Hawaiian dish,
a fermented paste made from the root of the kalo, or arum
esculentum.
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