I remained several days at Koloa, and would gladly have accepted the
hospitable invitation to stay as many weeks, but for a cowardly
objection to "beating to windward" in the Jenny. The scenery in the
Koloa woods is exquisitely beautiful. Such supreme beauty produces
on me some of the effects which fine music has upon those who have
an exquisite sense of it. It speaks in a language of its own, like
music, and is equally untranslatable.
One day, the girls asked me to go with them to the forests and
return by moonlight, but they only spoke of them as the haunts of
ferns, because they supposed that I should think nothing of them
after the forests of Australia and New Zealand! They were not like
the tropical woods of Hawaii, and owe more to the exceeding
picturesqueness of the natural scenery. Hawaii is all domes and
humps, Kauai all peaks and sierras. There were deep ravines, along
which bright fern-shrouded streams brawled among wild bananas,
overarched by Eugenias, with their gory blossoms: walls of peaks,
and broken precipices, grey ridges rising out of the blue forest
gloom, high mountains with mists wreathing their spiky summits, for
a background: gleams of a distant silver sea: and the nearer many-
tinted woods were not matted together in jungle fashion, but
festooned and adorned with numberless lianas, and even the prostrate
trunks of fallen trees took on new beauty from the exquisite ferns
which covered them.
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