stranger. And it is a lulling, soothing, don't-carewhether-school-keeps-or-not atmosphere. It is not the climate in which to roll up one's sleeves at five A. M., and do hard mental or physical work till sundown or midnight. It is the very place to stop all things of that kind, and to do a little only, to-day, and the rest, or more, well—may be next week! It is a good place in which to dream life away, and not to be called idle, either, because you are busy watching Nature in her most beautiful holiday dress-a very queen of transcendent loveliness! Ah, yes! the lotos will grow in your brain and thrive; and you will take to a lulling dream-life, and die there, accomplishing almost nothing of your life's earnest, best work, unless you see your danger, rouse yourself, put on the brakes, and go where you can once again swim on skates, and smell the snow! ALOHA, HAWAII! ALOHA NUI! "Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, "As night drew on, and, from the crest We piled, with care, our nightly stack And filled between with curious art Whispered the old rhyme: 'Under the tree There the witches are making tea.' With nuts from brown October's wood. ALOHA, NEW ENGLAND, ALOHA NUI! THE PLUMARIA. S OMEWHERE I have read that in India, while all flowers may be offered to the lesser or inferrior gods, the plumaria only is offered to Brahma. For me, there is but one flower and one perfumethe violet. From the time of "our old home," when, as a child, in the early summertime, I would run with my chum-brother-a year younger than myself -down the road in the morning, and through "Bryon's Woods," on across the foot-bridge of Swan's Brook, past the Indian encampment (whose inmates and their basket-making were one more note in my happy childhood's music), thence straight on to the side of the hill to pull my violets wet with the dew; throwing away handful after handful, tugging little Dyke farther on, fancying, in my childish ignorance, I saw longer-stemmed and larger violets, richer in their royal color, a little farther up the hill! Nor even then quite satisfied until too warm and too tired to try to mount a step higher. Typical of life: we throw away the good we hold, climbing a little higher, toiling to reach what seems a little better, larger, sweeter, more-to-be-desired flower or fruit, and we grasp instead, too often, alas! the deception, the illusion, the mirage of the desert, the will-o'-the-wisp, the DeadSea apple of ashes. We look, and there is nothing in our hands. We have thrown away our birthright for "a mess of pottage." "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity." Violets are selling in the streets of San Francisco to-day, beautiful and cheap enough, indeed, while snow and frozen streams are in my birthplace, and the merry tinkling of sleigh-bells. But they are not quite like the violets of the dear old home. The friction of town-life-the busy whir of loom and lathe-is now upon my hill; they do not know it was the violets' land; my Indians are in their Heavenly Father's hunting-grounds; strangers are on our much-loved hearth-stone. Violets blossoming in the springtime in the "old buryingground" tell of the "new life" and the home beyond -farther on—a little higher up! "In that mansion used to be Free-hearted hospitality. His great fires up the chimney roared, An affluence of love and time! |