Page:Fifty Candles (1926).djvu/124

 say, it happened twenty years ago, in December, 1898. I was a kid of twelve then. I’d gone to the Islands with my father aboard his bark, the Edna-May; he owned a fleet of sailing vessels that made Honolulu from this port. Every detail of that trip stands out in my memory, clear-cut to this day. And no wonder, for I was an imaginative boy, a great reader, and I was standing for the first time on the threshold of the South Seas.

“The day of which I speak was to be our last in port. Late in the morning my father invited me to go ashore with him for lunch. We went from the dock to King Street, and I was all eyes, drinking in Honolulu for the last time. Even in those days it was the melting-pot of the Pacific; a dozen races mingled on the pavement. But you don’t want a description of the town. However, the picture returns and thrills me even now. We turned off King Street, into Fort. In front of a building that housed the Rh