to run to and around Hawaii, making this trip in one week, for twothirds of the subsidy. The bill also provides for a steamer to run to Kauai, touching at every port, and making the circuit of that island once a week for five thousand dollars a year. One hundred and forty-eight Japanese laborers arrived on the 18th of June. Six were accompanied by their wives. Their wages are fixed by contract at four dollars per month, with food, clothing, medical attendance, and free passage at the end of three years to Japan. Besides being more intelligent than the Chinese coolies hitherto imported, they appear healthier, and are more docile. The vacancy on the Supreme Bench occasioned by the death of Judge Robertson, has been filled by the appointment of Gen. A. S. Hartwell to the position. The General is a Massachusetts man, and a graduate of Harvard College and Law School. During the war he served as Colonel of one of the Massachusetts colored regiments, and in other situations of responsibility, and near its close was breveted Brigadier. A reception was given by the Hawaiian Club a few weeks ago in honor of Gen. Hartwell, at the residence of Gen. Marshall at Riverside; at which were assembled the friends of the Club, old Island residents, and people interested in the Islands to the number of forty or fifty. The day was a perfect one, and with the pleasant meetings of acquaintances, the interchange of news and opinions, the spread of good things under the trees, together with croquet, boating, etc., all heightened by the friendly informality which characterizes the Club reunions, the afternoon passed only too quickly Gen. Hartwell sailed for the Islands the middle of August: away. the best wishes of his friends for his success go with him. J. W. Austin, Esq., has also been appointed to the Supreme Bench, in place of Judge Davis, resigned. It were pleasant to step out of the mud of politics for a little season, did not the next step launch us into a chaos of spouting lava, earthquakes, heavy surf, smoke, bad gases, and rivers of thick mud; a combination worse than any two of Pharaoh's plagues. The earthquake and eruption which took place on Hawaii, at about the first of last April, was one of the great events of the century and geologists, as they learn more about it, are disposed to regard it as one of the greatest earthquakes on record the world over. About a hundred people were killed; and the amount of property that was destroyed was very great. Contributions of money and clothes were made from different parts of the Islands for the sufferers, in which good work Queen Emma was very active. The King also did much to help them with gifts of clothes and the cheering influence of his presence and sympathy. It seems most desirable that a scientific expedition should be organized to explore the scene of the earthquake and eruption. It is with peculiar feelings that we chronicle the loss of the schooner Excel, or Moi wahine, as she was more familiarly known. She was no ordinary craft, and was so old, years ago, that we never found any one who knew where she was built, or when. Before her advent at the Islands fifteen or twenty years ago, she did good service as a fishing smack on the Banks of Newfoundland. Of her history previous to that time we have no knowledge. At the time of her loss she was not the same vessel that she was when she first arrived. It is perhaps safe to say that she has been rebuilt half a dozen times. For the last ten years she has been in a chronic state of leakiness, and often when we have been compelled to take passage in her, we have wished that, ere we should have occasion to risk our valuable lives in her sugar-packed hull again, she might gently shiver her timbers against some friendly rock-bound coast, and decay where the winds and waves would ever chant over her a fitting requiem; but she was doomed to a more cruel fate. Blown out to sea from a shelterless guano island she has never since been heard from. She was a fair sailer, a capital sea-boat, and led a career of honor and usefulness. Two of the American missionaries have died within the last year: Rev. Asa Thurston, one of the pioneers, who landed at the Islands in the year 1820; and Rev. E. Johnson of Kauai, who was sent as delegate to the Micronesian Missions, and died on the Morning Star just before reaching the island of Ebon, where he was buried. We also record the death of two old and well-known residents; Capt. B. F. Snow of Honolulu, and Mr. Parker, the patriarch of Hawaii. We have lately had the pleasure of examining specimen copies of the revised edition of the Hawaiian Bible; it is published in octavo form for common use, and with wide margins as a quarto for the pulpit. The type is distinct, the paper clear, and the pages beautifully printed: there are full marginal references to both Old and New Testaments. As a translation, its improvement on the old edition is plainly noticeable; mistakes are corrected, and the language in places is more idiomatic. Mr. Clark, formerly of Honolulu, has had the supervision of the publishing of the work. It was printed at the New York Bible House. We congratulate the Hawaiian public on the acquisition of so perfect a Bible. Another publication on the Hawaiian Islands has just come out ; we refer to a translation of Jules Remy's "Tales of a Venerable Savage," by William T. Brigham, Esq., of Boston. Parts of the work have been translated before, and printed in the Honolulu papers, but it has never been published in a compact form. We find the translation to be very literal, and the style is easy and pleasant to the reader. It is published in a pamphlet form, and bears on the title-page a unique vignette, which is a faithful representation of Kamehameha's old war idol, now in the cabinet of Oahu College. Historically, and as throwing light on Hawaiian customs, the work is most valuable, and Mr. Brigham deserves the thanks of the public for the undertaking. As only two hundred copies were printed, copies are now comparatively scarce. We have watched with interest the advent of a new public journal at Honolulu, the "Maile Quarterly." As its name denotes, it is published once a quarter, and is devoted to religion, literature and education, and to social and political questions pertaining to the Pacific Islands. There is a place in the literature of the Islands which needs to be filled by just such a periodical as this in its prospectus proposes to be; and the opportunity which the publishers of the Maile Quarterly have for making it a necessity, and gaining for it a wide and permanent influence, is too good to be lost. Mr. Horace Mann's valuable "Enumeration of Hawaiian Plants" is soon to be followed by a complete Flora of the Islands, so that the people of Hawaii will have no excuse for any ignorance of the wonders of the vegetable world around them. |