Dearest Folks:

While I’m loafing before I go to bed, I (might) just as well apply my time to a better use, and make up for some letters I never wrote.  I just listened to Harry James and had intended to get into another bridge game that is rapidly developing into a mania, but which was dispensed with tonight because of the absence of one of the foursome.  I cut the clipping from the GI sheet that is published weekly.  Of course I don’t write for it any more since I was transferred to this battery.  The usual stake is two bits a rubber, and my fortune has been diminished by a buck already.

I believe I told you before that I had raised my allotment to thirty-five dollars effective March 1.  However, it will probably be July 1 before the additional amounts will reach you.  (This is surely a poor job of typing, but this is a poor machine and not the one I regularly use.)

As is usual at about this stage of my letter I am stuck for anything more to write.  I know my letters are getting to be very brief and irritatingly drab but I do the same thing everyday and see the same sights.  Maybe I could tell you about the visit I had with some Hawaiian people about two weeks ago.  Their home is not far from camp and sits atop a small hill at the back of a two acre lawn, and surrounded on both sides by carnations, hibiscus, nasturtiums, ferns and a dozen more varieties that in my estimation are much prettier than orchids or carnations.  We were invited in with a volume of welcoming words and immediately Eddie was telling us of the history and development of the islands.  Eddie is strictly a Hawaiian gaucho or Paniolo and was taken into the family many years ago when he was getting to be the island incorrigible.  His adopter made him his chauffeur while he campaigned around the island and went to Honolulu to the Senate.  In this way he developed his flare for politics and when the old man died, succeeded in getting himself elected as a District supervisor.  Now together with the old man’s widow he attends to his estate and manages her affairs.  From what Eddie told us a campaigning in the old days of the Hawaiians was more of a vacation and one prolonged fiesta than a job of backslapping and high sounding promises.  Every where they went the people prepared a ‘’luau’ of poi, squid, oranges, pork, wild turkey, showered them with leis and put on a big hula.  Then they would sit up all night and in Hawaiian unravel stories of the past so full of pageantry and tradition.  And Eddie said they would never return without a much loved fishing trip in the outriggers.  All this he tells in an amusing and pidgin sort of English.  All that he talked about I could never remember but one subject was the hog hunts that are full of sport and plenty of danger.  Sometimes horses are used but more often they are tracked on foot.  His many individual experiences are full of color and I could easily have listened to him all night.

Later, as I noticed and remarked about the furniture, he began to go into detail on the home.  All the furnishings are hand carved of native Koa, a very hardwood with a beautiful grain and that will resist termites and retain a high polish almost indefinitely.  What caught my eye was a model of a Hawaiian rigger that could easily bring up imaginations of long voyages of singing natives and golden moons.  Anyway, we stayed as long as we dared while he kept going on about famous people who visited there, and his trip to the mountains and his first voyage to San Francisco on a cattle boat that produced some very comical episodes of his greenness in a big city.  Finally we had an ice cold drink of passion fruit, and believe it or not, peanut butter cookies exactly the way you used to make them.  I hope you will read the book I referred you to.  I’m sure you will like it.

It is really getting on into the hours and I don’t want to keep anybody awake on my account.  I will write you tomorrow night and tell you more of my visit in another letter.

Love,