This concludes Mark Twain's personal letters from the islands.
Of his descriptive news letters there were about twenty, and they
were regarded by the readers of the Union as distinctly notable.
Re-reading those old letters to-day it is not altogether easy to
understand why. They were set in fine nonpareil type, for one
thing, which present-day eyes simply refuse at any price, and the
reward, by present-day standards, is not especially tempting.

The letters began in the Union with the issue of April the 16th,
1866. The first--of date March 18th--tells of the writer's arrival
at Honolulu. The humor in it is not always of a high order; it
would hardly pass for humor today at all. That the same man who
wrote the Hawaiian letters in 1866 (he was then over thirty years
old) could, two years later, have written that marvelous book, the
Innocents Abroad, is a phenomenon in literary development.

The Hawaiian letters, however, do show the transition stage between
the rough elemental humor of the Comstock and the refined and subtle
style which flowered in the Innocents Abroad. Certainly Mark
Twain's genius was finding itself, and his association with the
refined and cultured personality of Anson Burlingame undoubtedly
aided in that discovery. Burlingame pointed out his faults to him,
and directed him to a better way. No more than that was needed at
such a time to bring about a transformation.

The Sandwich Islands letters, however, must have been precisely
adapted to their audience--a little more refined than the log
Comstock, a little less subtle than the Atlantic public--and they
added materially to his Coast prestige. But let us consider a
sample extract from the first Sandwich Islands letter: