We are obliged to say again, as we said in the cases of Nasby and Josh Billings, that there is little use in trying to write a sketch of the discourse. But we must attempt to give our readers a little taste of the speaker’s quality. Mr. Clemens devoted the first ten minutes of his lecture to a painfully accurate description of a person afflicted with the most loathsome form of Oriental leprosy; and then he gave five minutes to the narration of a boyish adventure which ended in his seeing the horrible face of a dead man in the moonlight. And all this mass of horror for what? Simply that he might say that his memory was full of unpleasant things so linked together that when he thought of one he inevitably thought of another, and so on through the entire series; and starting with leprosy and dead faces in the moonlight his mind necessarily ran through other unpleasant things until it brought him to the Sandwich Islands and his lecture. The position of the islands he gave geographically; but why they were placed so far away from everything and in such an inconvenient space, he declined to consider. The man who would have discovered the islands but did not, he said, was diverted from his course by a manuscript found in a bottle; and this, said Mark Twain, is not the only case in which a man has been turned from the true path by suggestions drawn from a bottle. The European nations brought into the islands their own diseases, together with civilization, education and other calamities. The effect of this had been to diminish the native population:—education in particular causing a frightful mortality as the facilities for learning were multiplied. But fifty thousand natives are now left upon the islands, and it is proposed to start a few more seminaries to finish them. The country people of the islands, the women, he said, wear a single garment made of one piece: “and the men don’t.” But when the weather is inclement the men wear cotton in their ears. The hospitality of the people he declared to be of a very high and generous order. A stranger might enter any house and straightway his host would set before him raw fresh fish with the scales on, baked dogs, fricas[s]eed cats, and all the luxuries of the season. But in trade they were exceedingly sharp and deceitful,—lying invariably from one end of the transaction to the other; not descending to common lies either, but indulging in lies that are “gorgeously imposing and that awe you by their grandeur.” The fondness of the islanders for dogs he declared to be intense. Dogs had the best of everything and were the close companions of the men. “They fondle and caress the dog until he is a full grown dog, and then they eat him.” “I couldn’t do that,” said Mr. Clemens, in one of his dryest and funniest passages: “I’d rather go hungry two days than eat an old personal friend in that way.”