Short Stories
years after Hotchkiss, of Hotchkiss, Morterson Company, died,
they found among mislaid papers a memorandum of a loan of
thirty thousand dollars to Ah Chun. It had been incurred when
Ah Chun was Privy Councillor to Kamehameha II. In the bustle
and confusion of those heyday, money-making times, the affair
had slipped Ah Chun's mind. There was no note, no legal claim
against him, but he settled in full with the Hotchkiss' Estate, vol-
untarily paying a compound interest that dwarfed the principal.
Likewise, when he verbally guaranteed the disastrous Kakiku
Ditch Scheme, at a time when the least sanguine did not dream a
guarantee necessary—"Signed his cheque for two hundred thou-
sand without a quiver, gentlemen, without a quiver," was the re-
port of the secretary of the defunct enterprise, who had been
sent on the forlorn hope of finding out Ah Chun's intentions.
And on top of the many similar actions that were true of his
word, there was scarcely a man of repute in the islands that at
one time or another had not experienced the helping financial
hand of Ah Chun.
So it was that Honolulu watched his wonderful family grow
up into a perplexing problem and secretly sympathized with
him, for it was beyond any of them to imagine what he was go-
ing to do with it. But Ah Chun saw the problem more clearly
than they. No one knew as he knew the extent to which he was
an alien in his family. His own family did not guess it. He saw
that there was no place for him amongst this marvellous seed of
his loins, and he looked forward to his declining years and knew
that he would grow more and more alien. He did not under-
stand his children. Their conversation was of things that did not
interest him and about which he knew nothing. The culture of
the West had passed him by. He was Asiatic to the last fibre,
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