surfresearch.com.au  london : aloha oe, 1908

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Hawaii has a ripening climate, and Dorothy Sambrooke had been exposed to it under exceptionally ripening circumstances.
Slender, pale, with blue eyes, a trifle tired from poring over the pages of books and trying to muddle into an understanding of life- such she had been the month before.
But now the eyes were warm instead of tired, the cheeks were touched with the sun, and the body gave the fIrst hint and promise of swelling lines.
During that month she had left books alone, for she had found greater joy in reading from the book of life.
She had ridden horses, climbed volcanoes, and learned surf swimming.
The tropics had entered into her blood, and she was aglow with the warmth and colour and sunshine.
And for a month she had been in the company of a man-Stephen Knight, athlete, surf-board rider; a bronzed god of the sea, who bitted the crashing breakers, leaped upon their backs, and rode them in to shore.
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Page 37

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When the Senatorial party had landed, Steve had been one of the committee of entertainment.
It was he who had given them their first exhibition of surf-riding, out at Waikiki Beach, paddling his narrow board seaward until he became a disappearing speck, and then, suddenly reappearing, rising like a sea-god from out of the welter and spume and churning white- rising swiftly higher and higher, until he stood poised on the crest of a mighty billow, his feet buried in the flying foam, hurling beachward with the speed of an express train, and stepping calmly ashore at their astounded feet. That had been her first glimpse of Steve.
He had been the youngest man on the committee, a youth himself of twenty.
He had not entertained by speech-making, nor had he shone decoratively at receptions.
It was in the breakers at Waikiki, on the wild cattle drive on Mauna Kea, and in the breaking-in yard of the Haleakala Ranch, that he had performed his share of the entertaining.
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