There was only one "match" horse, and he had examined his starboard side through one window and his port side through another! I decline to believe this story, but I give it because it is worth something as a fanciful illustration of a fixed fact--namely, that the Kanaka horse-jockey is fertile in invention and elastic in conscience.
You can buy a pretty good horse for forty or fifty dollars, and a good enough horse for all practical purposes for two dollars and a half.

I estimate "Oahu" to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five cents.

A good deal better animal than he is was sold here day before yesterday for a dollar and seventy-five cents, and sold again to-day for two dollars and twenty-five cents; Williams bought a handsome and lively little pony yesterday for ten dollars; and about the best common horse on the island (and he is a really good one) sold yesterday, with Mexican saddle and bridle, for seventy dollars--a horse which is well and widely known, and greatly respected for his speed, good disposition and everlasting bottom.
You give your horse a little grain once a day; it comes from San Francisco, and is worth about two cents a pound; and you give him as much hay as he wants; it is cut and brought to the market by natives, and is not very good it is baled into long, round bundles, about the size of a large man; one of them is stuck by the middle on each end of a six foot pole, and the Kanaka shoulders the pole and walks about the streets between the upright bales in search of customers.

These hay bales, thus carried, have a general resemblance to a colossal capital 'H.' The hay-bundles cost twenty-five cents apiece, and one will last a horse about a day.

You can get a horse for a song, a week's hay for another song, and you can turn your animal loose among the luxuriant grass in your neighbor's broad front yard without a song at all--you do it at midnight, and stable the beast again before morning.