tion arises, "did they carefully and conscientiously tell these stories exactly as related to them by aboriginal Hawaiians, free from missionary influences, or did they flavor the broth with European condiments?" To this question no answer is given in the book, but there is plenty of evidence that either the King himself, in order to make his people as much like ours as possible, or his foreign assistants, embellished them with sentimental details. To take only two significant points: it sounds very sentimental to be told that the girl Ua, after Kaaialii had jumped into the vortex "wailed upon the winds a requiem of love and grief," but a native Hawaiian has no more notion of the word requiem than he has of a syllogism. Then again, the story is full of expressions like this: "His heart beat with joy, for he thought she was Kaala ; " or " He asked her for a smile and she gave him her heart." Such phrases mislead not only the general reader but careless anthropologists into the belief that the lower races feel and express their love just as we do. As a matter of fact, Polynesians do not attribute feelings to the heart. Ellis (II., 311), could not even make them understand what he was talking about when he tried to explain to them our ideas regarding the heart as a seat of moral feeling. The fact that our usage in this respect is a mere convention, not based on physiological facts, makes it all the more reprehensible to falsify psychology by adorning aboriginal tales with the borrowed plumes and phrases of civilization.

VAGARIES OF HAWAIIAN FONDNESS

It is quite possible that the events related in the cavestory did occur; but a Hawaiian, untouched by missionary influences, would have told them very differently. It is very much more likely, however, that if a Hawaiian had found himself in the predicament of Kaaialii, he would have sympathized with the king's contemptuous speech: "What! would you throw your life away for a girl? There are others as fair. Here is Ua; she shall be your wife." This would have been much more in accordance with what observers have

told us of Hawaiian "heart-affairs." "The marriage tie is loose," says Ellis (IV., 315), "and the husband can dismiss his wife on any occasion." "The loves of the Hawaiians are usually ephemeral," says "Häolé," the author of Sandwich Island Notes (267). The widow seldom or never plants a solitary flower over the grave of her lord. She may once visit the mound that marks the repose of his ashes, but never again, unless by accident. It not unfrequently happens that a second husband is selected while the remains of the first are being conveyed to his "long home." Hawaiian women seem more attached to pigs and puppies than to their husbands or even their children. The writer just quoted says whole volumes might be written concerning the "silly affection" of the women for animals. They carry them in their bosoms, and do not hesitate to suckle them. It is one of their duties to drive pigs to the market, and one day "Häolé" came across a group of native women who had taken off their only garments and soaked them in water to cool their dear five hundred-pounder, while others were fanning him! As late as 1881 Isabella Bird wrote (213) that

the crime of infanticide, which formerly prevailed to a horrible extent, has long been extinct; but the love of pleasure and the dislike of trouble which partially actuated it are apparently still stronger among the women than the maternal instinct, and they do not take the trouble necessary to rear infants. I have nowhere seen such tenderness lavished upon infants as upon the pet dogs that the women carry about with them."

HAWAIIAN MORALS

Hawaiians did not treat women as brutally as Fijians do; yet how far they were from respecting, not to speak of adoring, them, is obvious from the contemptuous and selfish taboos which forbade women, on penalty of death, to eat any of the best and commonest articles of food, such as bananas, cocoanuts, pork, turtle; or refused them permission to eat with their lords and masters, or to share in divine worship, because their touch would pollute the offerings to the gods.

The grossness of the Hawaiian erotic taste is indicated by "Häolé's" reference (123) to "the immense corpulency of some of the old Hawaiian queens, a feature which, in those days, was deemed the ne plus ultra of female beauty." Incest was permitted to the chiefs, and the people vied with their rulers in the grossest sensuality. "Nearly every night, with the gathering darkness, crowds would retire to some favorite spot, where, amid every species of sensual indulgence, they would revel until the morning twilight" (412). “In Hawaii, whether the woman was married or single, she would have been thought very churlish and boorish if she refused any favor asked by a male friend of the family," says E. Tregear; and in Dibble's History of the Sandwich Islands (126-27) we read:

"For husbands to interchange wives, or for wives to interchange husbands, was a common act of friendship, and persons who would not do this were not considered on good terms of sociability. For a man or a woman to refuse a solicitation for illicit intercourse was considered an act of meanness, and so thoroughly was this sentiment wrought into their minds that, even to the present day, they seem not to rid themselves of the feeling of meanness in making a refusal."

The Hawaiian word for marriage is hoao, meaning "trial." It was also customary for a married woman to have an acknowledged lover known as punula. The word hula hula is familiar the world over as the name of an improper dance, but it is nothing to what it used to be. The famous cave Niholua was consecrated to it. In past generations

"warriors came here to revel with their paramours. The Tartarean gloom was slightly relieved by torches ingeniously formed of strings of the candle-nut. Beneath this rugged roof, and amid this darkness-their faces strangely reflecting the feeble torch-light-and, divested of every particle of apparel, they promiscuously united in dancing the hula hula (the licentious dance). Wives were exchanged, and so were concubines; fathers despoiled their own daughters, and brothers deemed it no crime to perpetrate incest.

Jour. Anthr. Inst., 1889, p. 104.

Waitz-Gerland (VI., 459) cite Wise as attesting that "in 1848 the missionaries gave up a girls' school, because it was impossible to preserve the virtue of their pupils," and Steen Bill wrote that in 1846 seventy per cent. of all the crimes punished were of a lewd character, and that on the whole island there was not a chaste girl of eleven years of age. Isabella Bird wrote (169) that "the Hawaiian women have no notions of virtue as we understand it, and if there is to be any future for this race it must come through a higher morality.”

THE HELEN OF HAWAII

As there was practically no difference between married and unmarried women in Hawaii, it is not strange that cases of abduction of wives should have occurred. The following story, related in Kalakaua's book, probably suffered no great change at the hands of the recorder. I give a condensed version of it:

In the twelfth century, the close of the second era of migration from Tahiti and Samoa, there lived a girl named Hina, noted as the most beautiful maiden on the islands. She married the chief Hakalanileo, and had two children by him. Reports of her beauty had excited the fancy of Kaupeepee, the chief of Haupu. He went to test the reports with his own eyes, and saw that they were not exaggerated. So he hovered around the coast of Hilo watching for a chance to abduct her. It came at last. One day, after sunset, when the moon was shining, Hina repaired to the beach with her women to take a bath. A signal was given-it is thought by the first wife of Hina's husband-and, not long after, a light but heavily manned canoe dashed through the surf and shot in among the bathers. The women screamed and started for the shore. Suddenly a man leaped from the canoe into the water. There was a brief struggle, a stifled scream, a sharp word of command, and a moment later Kaupeepee was again in the canoe with the nude and frantic Hina in his arms. The boatmen lost no time to start; they rowed all night and in the morning reach Haupu.

Hina had been wrapped in folds of soft kapa, and she spent the night sobbing, not knowing what was to become of her. When shore was reached she was borne to the captor's fortress

and given an apartment provided with every luxury. She fell asleep from fatigue, and when she awoke and realized where she was it was not without a certain feeling of pride that she reflected that her beauty had led the famous and mighty Kaupeepee to abduct her.

After partaking of a hearty breakfast, she sent for him and he came promptly. "What can I do for you?" he asked. "Liberate me!" was her answer. "Return me to my children!" "Impossible!" was the firm reply. "Then kill me," she exclaimed. The chief now told her how he had left home specially to see her, and found her the most beautiful woman in Hawaii. He had risked his life to get her. "You are my prisoner," he said, "but not more than I am yours. You shall leave Haupu only when its walls shall have been battered down and I lie dead among the ruins."

Hina saw that resistance was useless. He had soothed her with flattery; he was a great noble; he was gentle though brave."How strangely pleasant are his words and voice," she said to herself. "No one ever spoke so to me before. I could have listened longer." After that she hearkened for his footsteps and soon accepted him as her lover and spouse.

For seventeen years she remained a willing prisoner. In the meantime her two sons by her first husband had grown up; they ascertained where their mother was, demanded her release, and on refusal waged a terrible war which at last ended in the death of Kaupeepee and the destruction of his walls.

INTERCEPTED LOVE-LETTERS

The Rev. H. T. Cheever prints in his book on the Sandwich Islands (226-28) a few amusing specimens of the loveletters exchanged between the native lads of the Lahainaluna Seminary and certain lasses of Lahaina. The following ones were intercepted by the missionaries. The first was penned by a girl:

"Love to you, who speakest sweetly, whom I did kiss. My warm affections go out to you with your love. My mind is oppressed in consequence of not having seen you these times. Much affection for thee dwelling there where the sun causeth the head to ache. Pity for thee in returning to your house, destitute as you supposed. I and she went to the place where we had sat in the meeting-house, and said she, Let us weep. So we two wept for you, and we conversed about you.