“I gave in. But I, too, imposed stipulations. Steadfastly had my father, new school, refused to let me go to England for my education. That sugar was slumping was reason sufficient for him. Steadfastly had my mother, old school, refused, her heathen mind too dark to place any value on education, while it was shrewd enough to discern that education led to unbelief in all that was old. I wanted to study, to study science, the arts, philosophy, to study everything old Howard knew, which enabled him, on the edge of the grave, undauntedly to sneer at superstition, and to give me Jules Verne to read. He was an Oxford man before he went wild and wrong, and it was he who had set the Oxford bee buzzing in my noddle. “In the end Ahuna and I, old school and new school leagued together, won out. Mother promised that she’d make father send me to England, even if she had to pester him into a prolonged drinking that would make his digestion go back on him. Also, Howard was to accompany me, so that I could decently bury him in England. He was a queer one, old Howard, an individual if there ever was one. Let me tell you a little story about him. It was when Kalakaua was starting on his trip around the world. You remember, when Armstrong, and Judd, and the drunken valet of a German baron accompanied him. Kalakaua made the proposition to Howard . . . ” But here the long-apprehended calamity fell upon Prince Akuli. The old _wahine_ had finished her _lei hala_. Barefooted, with no adornment of femininity, clad in a shapeless shift of much-washed cotton, with age-withered face and labour-gnarled hands, she cringed before him and crooned a _mele_ in his honour, and, still cringing, put the _lei_ around his neck. It is true the _hala_ smelled most freshly strong, yet was the act beautiful to me, and the old woman herself beautiful to me. My mind leapt into the Prince’s narrative so that to Ahuna I could not help likening her. Oh, truly, to be an _alii_ in Hawaii, even in this second decade of the twentieth century, is no light thing. The _alii_, utterly of the new, must be kindly and kingly to those old ones absolutely of the old. Nor did the Prince without a kingdom, his loved island long since annexed by the United States and incorporated into a territory along with the rest of the Hawaiian Islands—nor did the Prince betray his repugnance for the odour of the _hala_. He bowed his head graciously; and his royal condescending words of pure Hawaiian I knew would make the old woman’s heart warm until she died with remembrance of the wonderful occasion. The wry grimace he stole to me would not have been made had he felt any uncertainty of its escaping her. “And so,” Prince Akuli resumed, after the _wahine_ had tottered away in an ecstasy, “Ahuna and I departed on our grave-robbing adventure. You know the Iron-bound Coast.”