He now takes the baked taro and puts it on a wooden platter and beats it with a heavy stone pestle. From time to time he dips his hands into water as they grow sticky from handling the pasty mass. After he has pounded it for a long time, he puts it into calabashes, adds water, and sets it away for several days to ferment. He grows very tired before his work is over, but does it gladly, rather than do without his favourite food. It would not suit us, I fear, as it tastes very much like sour buckwheat paste. In Hawaii white people often eat the taro root sliced and boiled or baked, but they seldom touch it when prepared in the native fashion. Now let us return to Auwae's dinner-table. The food is quickly eaten, after which the little girl passes a calabash of water around among the company. It is to serve as a finger-bowl. Does this surprise you? Ah! but you must remember these Hawaiians ate with their fingers. These same fingers are now sticky with poi, and as the people are natural lovers of water, they are fond of having every part of their bodies spotless. A pipe and tobacco are passed around for a smoke. These people, so cleanly in some other ways, do not object to using the one pipe in common. The women put away the food, and the company prepare for a picnic at the shore but a short distance from the house. They will spend the afternoon in surf-bathing, and all of them will perform feats in the water that would astonish the best swimmers in other countries. CHAPTER III. SURF-RIDING. AUWAE has a loved playmate, Upa, a boy a little older than herself. He goes with the party to the beach. Carrying their surf-boards under their arms, the two children hurry ahead to the beach of shining white coral sand. Look! The broad Pacific now stretches out before their eyes. How blue are the waters, reaching out in the distance till they seem to meet a sky just as blue and clear of a passing cloud! How the hot sunshine beats down upon the sand! Yet Auwae does not seem to mind it. She stoops to pick a wild morning-glory growing almost at the water's edge, and then dances about, saying to Upa: "Hurrah! The waves are just fine to-day for bathing, aren't they?" We almost hold our breath at the thought of these children trusting themselves out in the high waves rushing in from the coral reef a quarter of a mile outside. Then, too, we know there are sharks in these waters; and what a terrible death would be Auwae's if one of these creatures should grind her between his many teeth! As to the sharks, we need not fear, as they never venture nearer than the coral reefs, which seem to be a wall beyond which they dare not pass. And as for the water! why, when we have once seen Auwae swim, we can no longer fear for her safety. It seems as though water, instead of land, must be her natural abiding-place. But now the rest of the party have arrived, bringing with them their surf-boards, or wave-sliding-boards, as we might call them.