But even now, when the tabu has been removed and the assembly is supposed to have assumed an informal character, before they may indulge themselves in informalities, there remains to be chanted a dismissing prayer, _pule hooku’u_, in which all voices must join: [Page 129] _Pule Hooku’u_ Ku ka makaia a ka huaka’i moe ipo;[278] Ku au, hele; Noho oe, aloha! Aloha na hale o makou i makamaka ole, 5 Ke alanui hele mauka o Huli-wale,[279] la; H-u-l-i. E huli a’e ana i ka makana, I ke alana ole e kanaenae aku ia oe. Eia ke kanaenae, o ka leo. [Translation.] _Dismissing Prayer_ Doomed sacrifice I in the love-quest, I stand [loin-girt][280] for the journey; To you who remain, farewell! Farewell to our homes forsaken. 5 On the road beyond In-decision, I turn me about— Turn me about, for lack of a gift, An offering, intercession, for thee— My sole intercession, the voice. [Footnote 278: A literal translation of the first line would be as follows: (Here) stands the doomed sacrifice for the journey in search of a bed-lover.] [Footnote 279: _Huli-wale_. To turn about, here used as the name of a place, is evidently intended figuratively to stand for mental indecision.] [Footnote 280: The bracketed phrase is not in the text of the original.] This fragment—two fragments, in fact, pieced together—belongs to the epic of Pele. As her little sister, Hiiaka, is about to start on her adventurous journey to bring the handsome Prince Lohiau from the distant island of Kauai she is overcome by a premonition of Pele’s jealousy and vengeance, and she utters this intercession. The formalities just described speak for themselves. They mark better than any comments can do the superstitious devotion of the old-timers to formalism, their remoteness from that free touch of social and artistic pleasure, the lack of which we moderns often lament in our own lives and sigh for as a lost art, conceiving it to have been once the possession of “the children of nature.”