Lo, the rain, the rain! The rain is approaching; The dance-hall is murky, The great hall of Lono. 5 Listen! its mountain walls Are stunned with the clatter, As when in October, Heaven’s thunderbolts shatter. Then follows Welehu, 10 The month of the Pleiads. Scanty the work then done, Save as one’s driven. Spur comes with the sun, When day has arisen. 15 Now comes the Heaven-born; The whole land doth shake, As with an earthquake; Sleep quits then my bed: How shall this maw be fed! 20 Great maw of the shark— Eyes that gleam in the dark Of the boundless sea! Rare the king’s visits to me. All is free, all is free! If the author of this Hawaiian idyl sought to adapt its descriptive imagery to the features of any particular landscape, it would almost seem as if he had in view the very region in which Kauikeaouli found himself in the year 1847 as he listened to the mele of this unknown Hawaiian Theocritus. Under the spell of this poem, one is transported to the amphitheater of Mauna-wili, a valley separated from Waimanalo only by a rampart of hills. At one’s back are the abrupt walls of Konahuanui; at the right, and encroaching so as almost to shut in the front, stands the knife-edge of Olomana; to the left range the furzy hills of Ulamawao; while directly to the front, looking north, winds the green valley, whose waters, before reaching the ocean, spread out into the fish-ponds and duck swamps of Kailua. It would seem as if this must have been the very picture the idyllic poet had in mind. This smiling, yet rock-walled, amphitheater was the vast dance-hall of Lono—_Halau loa o Lono_ (verse 4)—whose walls were deafened, stunned (_pa-á-a_, verse 6), by the tumult and uproar of the multitude that always followed in the wake of a king, a multitude whose night-long revels banished sleep: _Moe pono ole ko’u po_ (verse 17). The poet seems to be thinking of this same hungry multitude in verse 18, _Na niho ai kalakala_, literally the teeth that tear the food; also when he speaks of the Niuhi (verse 19), a mythical shark, the glow of whose eyes was said to be visible [Page 218 for a great distance in the ocean, _A mau i ke kai loa_ (verse 20). _Ikuwá, Welehu, Makali’i_ (verses 7, 9, and 10). These were months in the Hawaiian year corresponding