Let us picture to ourselves the scene: A shadowy, flower-scented hall; the elite of some Hawaiian court and their guests, gathered, in accord with old-time practice, to contend in a tournament of wit and grace and skill, vying with one another for the prize of beauty. The president has established order in the assembly; the opposing players have taken their stations, each one seated behind his target-block. The tallykeeper of one side now makes the challenge. “This kilu,” says he, “is a love token; the forfeit a kiss.” An Apollo of the opposite side joyfully takes up the gauge. His tallykeeper introduces him by name. He plumes himself like a wild bird of gay feather, standing forth in the decorous finery of his rank, girded and flowerbedecked after the manner of the halau, eager to win applause for his party not less than to secure for himself the loving reward of victory. In his hand is the instrument of the play, the kilu; the artillery of love, however, with which he is to assail the heart and warm the imagination of the fair woman opposed to him is the song he shoots from his lips. The story of the two songs next to be presented is one, and will show us a side of Hawaiian life on which we can not afford entirely to close our eyes. During the stay at Lahaina of Kamehameha, called the Great—whom an informant in this matter always calls “the murderer,” in protest against the treacherous assassination of Keoua, which took place at Kawaihae in Kamehameha’s very presence—a high chiefess of his court named Kalola engaged in a love affair with a young [Page 237] man of rank named Ka’i-áma. He was much her junior, but this did not prevent his infatuation. Early one morning she rose, leaving him sound asleep, and took canoe for Molokai to serve as one of the escort to the body of her relative, Keola, on the way to its place of sepulture. Some woman, appreciating the situation, posted to the house and waked the sleeper with the information. Ka’iáma hastened to the shore, and as he strained his vision to gain sight of the woman of his infatuation the men at the paddles and the bristling throng on the central platform—the _pola_—of the craft, vanishing in the twilight, made on his imagination the impression of a hazy mountain thicket floating on the waves, but hiding from view some rare flower. He gave vent to his feelings in song: _Mele_