deposed queen, Liliuokalani, was a most interested witness.

Papa Ita looked neither to the right nor left, but striking the ground
thrice with a wand of ti, he raised his voice in invocation and walked
upon the stones. He reached the other end, paused and returned. Several
times he did this and when photographers rushed to make a picture,
he posed calmly in the center of the pit, and then, with all the air
of a priest who has celebrated a rite of approved merit, he retired
with dignity. As he departed from the inclosure, the natives crowded
about him, fearfully, as viewed the Israelites the safety of Daniel
emerging from the lions' den. Did I not see the former queen lift the
hem of his tapa and bow over it? It was night, the lights sputtered,
and I was awed by the success of the incantation. A minute after
Papa Ita had gone, I threw a newspaper upon the path he had trod,
and it withered into ashes. The heat seared my face. The doctors,
five or six of them, Americans and English, resident in Honolulu,
shrugged their shoulders. They had examined Papa Ita's feet before the
ceremony and afterward. The flesh was not burned, but, well--What? I
confess I do not know. A thermometer held over the umu of Papa Ita
at a height of six feet registered 282 degrees Fahrenheit.

There could be no negation of the extreme heat of the oven of
Tufetufetu. I had tested it for myself. No precaution was taken by
the walkers. I knew most of them intimately. There was no fraud,
no ointment or oil or other application to the feet, and all had not
the same thickness of sole. At Raratonga, near Tahiti, the British
resident, Colonel Gudgeon, and three other Englishmen had followed
the tahua as my neighbors had here. The official said that though his
feet were tender, his own sensations were of light electric shocks
at the moment and afterward. Dr. William Craig, who disobeyed the
tahua and looked behind, was badly burned, and was an invalid for
a long time, though Dr. George Craig and Mr. Goodwin met with no
harm. The resident half an hour after his passage tossed a branch on
the stones, and it caught fire. In Fiji, Lady Thurston with a long
stick laid her handkerchief on the shoulder of one of the walkers,
and when withdrawn in a few seconds it was scorched through. A cloth
thrown on the stones was burned before the last man had gone by.

What was the secret of the miracle I had witnessed? How was it that
in all the Orient, and formerly in Am