notice on a board told of the reign of law.

At length we turned the corner of a point and debouched on a flat of
lava. On the landward hand, cliffs made a quadrant of an amphitheatre,
melting on either side into the general mountain of the isle. Over
these, rivers of living lava had once flowed, had frozen as they fell,
and now depended like a sculptured drapery. Here and there the mouth of
a cave was seen half blocked, some green lianas beckoning in the
entrance. In front, the fissured pavement of the lava stretched into the
sea and made a surfy point. A scattered village, two white churches, one
Catholic, one Protestant, a grove of tall and scraggy palms, and a long
bulk of ruin, occupy the end. Off the point, not a cable's length beyond
the breaching surf, a schooner rode; come to discharge house-boards, and
presently due at Hookena to load lepers. The village is Honaunau; the
ruin, the Hale Keawe, temple and city of refuge.

The ruin made a massive figure, rising from the flat lava in ramparts
twelve to fifteen feet high, of an equal thickness, and enclosing an
area of several acres. The unmortared stones were justly set; in places,
the bulwark was still true to the plummet, in places ruinous from the
shock of earthquakes. The enclosure was divided in unequal parts--the
greater, the city of refuge; the smaller, the _heiau_, or temple, the
so-called House of Keawe, or reliquary of his royal bones. Not his
alone, but those of many monarchs of Hawaii were treasured here; but
whether as the founder of the shrine, or because he had been more
renowned in life, Keawe was the reigning and the hallowing saint. And
Keawe can produce at least one claim to figure on the canon, for since
his death he has wrought miracles. As late as 1829, Kaahumanu sent
messengers to bring the relics of the kings from their long repose at
Honaunau. First to the keeper's wife, and then to the keeper, the spirit
of Keawe appeared in a dream, bidding them prevent the desecration. Upon
the second summons, they rose trembling; hasted with a torch into the
crypt; exchanged the bones of Keawe with those of some less holy
chieftains; and were back in bed but not yet asleep, and the day had not
yet dawned, before the messengers arrived. So it comes that to this hour
the bones of Keawe, like those of his great descendant, sleep in some
unknown crevice of that caverned isle.

When Ellis passed in 1823, six years before this intervention of the
dead, th