toiling a while longer, a prayer duel follows and the best man
wins. Kahuna number one delivers a veritable anathema, bestowing on
his subject more aches and illnesses and deformities and difficulties
than Pius IX. conferred on Victor Emmanuel, while number two sweats
with the haste and force of his invocations for the continued or
increased health and fortune of his client. If he can afford them,
the victim may hire two kahunas and have them pray around the house
until the opposition is silenced or the malevolent employer's money
gives out. When one of the two prays for his patron, in such a case
the other may pray against the enemy who began the trouble, so that,
instead of doing a deadly injury, the instigator of the disturbance
may discover, to his alarm, that he is in more danger than his foe,
and some morning he may find himself dead.

King David Kalakaua made a law against praying folks into their graves,
but the kahunas, to a man, cried, "Why, this will kill business! If
you don't abolish that law we will pray you to death in two days." And
King David took the law away, quick. In order to make a prayer for
death effectual the kahuna must possess himself of some object closely
associated with the person he intends to kill. Finger-nails, hair,
and teeth are especially desired, but if they cannot be had, a few
drops of saliva will do. The kings were always so careful of their
precious selves that nail-parings and hair-croppings were burned to
keep them from falling into the hands of ghoulish kahunas, and they
were always attended by a spittoon-bearer, who was a chief of high
rank, and whose duty it was to see that none of the royal spittle
was accessible to wizards or suspicious strangers. The spittoon was
emptied into the sea at a distance from land secretly and in the
middle of the night. What a lecture Charles Dickens would have read
to the Americans out of this circumstance!

The last death attributed to the kahunas was that of Princess Kaiulani
in the spring of 1899. Though this young woman was enlightened, had
travelled and studied in Europe and America, and presumably disbelieved
in the superstitions of her ancestors, it is whispered that the rumor
of kahuna influence against her shortened her days by many. The people
believed so, at any rate, though they were perplexed by the failure of
the little red fish to run into the harbor just before she breathed
her last, as it was believed that they always made t