dy.
My body is pledged to another.
30 Crown it, Ku, crown it.
Now the service is free!

Some parts of this mele, which is a love-song, have defied
the author's most strenuous efforts to penetrate their deeper
meaning. No Hawaiian consulted has made a pretense of
understanding it wholly. The Philistines of the middle of the
nineteenth century, into whose hands it fell, have not helped
matters by the emendations and interpolations with which they
slyly interlarded the text, as if to set before us in a
strong light the stigmata of degeneracy from which they were
suffering.

The author has discarded from the text two verses which
followed verse 28:

Hai'na ia mai ka puana:
Ka wai anapa i ke kala.

[Translation]

Declare to me now the riddle:
The waters that flash on the plain.

The author has refrained from casting out the last two
verses, though in his judgment they are entirely out of place
and were not in the mele originally.

[Page 186]

XXIV--THE HULA PELE

The Hawaiian drama could lay hold of no worthier theme than
that offered by the story of Pele. In this epic we find the
natural and the supernatural, the everyday events of nature
and the sublime phenomena of nature's wonderland, so
interwoven as to make a story rich in strong human and deific
coloring. It is true that the genius of the Hawaiian was not
equal to the task of assembling the dissevered parts and of
combining into artistic unity the materials his own
imagination had spun. This very fact, however, brings us so
much nearer to the inner workshop of the Hawaiian mind.

The story of Pele is so long and complicated that only a
brief abstract of it can be offered now:

Pele, the goddess of the volcano, in her dreams and
wanderings in spirit-form, met and loved the handsome Prince
Lohiau. She would not be satisfied with mere spiritual
intercourse; she demanded the sacrament of bodily presence.
Who should be the ambassador to bring the youth f