to eat "native fashion," and
great was their rejoicing and merrymaking as they sat, crowned with
flowers, on the veranda-floor and ate poi and raw fish with their
fingers, and talked Hawaiian. They were required to talk English usually
until the four-o'clock bell sounded in the afternoon. From that until
supper-time they were allowed to talk native, and their tongues ran
fast.

On Wednesday afternoons the girls went to bathe in the river, and on
Saturday afternoons to bathe in the sea. It usually fell to my lot to
accompany them. The river, back of the house a few rods, had steep banks
ten or fifteen feet high and a deep, still current. The girls would
start to run as soon as they left the house, race with each other all
the way and leap from the bank into the river below. Presently their
heads would appear above water, and, laughing and blowing and shaking
the drops from their brown faces, they would swim across the river. The
older girls could dive and swim under water for some distance. They had
learned to swim as soon as they had learned to walk. They sometimes
brought up fish in their hands, and one girl told me that her father
could dive and bring up a fish in each hand and one in his mouth. The
little silver-fish caught in their dress-skirts they ate raw. The girls
were always glad when the time came to go swimming in the sea, for they
were very fond of a green moss which grew on the reef, and the whole
crowd would sit on rocks picking and eating it while the spray dashed
over them.

_Waialua_ means "the meeting of the waters," or, literally, "two
waters," and the place is named from the perpetual flow and counterflow
of the river and the ocean tide. The river pours into the sea, the sea
at high tide surges up the river, beating back its waters, and the foam
and spray of the contending floods are dashed high into the air,
bedewing the cluster of cocoanut palms that stand on the bank above
watching this perpetual conflict. In calm weather and at low tide there
is a truce between the waters, and the river flows calmly into the sea;
but immediately after a storm, when the river is flooded with rains from
the mountains and the sea hurls itself upon the reef with a shock and a
roar, then the antagonism between the meeting waters is at its height
and the clash and uproar of their fury are great.

Sometimes we went on picnic excursions to places in the neighborhood--to
the beach of Waiamea, a mile or two distant, wh