a fortnight without improvement, when one morning at breakfast a marmalade of bananas was served.  I had hardly touched it to my lips when the nausea returned with greater violence; I could eat nothing, and soon a salivation came on which lasted several hours.  In the mean while a poor Breton who had established himself on the island some years ago, and had conformed to savage life, came to see me.  Bananas were scarce in the neighborhood, and he found that I had a large supply of them, and I offered him a bunch.  Fortin, it was his name, on his way back to his cabin with my present, broke a banana off the bunch and commenced to eat it.  He felt under his tooth a hard substance, which he caught in his hand.  To his great surprise, it was a sort of blue and white stone.  He soon felt ill, and fortunately was able to vomit what he had swallowed.  Furious, and accusing me of a criminal intention, he returned to my quarters to demand an explanation.  I examined the substance taken from the banana, and found that it was blue vitriol and corrosive sublimate.  The presence of such substances in a banana was far from natural.  I took other bunches of my supply, and found in several bananas the same poisons, which had been skillfully introduced under the skin.  After some inquiries I found, from Fortin’s own wife, that similar drugs had been sometimes seen in the hands of Lilihae, who had bought them of a druggist in Honolulu for the treatment of syphilis.  The riddle was at once completely solved.  A few days passed, and Lilihae killed himself by poison, convinced that all his attempts could not kill me.  In his native superstition, he was satisfied that the gods would not forgive his indiscretion, since they withheld from him the power of taking my life; and he could devise no simpler way to escape their anger, and the vengeance of my own God, than to take himself the poison against which I had rebelled.  It was discovered that Lilihae had, in the first place, tried native poisons on me, and finding them ineffective, he thought that my foreign nature might require exotic poisons, which he had accordingly served in the bananas destined for my table.  He went, without my knowledge, into the cook-house where my native servants kept my provisions, and, under pretext of chatting with them, found means to poison my food.  The unfortunate kahuna died fully persuaded that I was a more powerful sorcerer than he.  It was to be feared that, when he discovered his impotency, he would intrust the execution of his designs to his fellows, as is common among sorcerers; but his suicide fortunately removed this sword of Damocles which hung over my head.

(11.) At the present day, useless old men are no longer destroyed, nor are the children, whom venereal diseases have rendered very rare, suffocated; but they do eat lice, fleas, and grasshoppers.  Flies inspire the same disgust, and the women still give their breasts to dogs, pigs, and young kids.

(12.) [This operation is certainly still practiced extensively, if not universally; and the ancient form of kakiomaka, or slitting the prepuce, has given way, generally, to the okipoepoe, or the complete removal of the foreskin.  The operation in a case that came under my notice on the island of Oahu was performed with a bamboo, and attended with a feast and rejoicings; the subject was about nine years old.]