and refinement, boxing the ears of a tall native, whom she had caught furiously abusing his wife, and the man bore his punishment as meekly as a child.  “Why?” “He knows I am his chief, and he would not dare raise even an angry look toward me; he would not think of it, even,” was her reply, when she was asked how she had courage to interfere in what was a very violent quarrel.  Yet the present law recognizes no allegiance due to a chief.

When the young king Lunalilo returned to the palace after the coronation, the pipe-bearer, an old native retainer, approached him on his knees, and was shocked at being ordered to get up and act like a man.  The older natives to this day approach a chief or chiefess only with humble and deprecatory bows; and wherever a chief or chiefess travels, the native people along the road make offerings of the fruits of the ground, and even of articles of clothing and adornment.  One of the curious sights of Honolulu to us travelers, last spring, was to see long processions of native people, men, women, and children, marching to the palace to lay their offerings before the king, who is a high chief.  Each brought something—­a man would walk gravely along with a pig under his arm; after him followed perhaps a little child with half a dozen bananas, a woman with a chicken tied by a string, a girl with a handkerchief full of eggs, a boy with a cocoa-nut, an old woman with a calabash of poi, and so on.  In the palace yard all this was laid in a heap before the young king, who thereupon said thank you, and, with a few kind words, dismissed the people to their homes.

As an illustration of the power of the old chiefs, as well as of the density of the population in former times, it is related that when the wall inclosing a certain fish pond on the windward side of Oahu was to be built, the chief then ruling over that land gave notice that on a certain day every man, woman, and child within his domain must appear at a designated point, bearing a stone.  The wall, which stands yet, is half a mile long, well built, and probably six feet high; and it was begun and completed in that one day.

[Illustration:  LUNALILO.]

I was shown, on Kauai, a young man of insignificant appearance, and of no particular merit or force of character.  To him an old woman recently dying had by a will, written out for her by a friend of my own, left all her property—­a taro patch, a house, and some other land.  My friend asked why.  He is my chief, was the reply; and sure enough, on inquiry my friend discovered, what he had not before known, that the man was a descendant of one of the chief families, of whom this old woman had in her early days been a subject.