A lady told me that having repeatedly clothed her nurse in good apparel, and finding this liberal soul, every time, in a day or two reduced to her original somewhat shabby clothing, she at last reproached her for her folly.  “What can I do?” the woman replied; “they come and ask me for the holaku, or the handkerchief, or whatever I have.  Suppose you say they are yours—­then I will not give them away.”  Accordingly, the next new suit was formally declared to belong to the mistress:  it was not given away.  An old woman, kept chiefly for her skill in lomi-lomi by an American family, asked her master one day for ten dollars.  He gave her two five-dollar gold pieces, and, to his amazement, saw her hand them over immediately, one to a little girl and one to a boy, who had evidently come to get the money—­not for her use at all.  A cook in my own family asked for the wages due him, which he had been saving for some time; he received forty-four dollars, and gave the whole amount at once to his father-in-law, who had come from another island on purpose to get this money.  Nor was it grudged to him, so far as any of us could see.  “By-and-by, if we are poor and in need, they will do as much for us,” is the excuse.

As you ride along in the country, you will see your guide slyly putting a stone or a bunch of grass on a ledge near some precipice.  If you look, you will see other objects of the same kind lying there.  Ask him about it and he will tell you, with a laugh, that his forefathers in other times did so, and he does the same.  It is, in fact, a peace offering to the local divinity of the place.  Is he, then, an idolater?  Not at all; not necessarily, at least.  He is under the compulsion of an old custom; and he will even tell you that it is all nonsense.  The same force leads him to treat with respect and veneration a chief or chiefess even if abjectly poor, though before the law the highest chief is no better than the common people.

They are hearty and even gross feeders; and probably the only christianized people who live almost entirely on cold victuals.  A Hawaiian does not need a fire to prepare a meal; and at a luau, or feast, all the food is served cold, except the pig, which ought to be hot.

Hospitable and liberal as he is in his daily life, when the Hawaiian invites his friends to a luau he expects them to pay.  He provides for them roast pig, poi, baked ti-root, which bears a startling resemblance in looks and taste to New England molasses-cake; raw fish and shrimps, limu, which is a sea-moss of villainous odor; kuulaau, a mixture of taro and cocoa-nut, very nice; paalolo, a mixture of sweet-potato and cocoa-nut; raw and cooked cuttle-fish, roast dog, sea-eggs, if they can be got; and, if the feast is something above the ordinary, raw pickled salmon with tomatoes and red-pepper.