The main situation in this story furnishes a close parallel to the Laieikawai A beautiful girl of high rank is taken from her parents and brought up apart in an earthly paradise by a supernatural guardian, Waka, where she is waited upon by birds.  A great lizard acts as her protector.  She is wedded to a high taboo chief who is fetched thither from the gods, and who later is seduced from his fidelity by the beauty of another woman.  This woman of the mountain, Poliahu, though identical in name and nature, plays a minor part in Haleole’s story.  In other details the stories show discrepancies.[3] It is pretty clear that Haleole’s version has suppressed, out of deference to foreign-taught proprieties, the original relationship of brother and sister retained in the Westervelt story.  This may be inferred from the fact that other unpublished Hawaiian romances of the same type preserve this relation, and that, according to Hawaiian genealogists, the highest divine rank is ascribed to such a union.  Restoring this connection, the story describes the doings of a single family, gods or of godlike descent.[4]

In the Westervelt story, on the whole, the action is treated mythically to explain how things came to be as they are—­how the gods peopled the islands, how the hula dances and the lore of the clouds were taught in Hawaii.  The reason for the localization is apparent.  The deep forests of Puna, long dedicated to the gods, with their singing birds, their forest trees whose leaves dance in the wind, their sweet-scented maile vine, with those fine mists which still perpetually shroud the landscape and give the name Haleohu, House-of-mist, to the district, and above all the rainbows so constantly arching over the land, make an appropriate setting for the activities of some family of demigods.  Strange and fairylike as much of the incident appears, allegorical as it seems, upon the face of it, the Polynesian mind observes objectively the activities of nature and of man as if they proceeded from the same sort of consciousness.

[Illustration:  IN THE FORESTS OF PUNA (HENSHAW)]

So, in Haleole’s more naturalistic tale the mythical rendering is inwrought into the style of the narrative.  Storm weds Perfume.  Their children are the Sun-at-high-noon; a second son, possibly Lightning; twin daughters called after two varieties of the forest vine, ieie, perhaps symbols of Rainbow and Twilight; and five sweet-smelling daughters—­the four varieties of maile vine and the scented hala blossom.  The first-born son is of such divine character that he dwells highest in the heavens.  Noonday, like a bird, bears visitors to his gate, and guards of the shade—­Moving-cloud and Great-bright-moon—­close it to shut out his brightness.  The three regions below him are guarded by maternal uncles and by his father, who never comes near the taboo house, which only his mother shares with him.  His signs are those of