City of Refuge, that the dog (perhaps recognising them) began
to bark. "Ah, there is the dog of Kaahumanu!" said the messengers, and
returned and told the king she was at the Hale O Keawe. Thence
Kamehameha fetched or sent for her, and the breach in their relations
was restored.

A king preferred this woman out of a kingdom; Kanihonui died for her,
when she was fifty; even her dog adored her; even Bingham, who did not
see her until 1820, thought her "_beautiful for a Polynesian_," and
while she was thus in person an emblem of womanly charm, she made her
life illustrious with the manly virtues. There are some who give to Mary
Queen of Scots the place of saint and muse in their historic
meditations; I recommend to them instead the wife and widow of the
island conqueror. The Hawaiian was the nobler woman, with the nobler
story; and no disenchanting portrait will be found to shatter an ideal.

CHAPTER V

THE LEPERS OF KONA

A step beyond Hookena, a wooden house with two doors stands isolated in
a field of broken lava, like ploughed land. I had approached it on the
night of my arrival, and found it black and silent; yet even then it had
inmates. A man and a woman sat there captive, and the man had a knife,
brought to him in secret by his family. Not long, perhaps, after I was
by, the man, silencing by threats his fellow-prisoner, cut through the
floor and escaped to the mountain. It was known he had a comrade there,
hunted on the same account; and their friends kept them supplied with
food and ammunition. Upon the mountains, in most islands of the group,
similar outlaws rove in bands or dwell alone, unsightly hermits; and but
the other day an officer was wounded while attempting an arrest. Some
are desperate fellows; some mournful women--mothers and wives; some
stripling girls. A day or two, for instance, after the man had escaped,
the police got word of another old offender, made a forced march, and
took the quarry sitting: this time with little peril to themselves. For
the outlaw was a girl of nineteen, who had been two years under the
rains in the high forest, with her mother for comrade and accomplice.
How does their own poet sing?

In the land of distress
My dwelling was on the mountain height,
My talking companions were the birds,
The decaying leaves of the Ki my clothing.

It is for no crime this law-abiding race flee to the woods; it is no
fear of the gallows or the dungeon that nerv