ks in the story that his material may have been collected from
different sources. It seems to have been common to incorporate a
_Laieikawai_ episode into the popular romances, and of these episodes
Haleole may have availed himself. But we shall have something more to
say of his sources later; with his particular style we are not
concerned. The only reason for presenting the romance complete in all
its original dullness and unmodified to foreign taste is with the
definite object of showing as nearly as possible from the native angle
the genuine Polynesian imagination at work upon its own material,
reconstructing in this strange tale of the "Woman of the Twilight" its
own objective world, the social interests which regulate its actions and
desires, and by this means to portray the actual character of the
Polynesian mind.

This exact thing has not before been done for Hawaiian story and I do
not recall any considerable romance in a Polynesian tongue so
rendered.[4] Admirable collections of the folk tales of Hawaii have been
gathered by Thrum, Remy, Daggett, Emerson, and Westervelt, to which
should be added the manuscript tales collected by Fornander, translated
by John Wise, and now edited by Thrum for the Bishop Museum, from which
are drawn the examples accompanying this paper. But in these collections
the lengthy recitals which may last several hours in the telling or run
for a couple of years as serial in some Hawaiian newspaper are of
necessity cut down to a summary narrative, sufficiently suggesting the
flavor of the original, but not picturing fully the way in which the
image is formed in the mind of the native story-teller. Foreigners and
Hawaiians have expended much ingenuity in rendering the _mele_ or chant
with exactness,[5] but the much simpler if less important matter of
putting into literal English a Hawaiian _kaao_ has never been attempted.

To the text such ethnological notes have been added as are needed to
make the context clear. These were collected in the field. Some were
gathered directly from the people themselves; others from those who had
lived long enough among them to understand their customs; others still
from observation of their ways and of the localities mentioned in the
story; others are derived from published texts. An index of characters,
a brief description of the local background, and an abstract of the
story itself prefaces the text; appended to it is a series of abstracts
from the Forna