d out, expand as blossom from bud;" it also applies to an
open-handed person. _Nee_ may mean "to hitch along from one place to
another," or "to change the mind." _Palele_ means "separate, put
somewhere else when there is no place vacant;" it also applies to
stammering. These illustrations gathered almost at random may be
indefinitely multiplied. I recall a clergyman in a small hamlet on
Hawaii who wished to describe the character of the people of that place.
Picking up a stone of very close grain of the kind used for pounding and
called _alapaa_, literally, "close-grained stone," he explained that
because the people of that section were "tight" (stingy) they were
called _Kaweleau alapaa_. This ready imitativeness, often converted into
caricature, enters into the minutest detail of life and is the clew to
many a familiar proverb like that of the canoe on the coral reef quoted
in the text.[3] The chants abound in such symbols. Man is "a long-legged
fish" offered to the gods. Ignorance is the "night of the mind." The
cloud hanging over Kaula is a bird which flies before the wind[4]--

The blackbird begged,
The bird of Kaula begged,
Floating up there above Waahila.

The coconut leaves are "the hair of the trees, their long locks." Kailua
district is "a mat spread out narrow and gray."

The classic example of the use of such metaphor in Hawaiian song is the
famous passage in the _Hauikalani_ in which chiefs at war are compared
with a cockfight, the favorite Hawaiian pastime[5] being realistically
described in allusion to Keoua's wars on Hawaii:

Hawaii is a cockpit; the trained cocks fight on the ground.
The chief fights--the dark-red cock awakes at night for battle;
The youth fights valiantly--Loeau, son of Keoua.
He whets his spurs, he pecks as if eating;
He scratches in the arena--this Hilo--the sand of Waiolama.

* * * * *

He is a well-fed cock. The chief is complete,
Warmed in the smokehouse till the dried feathers rattle,
With changing colors, like many-colored paddles, like piles of
polished Kahili.
The feathers rise and fall at the striking of the spurs.

Here the allusions to the red color and to eating suggest a chief. The
feather brushes waved over a chief and the bright-red paddles of his war
fleet are compared to the motion of a fighting cock's bright feathers,
the analogy resting upon the fact that