persons who would not do this were not considered
on good terms of sociability. For a man or a woman to
refuse a solicitation for illicit intercourse was
considered an act of meanness, and so thoroughly was
this sentiment wrought into their minds that, even to
the present day, they seem not to rid themselves of the
feeling of meanness in making a refusal."

The Hawaiian word for marriage is _hoao_, meaning "trial." It was also
customary for a married woman to have an acknowledged lover known as
_punula_. The word _hula hula_ is familiar the world over as the name
of an improper dance, but it is nothing to what it used to be. The
famous cave Niholua was consecrated to it. In past generations

"warriors came here to revel with their paramours. The
Tartarean gloom was slightly relieved by torches
ingeniously formed of strings of the candle-nut.
Beneath this rugged roof, and amid this darkness--their
faces strangely reflecting the feeble torch-light--and
divested of every particle of apparel, they
promiscuously united in dancing the _hula hula_ (the
licentious dance).... Wives were exchanged, and so were
concubines; fathers despoiled their own daughters, and
brothers deemed it no crime to perpetrate incest."

Waitz-Gerland (VI., 459) cite Wise as attesting that "in 1848 the
missionaries gave up a girls' school, because it was impossible to
preserve the virtue of their pupils," and Steen Bill wrote that in
1846 seventy per cent of all the crimes punished were of a lewd
character, and that on the whole island there was not a chaste girl of
eleven years of age. Isabella Bird wrote (169) that "the Hawaiian
women have no notions of virtue as we understand it, and if there is
to be any future for this race it must come through a higher
morality."

THE HELEN OF HAWAII

As there was practically no difference between married and unmarried
women in Hawaii, it is not strange that cases of abduction of wives
should have occurred. The following story, related in Kalakana's book,
probably suffered no great change at the hands of the recorder. I give
a condensed version of it:

In the twelfth century, the close of the second era of
migration from Tahiti and Samoa, there lived a girl
named Hina, noted as the most beautiful maiden on the
islands. She married the chief Hakalanileo, and had two
children by him. Reports of her b