a telltale,
A messenger sped by the gale
To warn the canoe to depart.
Pray you depart!
10 Hot-foot, she's off with her pack--
A bundle red-stained with the mud--
And ghost-swift she breasts Malu-aka.
Quest follows like smoke--lost is her companion;
Fierce the wind plucks at the leaves,
15 Grabs--by mistake--her burden, the man.
Despairing, she falls to the earth,
And, hugging the hillock of sand,
Sobs out her soul on the beach Mo-mo-iki.
A tale this wrung from my heart,
20 Not told by the tongue of man.
Wrong! yet right, was I, my friend;
My love after all was for you,
While I lived a vagabond life there and here,
Sowing my vagrom tears in all roads--
25 Prompt my payment of debt to your house--
Yes, truly, I'm wrong!
[Page 257]

XLI.--THE WATER OF KANE

If one were asked what, to the English-speaking mind,
constitutes the most representative romantico-mystical
aspiration that has been embodied in song and story,
doubtless he would be compelled to answer the legend and myth
of the Holy Grail. To the Hawaiian mind the aspiration and
conception that most nearly approximates to this is that
embodied in the words placed at the head of this chapter. The
Water of Kane. One finds suggestions and hints of this
conception in many passages of Hawaiian song and story,
sometimes a phosphorescent flash, answering to the dip of the
poet's blade, sometimes crystallized into a set form; but
nowhere else than in the following mele have I found this
jewel deliberately wrought into shape, faceted, and fixed in
a distinct form of speech.

This mele comes from Kauai, the island which more than any
other of the Hawaiian group retains a tight hold on the
mystical and imaginative features that mark the mythology of
Polynesia; the island also which less than any other of the
group was dazzled by the glamour of royalty and enslaved by
the theory of the divine birth of kings.