and light and rattly as dry gourds with the whisky and the rum.

"It was past midnight, I remember well, when I saw Malia, whom
never had I seen at a drinking, come across the wet-hard sand of
the beach. My brain burned like red cinders of hell as I looked
upon Anapuni look upon her, he being nearest to her by being across
from me in the drinking circle. Oh, I know it was whisky and rum
and youth that made the heat of me; but there, in that moment, the
mad mind of me resolved, if she spoke to him and yielded to dance
with him first, that I would put both my hands around his throat
and throw him down and under the wahine surf there beside us, and
drown and choke out his life and the obstacle of him that stood
between me and her. For know, that she had never decided between
us, and it was because of him that she was not already and long
since mine.

"She was a grand young woman with a body generous as that of a
chiefess and more wonderful, as she came upon us, across the wet
sand, in the shimmer of the moonlight. Even the haole sailormen
made pause of silence, and with open mouths stared upon her. Her
walk! I have heard you talk, O Kanaka Oolea, of the woman Helen
who caused the war of Troy. I say of Malia that more men would
have stormed the walls of hell for her than went against that old-
time city of which it is your custom to talk over much and long
when you have drunk too little milk and too much gin.

"Her walk! In the moonlight there, the soft glow-fire of the
jelly-fishes in the surf like the kerosene-lamp footlights I have
seen in the new haole theatre! It was not the walk of a girl, but
a woman. She did not flutter forward like rippling wavelets on a