United States or Slovakia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Old stomachs are worn thin and tender, and we drink sparingly because we dare not drink more. We are wise, but the wisdom is bitter." "The priest Eoppo sang a long mele about Kahekili's mother and his mother's mother, and all their mothers all the way back to the beginning of time," Kumuhana resumed. "And it seemed I must die of my sand-hot dryness ere he was done.
In the pause that followed, wherein Hardman Pool was deep sunk in meditation, Kumuhana licked his dry lips many times. At the last he broke silence: "The twelve dollars, Kanaka Oolea, for the jackass and the second- hand saddle and bridle?"
It warms the heart. Even the soul and the heart grow cold when one is old." "You ARE old," Pool conceded. "Almost as old as I." Kumuhana shook his head and murmured. "Were I no older than you I would be as young as you." "I am seventy-one," said Pool. "I do not know ages that way," was the reply. "What happened when you were born?" "Let me see," Pool calculated. "This is 1880.
Boki made a distillery, and leased Manoa lands to grow sugar for it, and Kaahumanu, who was regent, cancelled the lease, rooted out the cane, and planted potatoes. And Boki was angry, and prepared to make war, and gathered his fighting men, with a dozen whaleship deserters and five brass six-pounders, out at Waikiki " "That was the very time Kahekili died," Kumuhana broke in eagerly.
"And it was the year before their coming that the idols were cast down and the taboos broken," Kumuhana added. "But the chiefs still practised the old ways, the custom of hunakele, and hid the bones of the aliis where no men should find them and make fish-hooks of their jaws or arrow heads of their long bones for the slaying of little mice in sport. Behold, O Kanaka Oolea!"
They sat on, Pool meditating, conning over and over to himself the Maori death-chant he had heard, and especially the line, "So dusk of eve came on," finding in it an intense satisfaction of beauty; Kumuhana licking his lips and tokening that he waited for something more. At last he broke silence. "I have talked long, O Kanaka Oolea.
Hardman Pool drove home the point of his steel. Kumuhana looked about him first, then slowly let his eyes come to rest on the fly-flapping maid. "Go," Pool commanded her. "And come not back without you hear a clapping of my hands." Hardman Pool spoke no further, even after the flapper had disappeared into the house; yet his face adamantly looked: "Yes or no?"
If you will not tell me alone, then will you tell Kalama and me together, and her lips will talk, her lips will talk, so that the latest malahini will shortly know what, otherwise, you and I alone will know." Long time Kumuhana sat on in silence, debating the argument and finding no way to evade the fact-logic of it. "Great is your haole wisdom," he conceded at last. "Yes? or no?"
Why does not any man do this that I do? Any man of all the men who work for me, feed out of my hand, and let me do their thinking for them me, who work harder than any of them, who eats no more than any of them, and who can sleep on no more than one lauhala mat at a time like any of them?" "I am out of the cloud, Kanaka Oolea," said Kumuhana, with a visible brightening of countenance.
"Bring one glass of gin and milk for old Kumuhana," commanded Hardman Pool. WAIKIKI, HONOLULU June 28, 1916. This, of Alice Akana, is an affair of Hawaii, not of this day, but of days recent enough, when Abel Ah Yo preached his famous revival in Honolulu and persuaded Alice Akana to tell her soul. But what Alice told concerned itself with the earlier history of the then surviving generation.
Word Of The Day