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Updated: June 14, 2025
While our accounts were being settled, preparatory to our departure, I occupied myself in looking at some kahilis and feather leis. The yellow ones, either of Oo or Mamo feathers, only found in this island, are always scarce, as the use of them is a prerogative of royalty and nobility.
It was just as Hedwig was tucking the shawl about his neck to hide the collar of his tunic, and Miss Braithwaite was looking a trifle offended, because she considered the memory of Queen Victoria not to be trifled with, and just as Nikky took a fresh breath and puffed out leis cheeks again, that the Archduchess came in.
There were lamentably few, though the pretty rigidly enforced law, which compels all children between the ages of six and fifteen to attend school for forty weeks of the year, had probably gathered together all the children of the district. They all wore coloured chemises and leis of flowers. Outside, some natives presented us with some ripe papayas.
For while they lie basking in the sun, without care of theirs, the cocoanut, the breadfruit, the yam, the guava, the banana, and the delicious papaya, which is a compound of a ripe apricot with a Cantaloupe melon, grow and ripen perpetually. Men and women are always amusing themselves, the men with surf-bathing, the women with making leis both sexes with riding, gossiping, and singing.
A party of native travellers rainbound are here, and the native women are sitting on the floor stringing flowers and berries for leis. One very attractive-looking young woman, refined by consumption, is lying on some blankets, and three native men are smoking by the fire. Upa attempts conversation with us in broken English, and the others laugh and talk incessantly.
But in Virgin Soil he is easy and almost negligent master of his instrument, and though he is an exile and at times a sharply embittered one, he gathers experience round his theme as only the artist can who has enriched leis art by having outlived his youth without forgetting its pangs, joys, mortifications, and love-songs.
The fabrication of the beautiful quilts I before wrote of is a favourite occupation of native women, and they make all their own and their husbands' clothes; but making leis, going into the woods to collect materials for them, talking, riding, bathing, visiting, and otherwise amusing themselves, take up the greater part of their time.
This contains the seeds which are eatable, as is also the fleshy part of the drupes. I find that it is from the seeds of this tree and their coverings that the brilliant orange leis, or garlands of the natives, are made. The soft white case of the leaves and the terminal buds can also be eaten. The leaves are used for thatching, and their tough longitudinal fibres for mats and ropes.
Leis of the crimson ohia blossoms were universal; but besides these there were leis of small red and white double roses, pohas, yellow amaranth, sugar cane tassels like frosted silver, the orange pandanus, the delicious gardenia, and a very few of orange blossoms, and the great granadilla or passion-flower. Few if any of the women wore shoes, and none of the children had anything on their heads.
The dew was heavy, smoke curled idly from native houses, the east was flushing with the dawn, and the valley looked the picture of perfect peace. A number of natives assembled to see us start, and they all shook hands with us, exchanging alohas, and presenting us with leis of roses and ohias. D. looked very pretty with a red hibiscus blossom in her shining hair.
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