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By Root 4290 0

the whalers, the traders, the military-- "he is the only one who has brought more than he took away. After all, what is it he is trying to get me to do?" she reflected. "He wants me to stop sending the men into the forests for sandalwood. He wants me to build better fish ponds and to grow more taro. He wants me to protect the girls from the sailors, and to stop baby girls from being buried alive. Everything Makua Hale tells me is a good thing." Then she would pause and think of her kapu husband, Kelolo. "But I will not give up Kelolo until just before I am going to die." And so the warfare between Malama and Abner continued, but if a morning passed when duties kept him from the grass palace, Malama was uneasy, for her arguments with Abner were the best part of her day. She sensed that he was telling her the truth, and he was the first man who had ever done so.

When the time came for Jerusha's baby to be born she was faced by unwelcome news from Dr. Whipple: "I have been detained on Hawaii, where three mission wives are expecting babies, and it will be totally impossible for me to come to Lahaina. I am sure that Brother Abner will be able to handle the delivery capably, but nevertheless I beg your forgiveness. I am sorry." She grew afraid.

At one point she even went so far as to suggest: "Perhaps we should ask one of the local women to help us." But Abner was adamant and quoted Jeremiah: " 'Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen,'" and he pointed out how unlikely it was that a heathen woman, steeped in idols and vice, would know how to deliver a Christian baby, and Jerusha agreed. But this time stubborn little Abner had so memorized Deland's Midwifery, and Jerusha was finally so content to rely on him, that her boy was born without difficulty, and when Abner held the child for the first time he rather stolidly congratulated himself on having done such a good job of doctoring, but when the time came to place the boy in Jerusha's left arm and apply the infant's mouth to his wife's breast, the floods of emotion that he had so long imprisoned within his tight heart burst loose, and he fell onto the earth beside the bed and confessed, "My dearest companion, I love you more than I will ever be able to explain. I love you, Jerusha." And she, hearing these words of comfort in an alien land, the words she had so longed for, fed her child and was content.

"We will call the boy Micah," he announced at last.

"I had thought some sweeter name, perhaps David," she suggested.

"We will call him Micah," Abner replied.

"Is he strong?" she asked weakly.

"Strong in the goodness of the Lord," Abner assured her, and within two weeks she was teaching her classes again, a slim, radiant missionary woman sweating in a heavy woolen dress.

For one of the peculiarities of the missionaries was that they insisted upon living in tropical Hawaii exactly as if they were back home in bleak New England. They wore the same heavy clothing, did the same amount of tiring work, ate the same heavy meals whenever they could be obtained. In a land rich with Polynesian fruits, their greatest joy was to obtain from some passing ship a bag of dried apples, so that they could enjoy once more a thick, sweet apple pie. Wild cattle roamed the hills, but the missionaries preferred salt pork. There was an abundance of fish in the shallows, but they clung desperately to dried beef shipped out from Boston. Breadfruit they rarely touched, and coconuts were heathenish. In all his years on Maui, Abner Hale would never once do any of God's official work unless costumed in underwear, heavy woolen pants, long shirt, stock, vest, heavy claw-hammer coat and, if the meeting were outside, his big beaver hat. Jerusha dressed comparably.

But what was impossible to comprehend was the fact that each year, on the first of October, when the Hawaiian summer was hottest, mission families regularly climbed into heavy woolen underwear. They had followed this custom in Boston. They would follow it here. Nor did they ever find relief by swimming in the cool lagoon, for Bartholomew