"Yes," he nodded half-sadly to me, "in her last years Hiwilani went
back to the old ways, and to the old beliefs--in secret, of course.
And, BELIEVE me, she was some collector herself. You should have
seen her bones. She had them all about her bedroom, in big jars,
and they constituted most all her relatives, except a half-dozen or
so that Kanau beat her out of by getting to them first. The way
the pair of them used to quarrel about those bones was awe-
inspiring. And it gave me the creeps, when I was a boy, to go into
that big, for-ever-twilight room of hers, and know that in this jar
was all that remained of my maternal grand-aunt, and that in that
jar was my great-grandfather, and that in all the jars were the
preserved bone-remnants of the shadowy dust of the ancestors whose
seed had come down and been incorporated in the living, breathing
me. Hiwilani had gone quite native at the last, sleeping on mats
on the hard floor--she'd fired out of the room the great, royal,
canopied four-poster that had been presented to her grandmother by
Lord Byron, who was the cousin of the Don Juan Byron and came here
in the frigate Blonde in 1825.
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