Some parts of this mele, which is a love-song, have defied the author’s most strenuous efforts to penetrate their deeper meaning. No Hawaiian consulted has made a pretense of understanding it wholly. The Philistines of the middle of the nineteenth century, into whose hands it fell, have not helped matters by the emendations and interpolations with which they slyly interlarded the text, as if to set before us in a strong light the stigmata of degeneracy from which they were suffering.
The author has discarded from the text two verses which followed verse 28:
Hai’na ia mai ka puana:
Ka wai anapa i ke kala.
[Translation.]
Declare to me now the riddle:
The waters that flash on the plain.
The author has refrained from casting out the last two verses, though in his judgment they are entirely out of place and were not in the mele originally.