

Fence for the Honse. 



lOI 



part in the worship, while whole families, including pet dogs and pigs, rested on such 

 mats, through the long service, which lasted from nine or ten in the morning until 

 four in the afternoon. The congregation of that early day has passed away, people 

 and missionar}', and I am perhaps the sole survivor, for the church is now many feet 

 below the surface of the sea from subsidence of the coast. If I remember rightly one 

 of the Kailua churches on the same island had the same kind of floor as late as 1888. 

 A fence around the house so close that the intervening space could hardly be 

 called a yard was an important part of a decent house. This was made of palings, or 

 if the country afforded them, as was usually the case, stone laid in a low wall with 



FIG. 87. GRASS HOUSE OF THE POORER SORT. 



Steps opposite the door. Before describing the religious services necessary to the com- 

 pletion of a respe6lable dwelling we may read the account Stewart gives of the building 

 at Lahaina, Maui, of the houses Keopuolani, the highest chief on the group, had 

 ordered her men to build for the missionaries who had just arrived at the islands. 

 Although it is much as alread}^ described in these pages, I quote it as confirming the 

 previous account, and also because forty-four years afterward I occupied a room in the 

 foreign-built and comfortable house that had taken the place of the rude grass houses, and 

 learned from the venerable man. Dr. D. Baldwin, who then occupied the mission premises, 

 much that has helped my later studies of Hawaiian things. Stewart writes (p. 188) : 



The men began digging holes for the corner posts, making each house twenty-three feet long 

 and fifteen feet wide, with a space of fifteen feet between them. The posts are about as thick as the 



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