A Tale From the Rainbow Land/Foreword
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Foreword
The Menehunes are a mythical race of little brown people supposed to have inhabited the Hawaiian Islands in olden times. They were very tiny folk, measuring their stature by inches instead of by feet, and their mission seems to have been that of being helpful to men; but they could work only at night, and had to drop whatever they were doing when the elepaio bird called at dawn, and the task, no matter how far from completion, could never be taken up again by them.
They are used in this little tale merely as a fanciful vehicle to carry the words of the Loving People; and the local color, merely as a setting for a world-wide phase of human life. K. M. Y.
Waikiki, Honolulu,
Nineteen-Fourteen.