The chief, according to an old Hawaiian proverb, owned "all the land, all the sea, and all the iron cast up by the sea." [Illustration: HAWAIIAN WARRIORS.] The land was carefully parceled out among the chiefs, upon the plan of securing to each one from his own land all that he and his retainers needed for their lives.

What they chiefly required was taro ground, the sea for fish, the mulberry for tapa, and timber land for canoes; but they required also _ti_ leaves in which to wrap their parcels, and flowers of which to make their _les_, or flower necklaces.

And I have seen modern surveys of old "lands" in which the lines were run very irregularly, and in some cases oven outlying patches were added, because a straight line from mountain to sea was found to exclude some one product, even so trifling as the yellow flowers of which _les_ are often made.
On such a "land," and from it, the chief and his people lived.

He appears to have been the brains and they the hands to work it.

They owed him two days' labor in every seven, in which they cultivated his taro, cleaned his fish pond, caught fish for him, opened paths, made or transported canoes, and did generally what he required.