Colum's carefully crafted Hawaiian stories reflect the theories of storytelling that he set forth in Story Telling, New & Old (1968). Colum felt that a story should be performed aloud, and he was much concerned with sounds— rhythms, "rhymes and chimes," and onomatopoeia, or words that imitate the sounds they denote. He believed that a storyteller should use a mature vocabulary, since if the action and the sentences were clear, young readers would not be confused, and would instead take pleasure in the new words and in the respect that the use of these words implied.

In Story Telling Colum declared that characters should be readily comprehended, "explicable at every moment, even though they do odd and unpredictable things." In At the Gateways of the Day, the plots flow naturally from the needs and desires of the sharply etched characters. The necessities of the plot do not...