d just completed a tour of the islands. There
are few men in the world with a more mature knowledge of native
character, and I applied to him eagerly for an estimate of the relative
forces. "When the first shot is fired, and not before," said he, "you
will know who is who." The event has shown that he might have gone yet
further; for even after shots were fired and men slain, an important
province was still hesitating and trimming.

Mataafa lay in Malie. He had an armed picket at a ford some two miles
from Apia, where they sat in a prodigious state of vigilance and glee;
and his whole troop, although not above five hundred strong, appeared
animated with the most warlike spirit. For himself, he waited, as he had
waited for two years; wrote eloquent letters, the time to answer which
was quite gone by; and looked on while his enemies painfully collected
their forces. Doubtless to the last he was assured and deceived by vain
promises of help.

The process of gathering a royal army in Samoa is cumbrous and dilatory
in the extreme. There is here none of the expedition of the fiery cross
and the bale-fire; but every step is diplomatic. Each village, with a
great expense of eloquence, has to be wiled with promises and spurred
by threats, and the greater chieftains make stipulations ere they will
march. Tamasese, son to the late German puppet, and heir of his
ambitions, demanded the vice-kingship as the price of his accession,
though I am assured that he demanded it in vain. The various provinces
returned various and unsatisfactory answers. Atua was off and on;
Tuamasaga was divided; Tutuila recalcitrant; and for long the King sat
almost solitary under the windy palms of Mulinuu. It seemed indeed as if
the war was off, and the whole archipelago unanimous (in the native
phrase) to sit still and plant taro.

But at last, in the first days of July, Atua began to come in. Boats
arrived, thirty and fifty strong, a drum and a very ill-played bugle
giving time to the oarsmen, the whole crew uttering at intervals a
savage howl; and on the decked fore-sheets of the boat the village
champion, frantically capering and dancing. Parties were to be seen
encamped in palm-groves with their rifles stacked. The shops were
emptied of red handkerchiefs, the rallying sign, or (as a man might say)
the uniform of the Royal army. There was spirit shown; troops of
handsome lads marched in a right manly fashion, with their guns on their
shoulders, to