ut sulked in their villages and spent the time in
indecisive eloquence and barren embassies. Tamasese, by a trick
eminently Samoan, "went in the high bush and the mountains," carrying a
gun like a private soldier--served, in fact, with his own troops
_incognito_--and thus, to Samoan eyes, waived his dynastic pretensions.
And the war, which was announced in the beginning with a long catalogue
of complaints against the King and a distinct and ugly threat to the
white population of Apia, degenerated into a war of defence by the
province of Aana against the eminently brutal troops of Savaii, in which
sympathy was generally and justly with the rebels. Savaii, raging with
private clan hatred and the lust of destruction, was put at free
quarters in the disaffected province, repeated on a wider scale the
outrages of Manono and Apolima, cut down the food-trees, stripped and
insulted the women, robbed the children of their little possessions,
burned the houses, killed the horses, the pigs, the dogs, the cats,
along one half of the seaboard of Aana, and in the prosecution of these
manly exploits managed (to the joy of all) to lose some sixty men
killed, wounded, and drowned.

Government by the Treaty of Berlin was still erect when, one fine
morning, in walked the three Consuls, totally uninvited, with a
proclamation prepared and signed by themselves, without any mention of
anybody else. They had awoke to a sense of the danger of the situation
and their own indispensable merits. The two children knew their day was
over; the nurses had come for them. Who can blame them for their
timidity? The Consuls have the ears of the Governments; they are the
authors of those despatches of which, in the ripeness of time,
Blue-books and White-books are made up; they had dismissed (with some
little assistance from yourself) MM. Cedercrantz and Senfft von Pilsach,
and they had strangled, like an illegitimate child, the scandal of the
dynamite. The Chief Justice and the President made haste to disappear
between decks, and left the ship of the State to the three volunteers.
There was no lack of activity. The Consuls went up to Atua, they went
down to Aana; the oarsmen toiled, the talking men pleaded; they are said
to have met with threats in Atua, and to have yielded to them--at
least, in but a few days' time they came home to us with a new treaty
of pacification. Of course, and as before, the Government troops were
whitewashed; the Savaii ruffians h