"O, you see, you like
Mataafa; we don't." In short, communication is so completely sundered
that for anything we can hear in Samoa, they may all have been hanged at
the yard-arm two days out.

To take another instance. The high chief Faamoina was recently married
to a young and pleasing wife. She desired to follow her husband, an old
man, in bad health, and so deservedly popular that he had been given the
by-name of "_Papalagi Mativa_," or "Poor White Man," on account of his
charities to our countrymen. She was refused. Again and again she has
renewed her applications to be allowed to rejoin him, and without the
least success.

It has been decreed by some one, I know not whom, that Faamoina must
have no one to nurse him, and that his wife must be left in the
anomalous and dangerous position which the Treaty Powers have made for
her. I have wearied myself, and I fear others, by my attempts to get a
passage for her or to have her letters sent. Every one sympathises. The
German ships now in port are loud in expressions of disapproval and
professions of readiness to help her. But to whom can we address
ourselves? Who is responsible? Who is the unknown power that sent
Mataafa in a German ship to the Marshalls, instead of in an English ship
to Fiji? that has decreed since that he shall receive not even
inconsiderable gifts and open letters? and that keeps separated Faamoina
and his wife?

Now, dear sir, these are the facts, and I think that I may be excused
for being angry. At the same time, I am well aware that an angry man is
a bore. I am a man with a grievance, and my grievance has the misfortune
to be very small and very far away. It is very small, for it is only the
case of under a score of brown-skinned men who have been dealt with in
the dark by I know not whom. And I want to know. I want to know by whose
authority Mataafa was given over into German hands. I want to know by
whose authority, and for how long a term of years, he is condemned to
the miserable exile of a low island. And I want to know how it happens
that what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander in
Samoa?--that the German enemy Mataafa has been indefinitely exiled for
what is after all scarce more than constructive rebellion, and the
German friend Tamasese, for a rebellion which has lasted long enough to
threaten us with famine, and was disgraced in its beginning by ominous
threats against the whites, has been punished by a fine of fifty r