guarded by sentries and flown over by the
standard of Samoa. He would then have been told it was the seat of
government, driven (as I have to relate) over the Mulivai and from beyond
the German town into the Anglo-Saxon. To-day, he will learn it has been
carted back again to its old quarters. And he will think it significant
that the king of the islands should be thus shuttled to and fro in his
chief city at the nod of aliens. And then he will observe a feature more
significant still: a house with some concourse of affairs, policemen and
idlers hanging by, a man at a bank-counter overhauling manifests, perhaps
a trial proceeding in the front verandah, or perhaps the council breaking
up in knots after a stormy sitting. And he will remember that he is in
the _Eleele Sa_, the "Forbidden Soil," or Neutral Territory of the
treaties; that the magistrate whom he has just seen trying native
criminals is no officer of the native king's; and that this, the only
port and place of business in the kingdom, collects and administers its
own revenue for its own behoof by the hands of white councillors and
under the supervision of white consuls. Let him go further afield. He
will find the roads almost everywhere to cease or to be made impassable
by native pig-fences, bridges to be quite unknown, and houses of the
whites to become at once a rare exception. Set aside the German
plantations, and the frontier is sharp. At the boundary of the _Eleele
Sa_, Europe ends, Samoa begins. Here, then, is a singular state of
affairs: all the money, luxury, and business of the kingdom centred in
one place; that place excepted from the native government and
administered by whites for whites; and the whites themselves holding it
not in common but in hostile camps, so that it lies between them like a
bone between two dogs, each growling, each clutching his own end.

Should Apia ever choose a coat of arms, I have a motto ready: "Enter
Rumour painted full of tongues." The majority of the natives do
extremely little; the majority of the whites are merchants with some four
mails in the month, shopkeepers with some ten or twenty customers a day,
and gossip is the common resource of all. The town hums to the day's
news, and the bars are crowded with amateur politicians. Some are office-
seekers, and earwig king and consul, and compass the fall of officials,
with an eye to salary. Some are humorists, delighted with the pleasure
of faction for itsel