ck), a single turtle "for the
king"--_le tasi mo le tupu_. Then came one of the strangest sights I
have yet witnessed. The two most important persons there (bar Mataafa)
were Popo and his son. They rose, holding their long shod rods of
talking men, passed forth from the house, broke into a strange dance,
the father capering with outstretched arms and rod, the son crouching
and gambolling beside him in a manner indescribable, and presently began
to extend the circle of this dance among the acres of cooked food.
_Whatever they leaped over, whatever they called for, became theirs._ To
see mediaeval Dante thus demean himself struck a kind of a chill of
incongruity into our Philistine souls; but even in a great part of the
Samoan concourse, these antique and (I understand) quite local manners
awoke laughter. One of my biscuit tins and a live calf were among the
spoils he claimed, but the large majority of the cooked food (having
once proved his dignity) he re-presented to the king.

Then came the turn of _le alii Tusitala_. He would not dance, but he
was given--five live hens, four gourds of oil, four fine tapas, a
hundred heads of taro, two cooked pigs, a cooked shark, two or three
cocoanut branches strung with kava, and the turtle, who soon after
breathed his last, I believe, from sunstroke. It was a royal present for
"the chief of the great powers." I should say the gifts were, on the
proper signal, dragged out of the field of food by a troop of young men,
all with their lava-lavas kilted almost into a loin-cloth. The art is to
swoop on the food-field, pick up with unerring swiftness the right
things and quantities, swoop forth again on the open, and separate,
leaving the gifts in a new pile: so you may see a covey of birds in a
corn-field. This reminds me of a very inhumane but beautiful passage I
had forgotten in its place. The gift-giving was still in full swing,
when there came a troop of some ninety men all in tapa lava-lavas of a
purplish colour; they paused, and of a sudden there went up from them
high into the air a flight of live chickens, which, as they came down
again, were sent again into the air, for perhaps a minute, from the
midst of a singular turmoil of flying arms and shouting voices; I assure
you, it was very beautiful to see, but how many chickens were killed?

No sooner was my food set out than I was to be going. I had a little
serious talk with Mataafa on the floor, and we went down to the boat,
whe