over like a female charity school,
kept in a grotesque livery, and shaved twice a week? And I had made all
my points on the idea that they were unshaved and clothed anyhow.
However, this last is better business; if only the book had come when I
ordered it! _A propos_, many of the books you announce don't come as a
matter of fact. When they are of any value, it is best to register them.
Your letter, alas! is not here; I sent it down to the cottage, with all
my mail, for Fanny; on Sunday night a boy comes up with a lantern and a
note from Fanny, to say the woods are full of Atuas and I must bring a
horse down that instant, as the posts are established beyond her on the
road, and she does not want to have the fight going on between us.
Impossible to get a horse; so I started in the dark on foot, with a
revolver, and my spurs on my bare feet, leaving directions that the boy
should mount after me with the horse. Try such an experience on Our Road
once, and do it, if you please, after you have been down town from nine
o'clock till six, on board the ship-of-war lunching, teaching Sunday
School (I actually do) and making necessary visits; and the Saturday
before, having sat all day from 1/2-past six to 1/2-past four, scriving
at my Times letter. About half-way up, just in fact at "point" of the
outposts, I met Fanny coming up. Then all night long I was being wakened
with scares that really should be looked into, though I _knew_ there was
nothing in them and no bottom to the whole story; and the drums and
shouts and cries from Tanugamanono and the town keeping up an all-night
corybantic chorus in the moonlight--the moon rose late--and the
search-light of the war-ship in the harbour making a jewel of brightness
as it lit up the bay of Apia in the distance. And then next morning,
about eight o'clock, a drum coming out of the woods and a party of
patrols who had been in the woods on our left front (which is our true
rear) coming up to the house, and meeting there another party who had
been in the woods on our right {front / rear} which is Vaea Mountain,
and 43 of them being entertained to ava and biscuits on the verandah,
and marching off at last in single file for Apia. Briefly, it is not
much wonder if your letter and my whole mail was left at the cottage,
and I have no means of seeing or answering particulars.

The whole thing was nothing but a bottomless scare; it was _obviously_
so; you couldn't make a child believe it was any