l tell you, chiefs, that when I saw you working on that road, my
heart grew warm; not with gratitude only, but with hope. It seemed to
me that I read the promise of something good for Samoa; it seemed to
me as I looked at you that you were a company of warriors in a battle,
fighting for the defence of our common country against all aggression.
For there is a time to fight and a time to dig. You Samoans may
fight, you may conquer twenty times, and thirty times, and all will be
in vain. There is but one way to defend Samoa. Hear it, before it is
too late. It is to make roads and gardens, and care for your trees,
and sell their produce wisely; and, in one word, to occupy and use
your country. If you do not, others will. . . .

"I love Samoa and her people. I love the land. I have chosen it to
be my home while I live, and my grave after I am dead, and I love the
people, and have chosen them to be my people, to live and die with.
And I see that the day is come now of the great battle; of the great
and the last opportunity by which it shall be decided whether you are
to pass away like those other races of which I have been speaking, or
to stand fast and have your children living on and honouring your
memory in the land you received of your fathers."

Mr James H. Mulligan, U.S. Consul, told of the feast of Thanksgiving Day
on the 29th November prior to Mr Stevenson's death, and how at great
pains he had procured for it the necessary turkey, and how Mrs Stevenson
had found a fair substitute for the pudding. In the course of his speech
in reply to an unexpected proposal of "The Host," Mr Stevenson said:

"There on my right sits she who has but lately from our own loved
native land come back to me--she to whom, with no lessening of
affection to those others to whom I cling, I love better than all the
world besides--my mother. From the opposite end of the table, my
wife, who has been all in all to me, when the days were very dark,
looks to-night into my eyes--while we have both grown a bit older--with
undiminished and undiminishing affection.

"Childless, yet on either side of me sits that good woman, my
daughter, and the stalwart man, my son, and both have been and are
more than son and daughter to me, and have brought into my life mirth
and beauty. Nor is this all. There sits the bright boy dear to my
heart, full of the flow a