r; and now when he is dead, and the war seems to have gone
against him, many can scarce remember, without a kind of regret, how
much devotion and audacity have been spent in vain. His name still
lives in the songs of Samoa. One, that I have heard, tells of _Misi
Ueba_ and a biscuit-box--the suggesting incident being long since
forgotten. Another sings plaintively how all things, land and food and
property, pass progressively, as by a law of nature, into the hands of
_Misi Ueba_, and soon nothing will be left for Samoans. This is an
epitaph the man would have enjoyed.

At one period of his career, Weber combined the offices of director of
the firm and consul for the City of Hamburg. No question but he then
drove very hard. Germans admit that the combination was unfortunate; and
it was a German who procured its overthrow. Captain Zembsch superseded
him with an imperial appointment, one still remembered in Samoa as "the
gentleman who acted justly." There was no house to be found, and the new
consul must take up his quarters at first under the same roof with
Weber. On several questions, in which the firm was vitally interested,
Zembsch embraced the contrary opinion. Riding one day with an Englishman
in Vailele plantation, he was startled by a burst of screaming, leaped
from the saddle, ran round a house, and found an overseer beating one of
the thralls. He punished the overseer, and, being a kindly and perhaps
not a very diplomatic man, talked high of what he felt and what he might
consider it his duty to forbid or to enforce. The firm began to look
askance at such a consul; and worse was behind. A number of deeds being
brought to the consulate for registration, Zembsch detected certain
transfers of land in which the date, the boundaries, the measure, and
the consideration were all blank. He refused them with an indignation
which he does not seem to have been able to keep to himself; and,
whether or not by his fault, some of these unfortunate documents became
public. It was plain that the relations between the two flanks of the
German invasion, the diplomatic and the commercial, were strained to
bursting. But Weber was a man ill to conquer. Zembsch was recalled; and
from that time forth, whether through influence at home, or by the
solicitations of Weber on the spot, the German consulate has shown
itself very apt to play the game of the German firm. That game, we may
say, was twofold,--the first part even praiseworthy, the s