memory. All felt it was a gallant battle, and the man a
great fighter; 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 Captain Zembsch superseded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 Germ