o obtain even a stuffed specimen. The late Earl of Pembroke,
to whom I wrote on the subject from Australia, strongly urged me to
endeavour to secure at least one living specimen; so also did Sir George
Grey. But although I--like Mr. Stair--wrote to many native friends in
Samoa, offering a high price for a bird, I had no success; civil war
had broken out, and the people had other matters to think of beside
bird-catching. I was, however, told a year later that two fine specimens
had been taken on the north-west coast of Upolu, that one had been
so injured in trapping that it died, and the other was liberated by a
mischievous child.

I have never heard one of these birds sound a note, but a native teacher
on Tutuila told me that in the mating season they utter a short, husky
hoot, more like a cough than the cry of a bird.

A full month after I first landed in Samoa, I was shooting in the
mountains at the back of the village of Tiavea in Upolu, when a large,
and to me unknown, bird rose from the leaf-strewn ground quite near me,
making almost as much noise in its flight as a hornbill. A native
who was with me, fired at the same time as I did, and the bird fell.
Scarcely had the native stooped to pick it up, exclaiming that it was a
_Manu Mea_ when a second appeared, half-running, half-flying along the
ground. This, alas! I also killed They were male and female, and my
companion and I made a search of an hour to discover their resting place
(it was not the breeding season), but the native said that the _Manu
Mea_ scooped out a retreat in a rotten tree or among loose stones,
covered with dry moss. But we searched in vain, nor did we even see any
wild yams growing about, so evidently the pair were some distance from
their home, or were making a journey in search of food.

During one of my trips on foot across Upolu, with a party of natives,
we sat down to rest on the side of a steep mountain path leading to the
village of Siumu. Some hundreds of feet below us was a comparatively
open patch of ground--an abandoned yam plantation, and just as we were
about to resume our journey, we saw two _Manu Mea_ appear. Keeping
perfectly quiet, we watched them moving about, scratching up the leaves,
and picking at the ground in an aimless, perfunctory sort of manner with
their heavy, thick bills. The natives told me that they were searching,
not for yams, but for a sweet berry called _masa'oi_, upon which the
wild pigeons feed.

In a fe