14, 1899.

DEAR SIS, You will be surprised to get a letter
from me after all this time. I am well and hope you are
enjoying a simillar blessing. I am married now and left the
sea. I suppose Joe is a man along in middle life now and you
a handsome mattron with a family. This is a good country but
hot.

Ever your affectionate brother JACK WILSON.

P. S.--I often think of Pa and Ma and the old days.

Not long after, Jack sailed into Apia with a load of copra and his
letter for the outgoing mail. The town was in an uproar, and cracking
like the Fourth of July. Jack wondered what in thunder it was about, as
he landed at Leicester's wharf and discovered the postmaster lying
underneath the post office in a nest of sand bags. Crawling in after the
functionary, Jack handed him the letter.

"That's for America," said Jack.

"Five cents," said Leicester.

"What's all this corrobborree?" asked Jack.

"It's war, that's what it is," said Leicester, weighing the letter in a
tin scale.

Jack's jaw fell. For a month past he had heard rumors of a native war,
but he had resolutely closed his ears to all that Fetuao was so
insistent to tell him. It was none of his business, he had said to her
uneasily. He wasn't no politician, and all he asked of anybody was to be
let alone; and with that he had tried to put the matter by as something
imaginary and disquieting, which, if boldly ignored, would disappear of
itself.

"Say, Mr. Leicester, what in hell is it about?" he inquired.

"If you went to the bottom of it you would find Dutchmen," said
Leicester grimly.

Jack cursed the meddling scoundrels.

"They want Mataafa for king, just because he has a majority of two
thousand votes," said Leicester.

"There sounds to be something in that," said Jack faintly.

"Nothing at all!" exclaimed Leicester. "Just speciousness, that's what I
call it. The other fellow, Tanumafili, is a nice-appearing boy from the
missionary college, and being above wire-pulling and promising
everything to everybody, he hasn't any following to speak of. But he's a
good, decent Protestant boy, and will make a fine king."

"Oh, ho!" said Jack, beginning to see how the wind lay, "and so the
other dodger's a Catholic?"

"A rank, bigoted Catholic," said Leicester hotly. "That's what makes
the missionaries so wild against him, and likewise the British and
American officials."

"They won't let him be king, then