contents on a bit of paper. Nor was this all, for
he had to make a copy, besides, and tack it on the warehouse door with
the inscription, "Taly and find correct John Wilson."

This done, he dropped into his boat and hoisted the sails, weary,
heartsick, and anxious for what the future might have in store for him.
Passing to leeward of the British man-of-war, he saw her decks swarming
with refugees, her crew grouped about the guns, and an officer in the
fore-crosstrees sweeping the town with his glass. A gust of wind carried
down to him the sound of children crying, and with it an
indistinguishable humming, at once menacing and dejected, like the sigh
of an impending gale. It echoed in his ears long afterwards, the most
poignant note in war, the voice of the herded, helpless multitude.

He reached Oa in the gray of the morning, and the grating of his boat's
keel in the sand brought out Fetuao to meet him. She could not restrain
her joy at the sight of him, kissing his hands and clinging to him as he
took out the sails and oars and carried them up to the house. She never
seemed so sweet to him, never so girlish and charming in her fresh
young womanhood as in that dawn of his home-coming. To hear her laugh,
to see her eyes sparkle, to feel her warm breath against his cheek, all
transported him into a state of unreasoning security. Apia and its
blood-stained streets faded into the immeasurable distance; the war, and
all the attendant horrors that had haunted him, now seemed for a moment
too remote to even think of. What had he to fear, here on his own
hearthstone, with his dear wife beside him, in another world from that
he had so lately quitted? If there was trouble, wouldn't the consuls
settle it, them and the treaty officials whose job it was to run the
blessed group? He had never been no politician himself, and he wasn't
agoing to begin now. Let them worry as was paid to worry.

"Fetuao," he said, "where is the flag the _faamasino_ gave us when we
were married in Apia?"

"_O i ai pea i le pusa_," she returned.

"Get it out, my pigeon," he said, "for I mean to hoist it above the
house for a protection. And tell me, Fetuao," he went on, "what before I
have never asked thee: on what side are thy people in this misa of
Mataafa and Tanumafili?"

"For Mataafa," she returned. "Dost thou think that Samoa wants this
untattooed boy from the missionary college? Why else did Faalelei and
the young men go last month to Apia to