few exceptions, all is Anglo-Saxon. Here the reader will go forward
past the stores of Mr. Moors (American) and Messrs. MacArthur (English);
past the English mission, the office of the English newspaper, the
English church, and the old American consulate, till he reaches the
mouth of a larger river, the Vaisingano. Beyond, in Matautu, his way
takes him in the shade of many trees and by scattered dwellings, and
presently brings him beside a great range of offices, the place and the
monument of a German who fought the German firm during his life. His
house (now he is dead) remains pointed like a discharged cannon at the
citadel of his old enemies. Fitly enough, it is at present leased and
occupied by Englishmen. A little farther, and the reader gains the
eastern flanking angle of the bay, where stands the pilot-house and
signal-post, and whence he can see, on the line of the main coast of the
island, the British and the new American consulates.
The course of his walk will have been enlivened by a considerable to and
fro of pleasure and business. He will have encountered many varieties of
whites,--sailors, merchants, clerks, priests, Protestant missionaries in
their pith helmets, and the nondescript hangers-on of any island beach.
And the sailors are sometimes in considerable force; but not the
residents. He will think at times there are more signboards than men to
own them. It may chance it is a full day in the harbour; he will then
have seen all manner of ships, from men-of-war and deep-sea packets to
the labour vessels of the German firm and the cockboat island schooner;
and if he be of an arithmetical turn, he may calculate that there are
more whites afloat in Apia bay than whites ashore in the whole
Archipelago. On the other hand, he will have encountered all ranks of
natives, chiefs and pastors in their scrupulous white clothes; perhaps
the king himself, attended by guards in uniform; smiling policemen with
their pewter stars; girls, women, crowds of cheerful children. And he
will have asked himself with some surprise where these reside. Here and
there, in the back yards of European establishments, he may have had a
glimpse of a native house elbowed in a corner; but since he left
Mulinuu, none on the beach where islanders prefer to live, scarce one on
the line of street. The handful of whites have everything; the natives
walk in a foreign town. A year ago, on a knoll behind a bar-room, he
might have observed a nativ
|