e house guarded by sentries and flown over by
the standard of Samoa. He would then have been told it was the seat of
government, driven (as I have to relate) over the Mulivai and from
beyond the German town into the Anglo-Saxon. To-day, he will learn it
has been carted back again to its old quarters. And he will think it
significant that the king of the islands should be thus shuttled to and
fro in his chief city at the nod of aliens. And then he will observe a
feature more significant still: a house with some concourse of affairs,
policemen and idlers hanging by, a man at a bank-counter overhauling
manifests, perhaps a trial proceeding in the front verandah, or perhaps
the council breaking up in knots after a stormy sitting. And he will
remember that he is in the _Eleele Sa_, the "Forbidden Soil," or Neutral
Territory of the treaties; that the magistrate whom he has just seen
trying native criminals is no officer of the native king's; and that
this, the only port and place of business in the kingdom, collects and
administers its own revenue for its own behoof by the hands of white
councillors and under the supervision of white consuls. Let him go
further afield. He will find the roads almost everywhere to cease or to
be made impassable by native pig-fences, bridges to be quite unknown,
and houses of the whites to become at once a rare exception. Set aside
the German plantations, and the frontier is sharp. At the boundary of
the _Eleele Sa_, Europe ends, Samoa begins. Here, then, is a singular
state of affairs: all the money, luxury, and business of the kingdom
centred in one place; that place excepted from the native government and
administered by whites for whites; and the whites themselves holding it
not in common but in hostile camps, so that it lies between them like a
bone between two dogs, each growling, each clutching his own end.

Should Apia ever choose a coat of arms, I have a motto ready: "Enter
Rumour painted full of tongues." The majority of the natives do
extremely little; the majority of the whites are merchants with some
four mails in the month, shopkeepers with some ten or twenty customers a
day, and gossip is the common resource of all. The town hums to the
day's news, and the bars are crowded with amateur politicians. Some are
office-seekers, and earwig king and consul, and compass the fall of
officials, with an eye to salary. Some are humorists, delighted with the
pleasure of faction for itself. "I n