istry, several hundred chiefs, two guards, and six
policemen. Always decent, he withdrew at an early hour; by those that
remained, all decency appears to have been forgotten; high chiefs were
seen to dance; and day found the house carpeted with slumbering
grandees, who must be roused, doctored with coffee, and sent home. As a
first chapter in the history of Polynesian Confederation, it was hardly
cheering, and Laupepa remarked to one of the embassy, with equal dignity
and sense: "If you have come here to teach my people to drink, I wish
you had stayed away."

The Germans looked on from the first with natural irritation that a
power of the powerlessness of Hawaii should thus profit by its
undeniable footing in the family of nations, and send embassies, and
make believe to have a navy, and bark and snap at the heels of the great
German Empire. But Becker could not prevent the hunted Laupepa from
taking refuge in any hole that offered, and he could afford to smile at
the fantastic orgie in the embassy. It was another matter when the
Hawaiians approached the intractable Mataafa, sitting still in his Atua
government like Achilles in his tent, helping neither side, and (as the
Germans suspected) keeping the eggs warm for himself. When the
_Kaimiloa_ steamed out of Apia on this visit, the German war-ship
_Adler_ followed at her heels; and Mataafa was no sooner set down with
the embassy than he was summoned and ordered on board by two German
officers. The step is one of those triumphs of temper which can only be
admired. Mataafa is entertaining the plenipotentiary of a sovereign
power in treaty with his own king, and the captain of a German corvette
orders him to quit his guests.

But there was worse to come. I gather that Tamasese was at the time in
the sulks. He had doubtless been promised prompt aid and a prompt
success; he had seen himself surreptitiously helped, privately ordered
about, and publicly disowned; and he was still the king of nothing more
than his own province, and already the second in command of Captain
Brandeis. With the adhesion of some part of his native cabinet, and
behind the back of his white minister, he found means to communicate
with the Hawaiians. A passage on the _Kaimiloa_, a pension, and a home
in Honolulu were the bribes proposed; and he seems to have been tempted.
A day was set for a secret interview. Poor, the Hawaiian secretary, and
J. D. Strong, an American painter attached to the embassy i