one would have guessed it from his solemn and dull countenance.  Impossible to conceive two less dashing champions for a threatened race; and there is no doubt they were reduced to the extremity of muddlement and childish fear.  It was drawing towards night on the 10th, when this luckless pair and a chief of the name of Tuiatafu, set out for the German consulate, still minded to temporise.  As they went, they discussed their case with agitation.  They could see the lights of the German war-ships as they walked—­an eloquent reminder.  And it was then that Tamasese proposed to sign the convention.  “It will give us peace for the day,” said Laupepa, “and afterwards Great Britain must decide.”—­“Better fight Germany than that!” cried Tuiatafu, speaking words of wisdom, and departed in anger.  But the two others proceeded on their fatal errand; signed the convention, writing themselves king and vice-king, as they now believed themselves to be no longer; and with childish perfidy took part in a scene of “reconciliation” at the German consulate.

Malietoa supposed himself betrayed by Tamasese.  Consul Churchward states with precision that the document was sold by a scribe for thirty-six dollars.  Twelve days later at least, November 22nd, the text of the address to Great Britain came into the hands of Dr. Stuebel.  The Germans may have been wrong before; they were now in the right to be angry.  They had been publicly, solemnly, and elaborately fooled; the treaty and the reconciliation were both fraudulent, with the broad, farcical fraudulency of children and barbarians.  This history is much from the outside; it is the digested report of eye-witnesses; it can be rarely corrected from state papers; and as to what consuls felt and thought, or what instructions they acted under, I must still be silent or proceed by guess.  It is my guess that Stuebel now decided Malietoa Laupepa to be a man impossible to trust and unworthy to be dealt with.  And it is certain that the business of his deposition was put in hand at once.  The position of Weber, with his knowledge of things native, his prestige, and his enterprising intellect, must have always made him influential with the consul:  at this juncture he was indispensable.  Here was the deed to be done; here the man of action.  “Mr. Weber rested not,” says Laupepa.  It was “like the old days of his own consulate,” writes Churchward.  His messengers filled the isle; his house was thronged with chiefs and orators; he sat close over his loom, delightedly weaving the future.  There was one thing requisite to the intrigue,—­a native pretender; and the very man, you would have said, stood waiting:  Mataafa, titular of Atua, descended from both the royal lines, late joint king with Tamasese, fobbed off with nothing in the time of the Lackawanna treaty, probably mortified by the circumstance, a chief with a strong following, and in character and capacity high above the native average.  Yet when Weber’s spiriting was