success that waited on their efforts.  Out of a hundred cases treated, only five died.  They were all well-behaved, though full of childish wiles.  One old gentleman, a high chief, was seized with alarming symptoms of belly-ache whenever Mrs. de Coetlogon went her rounds at night:  he was after brandy.  Others were insatiable for morphine or opium.  A chief woman had her foot amputated under chloroform.  “Let me see my foot!  Why does it not hurt?” she cried.  “It hurt so badly before I went to sleep.”  Siteoni, whose name has been already mentioned, had his shoulder-blade excised, lay the longest of any, perhaps behaved the worst, and was on all these grounds the favourite.  At times he was furiously irritable, and would rail upon his family and rise in bed until he swooned with pain.  Once on the balcony he was thought to be dying, his family keeping round his mat, his father exhorting him to be prepared, when Mrs. de Coetlogon brought him round again with brandy and smelling-salts.  After discharge, he returned upon a visit of gratitude; and it was observed, that instead of coming straight to the door, he went and stood long under his umbrella on that spot of ground where his mat had been stretched and he had endured pain so many months.  Similar visits were the rule, I believe without exception; and the grateful patients loaded Mrs. de Coetlogon with gifts which (had that been possible in Polynesia) she would willingly have declined, for they were often of value to the givers.

The tissue of my story is one of rapacity, intrigue, and the triumphs of temper; the hospital at the consulate stands out almost alone as an episode of human beauty, and I dwell on it with satisfaction.  But it was not regarded at the time with universal favour; and even to-day its institution is thought by many to have been impolitic.  It was opened, it stood open, for the wounded of either party.  As a matter of fact it was never used but by the Mataafas, and the Tamaseses were cared for exclusively by German doctors.  In the progressive decivilisation of the town, these duties of humanity became thus a ground of quarrel.  When the Mataafa hurt were first brought together after the battle of Matautu, and some more or less amateur surgeons were dressing wounds on a green by the wayside, one from the German consulate went by in the road.  “Why don’t you let the dogs die?” he asked.  “Go to hell,” was the rejoinder.  Such were the amenities of Apia.  But Becker reserved for himself the extreme expression of this spirit.  On November 7th hostilities began again between the Samoan armies, and an inconclusive skirmish sent a fresh crop of wounded to the de Coetlogons.  Next door to the consulate, some native houses and a chapel (now ruinous) stood on a green.  Chapel and houses were certainly Samoan, but the ground was under a land-claim of the German firm; and de Coetlogon wrote to Becker requesting permission (in case it should prove necessary) to use these structures for