prominently forth into the basin and makes a dangerous cape opposite the fairway of the entrance.  Danger is, therefore, on all hands.  The entrance gapes three cables wide at the narrowest, and the formidable surf of the Pacific thunders both outside and in.  There are days when speech is difficult in the chambers of shore-side houses; days when no boat can land, and when men are broken by stroke of sea against the wharves.  As I write these words, three miles in the mountains, and with the land-breeze still blowing from the island summit, the sound of that vexed harbour hums in my ears.  Such a creek in my native coast of Scotland would scarce be dignified with the mark of an anchor in the chart; but in the favoured climate of Samoa, and with the mechanical regularity of the winds in the Pacific, it forms, for ten or eleven months out of the twelve, a safe if hardly a commodious port.  The ill-found island traders ride there with their insufficient moorings the year through, and discharge, and are loaded, without apprehension.  Of danger, when it comes, the glass gives timely warning; and that any modern war-ship, furnished with the power of steam, should have been lost in Apia, belongs not so much to nautical as to political history.

The weather throughout all that winter (the turbulent summer of the islands) was unusually fine, and the circumstance had been commented on as providential, when so many Samoans were lying on their weapons in the bush.  By February it began to break in occasional gales.  On February 10th a German brigantine was driven ashore.  On the 14th the same misfortune befell an American brigantine and a schooner.  On both these days, and again on the 7th March, the men-of-war must steam to their anchors.  And it was in this last month, the most dangerous of the twelve, that man’s animosities crowded that indentation of the reef with costly, populous, and vulnerable ships.

I have shown, perhaps already at too great a length, how violently passion ran upon the spot; how high this series of blunders and mishaps had heated the resentment of the Germans against all other nationalities and of all other nationalities against the Germans.  But there was one country beyond the borders of Samoa where the question had aroused a scarce less angry sentiment.  The breach of the Washington Congress, the evidence of Sewall before a sub-committee on foreign relations, the proposal to try Klein before a military court, and the rags of Captain Hamilton’s flag, had combined to stir the people of the States to an unwonted fervour.  Germany was for the time the abhorred of nations.  Germans in America publicly disowned the country of their birth.  In Honolulu, so near the scene of action, German and American young men fell to blows in the street.  In the same city, from no traceable source, and upon no possible authority, there arose a rumour of tragic news to arrive by the next occasion, that the Nipsic had opened fire on the Adler, and the Adler had sunk her on the first reply.  Punctually on the day appointed, the news came; and the two nations, instead of being plunged into war, could only mingle tears over the loss of heroes.