far more dangerous materialism that comes with luxury and power. America had lived through sufficient history to give perspective to her romancers; she had not yet undergone the demoralizing strain of prosperity which has followed upon the epoch of the civil war. Never were Americans so profoundly idealistic, so temperamentally fit to understand the spiritualized art of Hawthorne, as between 1840 and 1860. And our pride in him is touched with a subtle regret at the disappearance of a fine civilization, provincial as it was. A more splendid civilization is still to come, no doubt; but the specific conditions that blossomed into many of Hawthorne's tales are irrevocably gone. Great as he seems when we look back, he seems still greater when we look around us. It is no service to Hawthorne's memory to disparage the industrious men and women who are producing our fiction of to-day. But to glance at them, and then to think of him, is to perceive the startling difference between talent and genius.

No one would claim that that genius was faultless in all its divinations. Feeble drawing, ineffective symbolism, morbid dallying with mortuary fancies, may indeed be detected in his books. That sound critic Edwin P. Whipple, who is passing into such ill-deserved oblivion, once said of Hawthorne: "He had spiritual insight, but it did not penetrate to the sources of spiritual joy." The note of robust triumph, of unquestioning faith

in individual happiness and in the sure advance of human society, is indeed too rarely heard in his writings. In repeating his Pater Noster, the stress falls upon Forgive us our trespasses rather than upon Thy Kingdom come.

Yet he believed that the sin and sorrow of humanity, inexplicable as they are, are not to be thought of as if we were apart from God. A neighbor of Hawthorne in Concord has recently written me that once, when death entered a household there, Hawthorne picked the finest sunflower from his garden and sent it to the mourners by Mrs. Hawthorne with this message: "Tell them that the sunflower is a symbol of the sun, and that the sun is a symbol of the glory of God." A shy, simple act of neighborhood kindness, — yet treasured in one memory for more than forty years; and how much of Hawthorne there is in it! The quaint flower from an old-fashioned garden; the delicate sympathy; the perfect phrase; the faith in the power of a symbol to turn the perplexed soul to God! Hawthorne was no natural lover of darkness, but rather one who yearned for light. The gloom which haunts many of his pages is the long shadow cast by our mortal destiny upon a sensitive soul, conscious of kinship with the erring race of men. The mystery is our mystery, perceived, and not created, by that finely endowed mind and heart. The shadow is our shadow; the gleams of insight, the soft radiance of truth and beauty, are his own.

the shore everywhere are the joyous people, shining like clean, oiled, varnished leather, straight and strong as Greeks, simple as children, happy, affectionate, irresponsible and human,—such men as there were when the earth was young.

There in the South Seas lies Tutuila. Four thousand miles to the southwest of the Golden Gate of California, "the second place to the left as you leave San Francisco," to borrow Stevenson's droll definition, Honolulu lying midway, there you will find the green islands of Samoa. Volcanoes make the mountains and gorges and solid land of these islands; two hundred inches of rain a year and an ardent tropic sun make its wonderful forest and bush and graceful palms; the "coral insect" makes its white shoreline and cruel reefs, while copra makes its enduring smell, and its shifting civilization. And about it all is the abiding presence of the Ocean. From every vantage point one sees the blue water meet the blue sky; ever in one's ears is the low growl of the repulsed waters breaking on the guarding reef; in every direction is it ocean-wide away to the world!

There are four principal islands in the Samoan group, besides six islets. The largest island lies to the west, the others, progressively smaller and, geologically, progressively older, to the eastward. The first is Savaii, forty-five miles long and thirty miles wide, the primitive creating volcanoes not yet cold, their rugged sides overrun with liana-bound forests, as yet impassable to man. Next comes Upolu, forty miles by fifteen, richest in cocoanuts and in arable land, its town Apia, the principal one in the islands, its green mountain Vaea, with the glossy farm of Vailima on its flanks, securely within the Valhalla of literary fame. Apia harbor, calm and safe in ordinary days when the trades blow across from the land, changes into a narrow gorge with jagged jaws of coral in the season of the northwest hurricanes. Then great ships are helpless in its tortuous channels, and the sheltering reefs become themselves the sources of

the direst danger. It was in 1889, in this harbor, that an impatient hurricane blew its breath on a Gordian knot of world politics and made ropy spindrift of it.

Fifty miles beyond Upolu lies Tutuila, twenty miles long, and from two to five miles wide. Sixty miles still farther to the southeast, out in the sea, is Manua, almost circular, ten miles in diameter, and oldest of all the Samoan Islands in geological time, and once most honored in hereditary leadership.

Tutuila is primarily a huge volcanic crater, which has built up the island with the lava it has ejected. This crater of Pago-Pago is fringed about with steep walls from 1000 to 2500 feet high, almost vertical on the inner edge after the fashion of craters, sloping away on the outside as the lava flows, two points in its rim, the mountains of Matafao and Peoa, much higher than the rest, and with a break half a mile wide on the south, letting in the sea. The harbor of Pago-Pago,1 thus formed within the crater of Peoa, is nearly two miles deep and a mile wide. This size is, however, much reduced by the barrier reef which occupies half the strait at the entrance, and which forms an unbroken rim about the shore within. But with all this, there is room enough, if not for all the navies of the world, for all the ships likely ever to put in to Samoa. The winding entrance shuts out all surf from the south, and the great walls on every other side make the harbor securely landlocked, whatever the hurricane without. It is, in brief, the one good harbor in all the South Seas, and for that reason it is of high value to a great nation with expansive commercial aspirations. In any case, it is now ours, and is likely to remain so, a mere dock and coaling station in the eyes of our American administrators, but to its people the colony of Tutuila of the United States of America, a position in their eyes far nobler than to be an independent kingdom. Long ago was Pago-Pago ceded to us, and a coaling

1 The g in Samoan is pronounced as ng in sing.

station established there; but the whole island came to us only on the division, in 1891, of the Samoan group between Germany and the United States.

Of arable land Tutuila has practically none: a few wet places are planted to taro, that curious aroid or tropical jackin-the-pulpit, whose tuber is the substitute for the potato throughout the Pacific islands, and for all modern predigested foods, which find their prototype in poi. Along the seashore and on the lower flanks of the mountains is the cocoanut palm, the most graceful tree that grows. The cocoanut furnishes the only article of export from the island, and is, besides, the chief provider of the native's food, drink, clothes, house, and house furnishings. Moors, the American trader of Apia, has said that the South Sea islander awakes in the morning, naked, hungry, and athirst. He rises, climbs a cocoanut tree, and comes down clothed, fed, and drunk. To achieve the last-named condition he must have climbed this tree once, some days before, and tapped a fruiting stem so that its quickly fermenting sap may run out into a shell cup suspended from it. The cocoanut product for export bears that magic name of South Sea tales, copra. This is simply the meat of ripe cocoanuts cut out in little strips, and dried in the sun. The oily, shriveled bits are packed into sacks, and sold to the traders, who ship them to Hamburg, to San Francisco, or to Sydney. From this copra is expressed the familiar cocoanut or palm oil used in making certain soaps. All the copra from all of Samoa - and by far the major part of it comes from the German island Upolu — amounts to barely half a million dollars' worth a year. And beyond copra the Samoan exports consist chiefly in much hopeful talk about some future cacao (chocolate). Besides cocoanuts, the banana, breadfruit, papaya, orange, mango, and a few other food trees grow freely, although but little attention is paid to their cultivation. Without effort on the part of any one there is fruit enough for all. Add to this VOL. XCIV-NO. DLXII

fruit, fish, chickens, pigs, bêche de mer, and squid, and the island contributions to the Samoan's bill of fare are practically all named. As bonnes bouches fat larvæ of giant wood-boring beetles, or the uncooked insides of fresh sea-urchins, may be added. Once a year, too, in the full moon of November the strange sea-worm Palolo rises from the depths to spawn, and to furnish the natives with their daintiest tidbit. An acquired taste for canned salmon-familiarly known as pea soupa, — the principal American export to this interesting colony of ours is much in evidence among all Samoans. Our farewell gift to royalty consisted of a great tin of ship's biscuit, and a case of Columbia River salmon, and it distinctly had the royal approval.

There is no encouragement for white settlers in Tutuila. At present the natives are not allowed to sell their land, and if they were the land could not easily be worked. Laborers are scarce, and the price of a day's work very high. The natives are excellent laborers on other islands when carried, willingly or unwillingly, from their own place, but they do not care to work at home. The communistic conditions, general within the tropics, largely account for this. When a native earns a few dollars his own relatives and those of his wife at once pay him a visit, and the surplus is promptly spent for pea soupa (canned goods), or for material for personal ornamentation. We once paid Vaiula, our head fisherman at Apia, a considerable sum for a fortnight's catch. The same night it was necessary for him to borrow or beg a shilling to go to the circus where his own son was a star performer. The poverty of the tropics is due chiefly to the communism of the people, and the consequent lack of individual incentive. To the generosity of the tropics we may again ascribe the possibility of this communism. There is enough for all and to spare. Why, then, should they not share it with one another? Because there is so much there is no reason why any one should accumulate a surplus.

In Upolu the labor problem has been partly met by the Germans through the introduction of the "black boys" from the Solomon Islands. They make picturesque figures, rambling through the great cocoanut plantation with their little pack donkeys. But they are a dwarfish, negrolike people, held in low esteem by the freeborn, stalwart Samoans, and their retention in semi-slavery is already adding a race problem to the many difficulties of the government at Apia. The great German planting and trading firm (Deutsche Plantagen und Handelsgesellschaft), successor to the once mighty Godeffroys, is pushing for permission to import the allconquering Chinese coolie. If he comes the work will be done, but Stevenson's people will certainly become only encumbering ornaments in their own land. In Tutuila, the laborers on the government coal wharves are Tongans, brought from the Friendly Islands, five hundred miles south of Samoa. The Tongans are of the same stock as the Samoans. The Maoris of New Zealand, the Tahitians of the beautiful French Society Islands, the Marquesans, with whom Hermann Melville lived his idyllic life, the Hawaiians, now almost gone as a pure-blooded race, the Tongans and Samoans constitute the various branches of the Polynesian race, all tall, well-proportioned, straight-haired, beautiful brown people. Anthropologists name the Polynesians as the finest people, physically, in the world. And the erect, great-chested, strong-limbed, supple Samoans are a revelation of the present-day reality of the Greek sculptor's ideal. But the Papuan, negroid, and Malay races that inhabit the myriad islands of Micronesia and Melanesia are mostly ugly and malformed specimens of the human species.

The dense forests of Tutuila have little value as timber. The breadfruit furnishes the curious beams and rafters of the mushroom houses, while the great cocoanut fronds roof them over. But these are not trees of the forest. In the wild wood and bush live numerous kinds of birds,

species allied to the honey-creepers, a few sorts of paroquets, a robin, a much-hunted dove species, some showily colored little kingfishers, a crow, an owl, and a few other predatory forms. The little blue and orange kingfishers are odd in that they are most often to be found far up on the mountain sides in the dense forest where there are certainly no fishes to fish for. The natives say that they peck out the eyes of other birds, and the American officer in charge of the customs, who keeps a few chickens for company and Sunday dinners, has repeatedly noticed the kingfishers dashing at his hens!

A species of flying-fox, a large fruiteating bat nearly a foot long, abounds in the forests, and is the only native mammal. This interesting beast, called pei, is used as food, and is often seen in daytime climbing among the trees like a pigmy goblin. One species of snake is found in Upolu and Savaii, and that but sparingly. It is a harmless serpent, allied to the garter snakes, but reaching a notable size. Lizards are numerous, but the species are few and not large.

The fringing coral reefs of all these islands abound in fishes and invertebrate life. We obtained six hundred and twenty species of fishes from the harbors of Apia and Pago-Pago, all shore forms of the reefs, there being little opportunity for outside fishing or collecting from deep water. So large a number is not recorded from any other ports so small as these. The flat-topped reefs are partly exposed at low tide, but are covered with pools of every size. The reef itself is loose and broken at the surface and fissured on the edges, and fish creep and swim through all the openings and crevices. The large dead masses of branching corals are also filled with small fishes, slippery morays winding in and out the open spaces, while gayly colored damsel-fishes and butterflyfishes cluster in the larger cavities. Everywhere in the tide pools and reef crevices swarm brittle stars, sea urchins, starfishes, crabs, sea-worms, and mollusks;