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A Footnote to History - Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa by Robert Louis Stevenson
page 14 of 181 (07%)
remains pointed like a discharged cannon at the citadel of his old
enemies. Fitly enough, it is at present leased and occupied by
Englishmen. A little farther, and the reader gains the eastern flanking
angle of the bay, where stands the pilot-house and signal-post, and
whence he can see, on the line of the main coast of the island, the
British and the new American consulates.

The course of his walk will have been enlivened by a considerable to and
fro of pleasure and business. He will have encountered many varieties of
whites,--sailors, merchants, clerks, priests, Protestant missionaries in
their pith helmets, and the nondescript hangers-on of any island beach.
And the sailors are sometimes in considerable force; but not the
residents. He will think at times there are more signboards than men to
own them. It may chance it is a full day in the harbour; he will then
have seen all manner of ships, from men-of-war and deep-sea packets to
the labour vessels of the German firm and the cockboat island schooner;
and if he be of an arithmetical turn, he may calculate that there are
more whites afloat in Apia bay than whites ashore in the whole
Archipelago. On the other hand, he will have encountered all ranks of
natives, chiefs and pastors in their scrupulous white clothes; perhaps
the king himself, attended by guards in uniform; smiling policemen with
their pewter stars; girls, women, crowds of cheerful children. And he
will have asked himself with some surprise where these reside. Here and
there, in the back yards of European establishments, he may have had a
glimpse of a native house elbowed in a corner; but since he left Mulinuu,
none on the beach where islanders prefer to live, scarce one on the line
of street. The handful of whites have everything; the natives walk in a
foreign town. A year ago, on a knoll behind a bar-room, he might have
observed a native house guarded by sentries and flown over by the
standard of Samoa. He would then have been told it was the seat of
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