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 done, and the curtain rose on the set scene of the
coronation, Mataafa was absent, and Tamasese stood in his place. Malietoa
was to be deposed for a piece of solemn and offensive trickery, and the
man selected to replace him was his sole partner and accomplice in the
act. For so strange a choice, good ground must have existed; but it
remains conjectural: some supposing Mataafa scratched as too independent;
others that Tamasese had indeed betrayed Laupepa, and his new advancement
was the price of his treachery.

So these two chiefs began to change places like the scales of a balance,
one down, the other up. Tamasese raised his flag (Jan. 28th, 1886) in