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.