SAMOA.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11670, 10 April 1916, Page 4

SAMOA.

"Samoa, Apia at lest,'' Stevenson wrote in one of his letters, " is far less beautiful than the Marquesas or Tahiti: more gentle scene-, gentler acclivities, a* tamer face of nature; and this much aided, for the wanderer, by the great German plantations, with .their countless avenues of palms. The island has beautiful rivers, of about the bigness of our water in the Lothians, with pleasant pools and waterfalls and overhanging verdure, and often a ' great volume of sound, so that onco I thought I was passing a mill, and it was only the voice of the river."

" The place is beautiful beyond dreams," lie says in another letter. " some fifty miles of the Pacific spread in front; deep woods all round; a mountain making .in .the sky a profile of huge trees upon the left; about us, the little island of our clearing, studded with brave old gentlemen (or ladies or 'the twa o'. thorn') whom we have spared. It is a good place to be in; night and morning Ave havo Theodore Rousseaus (always a new one) hung to amuse us on the walls of the world; and the moon—this is our good season, wo have' a moon just now—makes the night a piece of heaven." Or again ho speaks- of the sounds of the forest; "how the birds and frogs -aro rattling and pining and hailing from the woods! fiere and there a throaty chuckle, here and there cries liko those of jolly children who have lost their way; here and there, the ringing sleigh-bell of the tree-frog."