SAMOA.

Westport Times, Volume VIII, Issue 1186, 26 June 1874, Page 3

SAMOA.

(illustrated leader.) Non cnivis homini contingit attire Cormthum It is not every man's lot to be able to go to Corinth. It is not every body gets to Samoa. Virtue and self-control accompany a vessel up to the reef. But once inside the harbor of Apia there approach her undisguised immorality and open licentiousness. Hero still the Syren sit and sings. Here Circe endeavours to allure the seaman as of yore. Go on shore, and the town—with the exception of a few residences—is a collection of German casinos. He who has visited Apia carries away with him a vision or rather a hideous night-mare of Lager beer, German concertinas and bad German barrel organs, forming a maddening accompaniment to German drinking songs, and a few faint words of English struggling for existence in this German ocean. Of course tins docs not occur in the daytime, for Samoa like South Carolina is a sultry clime, and the days arc very hot and exhausting, but "when the hours of day arc numbered, then tho voices of the night," wake up in the shape of those terrible organs and concertinas, which last far on towards dawn. I used to think the Germans a musical people. Here they seem to have changed their mind as well as their sky when they ran across the sea. And, like Harry Hotspur, " J would rather live with cheese and garlic in a windmill," than have those soul-crushing music mills ground into my ear while, imbibing lager beer. Happy, happy will that day be for Apia "when the grinders shall cease because they arc few." It is to these melancholy and noxious instruments that I attribute the cause of the greater part of the crews of vessels lying: here going on shore and getting drunk. I commend them for it. The man who would not endeavour io drown his grief in cups on hearing those vexatious organs, can have no soul. I should recommend the use, the constant use, of these instruments to all publicans, for as braudy is given in large quantities to one who has been bitten by a snake, so it is necessary to drink deeply in order to resist the yery depressing effects of these German barrel organs. No one, I should say, would stay longer in Apia than he can help.

We have visited Levuka in its prime, when every vessel from the colonics brought down " Some more unfortunates weary of debt, who, rashly importunate, had gone"—to Fiji • and who, if they had a pound, had certainly " hidden it in a napkin," for no one saw it. Then were the gay times in Fiji ; for these fresh arrivals who had "folded their tents like tho Arabs, and as silently stolen away," from tho lived in a very free-handed and lavish style. Good, merry, jovial souls! they cut out the pace and made the place go ahead as far as piiblichpusca and too confiding credit would allow, and they threw such a tinsel glitter over the Island, that the sheen of them reached the colonics, and capitalists in Australia and New Zealand have been induced or rather seduced into opening stores on that nice little island. Gorernmcnts have opened up steam communication with that "right little tight little island. For O ! it is a tight little island." (Square gin ia the favorite drink.) Companies for the growth of cottou

have been formed which have proved melancholy fiascos and a bank is started where I. O. U's for sixpence and yams aro the true currency of the country. But to conclude, Fiji in its happiest days never countenanced opened profligacy as Apia docs. It is essentially an English settlement, Snrnoau shamelessness is unknown, and tho nights are not robbed of sleep by German barrel organs.