The _Renown_ sailed from Fiji the following day. On reaching Samoa she lay in the open roadstead, facing misty hills, among which rose steep green cones of long-dead volcanoes. In the middle distance white-crested waves flicked their tails with a vicious curl in a leaden rain-flogged sea, which ended in a white line of breakers where the red roofs of the town of Apia met the beach. The Prince went off in a bounding launch, accompanied by Colonel R. W. Tate, the administrator. A mile of rough and tumble brought the friendly shelter of the reef. Here a number of long low Samoan canoes, with some forty semi-naked paddlers apiece, met the launch and escorted it with shouting and beating of wooden drums, as big as bath-tubs, past the rusty skeleton of the German _See Adler_, wrecked upon the bar in the hurricane of 1899, to a quiet wharf, where the Prince landed in a bower of greenery and bunting. He was received by the principal people of the island, including the Chief Judge and other officers of the New Zealand administration, also a number of missionaries. Addresses of welcome were presented and the Prince was conducted on foot over carpets of brown mulberry bark to the reception by the Islanders themselves. Lines of smiling Samoans, naked save for loin-cloths of mat and bark and necklaces of crimson pandanus pods the size of fingers, lined the route and brought deep cries of "Aue!"--"Welcome!"--from the bottom of their lungs. The procession was slow and imposing. It ended in a grassy space beneath green coco-nut palms and white-flowering leva trees. The Prince took the seat of honour in a decorated booth, surrounded by thousands of Samoans, many of whom had travelled long distances from their homes by canoe. The ceremonies began with the presentation of a series of Samoan chiefs, including the "High Intercessor," Malietoa Tanumafili, brother of the late King Malietoa Laupepa, and the venerable Tuimale Fana, friend of Robert Louis Stevenson. He is a sturdy, upstanding figure in the photograph in "Vailima Letters," broad-faced and well covered and content. That was a quarter of a century ago. Now the years have bent and dulled him. The years, and perhaps the loss that dulls the world, for Tusitala tells no more tales to any of us in this South Sea Island where he lived and where he knew so well he would die. One thought, if he had been living now, how glad a hand and how rich a memory would have been added to this journey, and how brimming a cup of Imperial romance the _Renown_ would have lifted to Stevenson's lips. But Tusitala could not come to the Prince; so the Prince went to Tusitala, where he lies on the hill-top that meets the winds from the sea, and stood there for a while beside him.