I have said before that the Honolulu mosquito does not sing, so the first night out I went to bed unsuspecting, and foolishly congratulating myself that I had got rid of him for a time. I knew better when I woke up in the still watches of the night, scraping myself from head to foot, like Job with his potsherd—it was too hot for bed- or any other kind of clothes—and wondering what had got me. I turned up the light, and there was the cloud of witnesses. I gave up the struggle there and then, got into my pyjamas, and went on deck with a rug over my arm and many evil thoughts in my heart. One of those mosquitos got as far as Samoa with me. He was the only one that the sea air seemed to agree with, and he was as elusive as a Boer brigand surrounded by half a dozen British armies. I killed him the morning we sighted Apia. He was too gorged to fly. It was literally blood for blood, only all the blood was on one side. I didn’t discover any mosquitos in Samoa. At least, none discovered me, but that is perhaps because I escaped without sleeping there, and the old steam-roller was lying a long way off the shore. There were, however, plenty of the other winged pests which are characteristic of most tropical paradises. Some of us walked up to Vailima in response to the invitation of a fellow-traveller, a rich German merchant, who had bought the ruins of Robert Louis Stevenson’s house—it was torn to pieces by the shells during the bombardment—and “restored” it. I hope the gentle ghost of “R. L. S.” will never revisit it in the glimpses of the moon. Samoa is one of those tropical paradises over which the romancers have spread themselves with the most lavish verbal embroidery. The cold, or rather tepid, truth as to my own brief experiences of it is this. We trudged over four miles and a half of muddy road, under a grey, leaden sky that would have done justice to an English mid-summer day. From this descended an almost impalpable but drenching mist, the air was thick with flies and other intrusive things, which got into your eyes and nose and mouth and ears. The exertion of plodding through the mud quickly reduced us to a state of almost intolerable limpness. It was like four and a half miles of Turkish bath adorned with tropical foliage. You had to get some of this foliage and swing it about with what vigour you chanced to have left, so that you might keep the flies far enough off to be able to breathe. We took a languid interest in the shell-smashed and bullet-pierced trees by the wayside, and in the rude entrenchments which the Samoans had thrown up, for it was along this road that the British and American detachments had to fight their way to dubious victory so as to get things ready for the German occupation.