School was duly begun, but after a few days the children ceased to appear, the master declared he was “not an attendance officer,” and from then till we left, nearly a year later, no school was held; the last we saw of the blackboard and counting-frame, they were rotting in a field some two miles off, where they had been taken by the French marooned sailors for use in some carnival pony-races. The warship also brought an epidemic of bad colds: every ship except _Mana_ left some such legacy. Now that peace was in some measure restored, we set to work to excavate some of the statues which stood on the slope of the Raraku mountain. The natives were entirely indifferent whether they worked or not, but by paying high wages and giving any quantity of mutton, we were able at this time to get a certain amount of precarious labour for digging and camp work. The whole lot, including my maid-servant, went in for every week-end to the village, and it was always a matter of anxiety to know whether they would ever return. Our Sundays were spent peacefully, doing housework, taking the ponies to water in the crater, changing their pitches at due intervals, and similar jobs. We had just begun the week’s work on Monday, October 12th, when word was brought that some steamers had appeared. The whole of the native staff, of course, at once departed to see what could be begged from the ships. The vessels turned out to be a German squadron, going, they said, “from the China station to Valparaiso.” Some more turned up later, till there were twelve in all, four or five of the number being warships, and the remainder colliers or other smaller vessels. They kept entire silence on the European situation. We had not, of course, the slightest idea that war had broken out, still less that our lonely island was the meeting-place, cleverly arranged by Admiral von Spee, for his ships from Japan—the _Scharnhorst_ and _Gneisenau_—with the other German warships in this region; the _Nürnberg_ and _Leipzig_ had turned up from the west coast of Mexico, and the _Dresden_ from the other side of South America. A writer in the _Cornhill_ (August 1917) states “there happened to be upon it [Easter Island] a British scientific expedition, but busied over the relics of the past, the single-minded men of science did not take the trouble to cross the island to look at the German ships.” S. was, as a matter of fact, twice over at Mataveri while they were in Cook’s Bay, but it is true of this “single-minded” woman, who felt she had something else to do than to ride for some four hours to gaze at the outside of German men-of-war. What did interest us was that presumably, after the usual manner of passing ships, the officers would come over to Raraku, and being intelligent Germans, would photograph our excavations. We therefore turned to, and with our own hands covered up our best things.