Jump to content

Page:Letters from America, Brooke, 1916.djvu/215

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
SOME NIGGERS
165

famous beauty, with the keen intelligence Samoans have if they care, a wonderful dancer, possessed of a glorious singing voice and a perfect knowledge of English. The party was a great success. The princess led her guests afterwards to the flag-staff. Before anyone could stop her, she leapt on to the pole and raced up the sixty feet of it. That also is among the accomplishments of a Samoan princess. She seized the German flag, tore it to pieces, brought it down, and danced on it. So the tale is; and it is probably true. In the villages where I stayed it was amusing how swiftly and completely the children forgot the few words of German the Government sometimes had them taught; while one or two common phrases, 'Morgen,' 'gut,' etc., were retained as extremely good jokes by the boys and girls, occasions of inextinguishable laughter, through the absurdity of their sound and the very ridiculous Germanness of them....

I wish I were there again. It is a country, and a life, that bind the heart. There is a poem:

"I know an island,
Lovely and lost, and half the world away;

And there, 'twixt lowland and highland,