IX.—Tourist and Invalid traffic.

These Islands should prove a popular tourist resort, from their variety and beauty of landscape, combining ocean, woodland, winding vales, silvery streams, and towering mountain peaks clothed in evergreen verdure; from their pleasant and equable winter climate, and from the fact that here the natives are to be seen dwelling in their primitive condition, or nearly so, which is by no means the case at Tonga, Rarotonga, or Tahiti. Hotels are established, which could easily be adapted to accommodate travellers, if any wished to spend the winter months at Apia. Until there are means provided for lodging invalids in some mountain sanatorium, such had better not visit Samoa. Natives and sometimes European residents suffer from eye diseases, and at two of the native houses at which I called I found the head of the page 35 house down with a kind of low fever, which did not, however, prevent their asking sufficiently high prices for certain articles of native manufacture which they wished to "trade." The atmosphere of Apia was the least desirable of any place included in our trip, but on the hills behind the town it was much more pleasant.