248 SWEEPING REFORM. 



be found. Fuming with impatience, the anger of the famished 

 populace, like the turbulence of a sea checked in its progress, 

 rose the higher from obstruction. With hoarse murmurs they 

 approached the precincts of the court, rolled onwards to the 

 palace, and retreated not till they had swept away in their 

 unbounded fury, those who were its unworthy objects, the 

 idle and rapacious favourites, whose tragic fate so long sus- 

 pended, no queenly commands, no womanly entreaties could 

 now avert. Of these, not one survived to tell the tale of their 

 extermination. But here the fury of the multitude was 

 stayed ; the four hundred lives of the hapless nobles, including 

 the prince or princes-consort, had appeased it, and the persons 

 of the queen and her sister widows were sacred in the eyes of 

 the people of Apia. So long as a remnant of provision or of 

 strength to procure it, lasted, the royal trio knew not the 

 pangs of hunger beneath which hundreds were daily perishing 

 around them. The young of the community, wanting their 

 accustomed food and usual attendance, perished also in great 

 numbers, and some yet in a state of infancy were overlooked 

 amidst the general distress, and suffered to corrupt within 

 their cradles. This, together with the long crowded state of 

 the metropolis, soon invited pestilence to fill up the measure 

 of destruction already wrought by her sisters, war and famine ; 

 and from the hand of pestilence no rank or loyalty could save. 

 Among those who first fell beneath her deadly grasp were 

 the queen and princesses, leaving (as often happened) amidst 



