in the afternoon, a very lucky thing happened; the Chief Justice came to
call; met one of our employés on the road; and was shown what I had done
to the road.

"Is this the road across the island?" he asked.

"The only one," said Innes.

"And has one man done all this?"

"Three times," said the trusty Innes. "It has had to be made three
times, and when Mr. Stevenson came, it was a track like what you see
beyond."

"This must be put right," said the Chief Justice.

_Sunday._--The truth is, I broke down yesterday almost as soon as I
began, and have been surreptitiously finishing the entry to-day. For all
that I was much better, ate all the time, and had no fever. The day was
otherwise uneventful. I am reminded; I had another visitor on Friday;
and Fanny and Lloyd, as they returned from a forest raid, met in our
desert, untrodden road, first Father Didier, Keeper of the conscience of
Mataafa, the rising star; and next the Chief Justice, sole stay of
Laupepa, the present and unsteady star, and remember, a few days before
we were close to the sick bed and entertained by the amateur physician
of Tamasese, the late and sunken star. "That is the fun of this place,"
observed Lloyd; "everybody you meet is so important." Everybody is also
so gloomy. It will come to war again, is the opinion of all the well
informed--and before that to many bankruptcies; and after that, as
usual, to famine. Here, under the microscope, we can see history at
work.

_Wednesday._--I have been very neglectful. A return to work, perhaps
premature, but necessary, has used up all my possible energies, and made
me acquainted with the living headache. I just jot down some of the past
notabilia. Yesterday B., a carpenter, and K., my (unsuccessful) white
man, were absent all morning from their work; I was working myself,
where I hear every sound with morbid certainty, and I can testify that
not a hammer fell. Upon inquiry I found they had passed the morning
making ice with our ice machine and taking the horizon with a spirit
level! I had no sooner heard this than--a violent headache set in; I am
a real employer of labour now, and have much of the ship captain when
aroused; and if I had a headache, I believe both these gentlemen had
aching hearts. I promise you, the late ---- was to the front; and K.,
who was the most guilty, yet (in a sense) the least blameable, having
the brains and character of a canary-bird, fared none the better for
B.'s repartees. I hear them hard at work this morning, so the menace may
be blessed. It was just after my dinner, just before theirs, that I
administered my redoubtable tongue--it is really redoubtable--to these
skulkers. (Paul used to triumph over Mr. J. for weeks. "I am very sorry
for you," he would say; "you're going to have a talk with Mr. Stevenson
when he comes home: you don't know what that is!") In fact, none of them
do, till they get it. I have known K., for instance, for months; he has
never heard me complain, or take notice, unless it were to praise; I
have used him always as my guest, and there seems to be something in my
appearance which suggests endless, ovine long-suffering! We sat in the
upper verandah all evening, and discussed the price of iron roofing, and
the state of the draught-horses, with Innes, a new man we have taken,
and who seems to promise well.

One thing embarrasses me. No one ever seems to understand my attitude
about that book; the stuff sent was never meant for other than a first
state; I never meant it to appear as a book. Knowing well that I have
never had one hour of inspiration since it was begun, and have only
beaten out my metal by brute force and patient repetition, I hoped some
day to get a "spate of style" and burnish it--fine mixed metaphor. I am
now so sick that I intend, when the Letters are done and some more
written that will be wanted, simply to make a book of it by the
pruning-knife. I cannot fight longer; I am sensible of having done worse
than I hoped, worse than I feared; all I can do now is to do the best I
can for the future, and clear the book, like a piece of bush, with axe
and cutlass. Even to produce the MS. of this will occupy me, at the most
favourable opinion, till the middle of next year; really five years were
wanting, when I could have made a book; but I have a family,
and--perhaps I could not make the book after all.

TO W. CRAIBE ANGUS

   The late Mr. Craibe Angus of Glasgow was one of the chief organisers
   of the Burns Exhibition in that city, and had proposed to send out to
   Samoa a precious copy of the _Jolly Beggars_ to receive the autograph
   of R. L. S. and be returned for the purposes of that Exhibition. The
   line quoted, "But still our hearts are true," etc., should, it
   appears, run, "But still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland."
   The author of the _Canadian Boat Song_ which opens thus was Hugh,
   twelfth Earl of Eglinton. The first quotation is of course from
   Burns.

     _Vailima, Samoa, April_ 1891.

DEAR MR. ANGUS,--Surely I remember you! It was W. C. Murray who made us
acquainted, and we had a pleasant crack. I see your poet is not yet
dead. I remember even our talk--or you would not think of trusting that
invaluable _Jolly Beggars_ to the treacherous posts, and the perils of
the sea, and the carelessness of authors. I love the idea, but I could
not bear the risk. However--

  "Hale be your heart, hale be your fiddle--"

it was kindly thought upon.

My interest in Burns is, as you suppose, perennial. I would I could be
present at the exhibition, with the purpose of which I heartily
sympathise; but the _Nancy_ has not waited in vain for me, I have
followed my chest, the anchor is weighed long ago, I have said my last
farewell to the hills and the heather and the lynns: like Leyden, I
have gone into far lands to die, not stayed like Burns to mingle in the
end with Scottish soil. I shall not even return like Scott for the last
scene. Burns Exhibitions are all over. 'Tis a far cry to Lochow from
tropical Vailima.

  "But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
   And we in dreams behold the Hebrides."

When your hand is in, will you remember our poor Edinburgh Robin? Burns
alone has been just to his promise; follow Burns, he knew best, he knew
whence he drew fire--from the poor, white-faced, drunken, vicious boy
that raved himself to death in the Edinburgh madhouse. Surely there is
more to be gleaned about Fergusson, and surely it is high time the task
was set about. I may tell you (because your poet is not dead) something
of how I feel: we are three Robins who have touched the Scots lyre this
last century. Well, the one is the world's; he did it, he came off, he
is for ever; but I and the other--ah! what bonds we have--born in the
same city; both sickly, both pestered, one nearly to madness, one to the
madhouse, with a damnatory creed; both seeing the stars and the dawn,
and wearing shoe-leather on the same ancient stones, under the same
pends, down the same closes, where our common ancestors clashed in their
armour, rusty or bright. And the old Robin, who was before Burns and the
flood, died in his acute, painful youth, and left the models of the
great things that were to come; and the new, who came after, outlived
his green-sickness, and has faintly tried to parody the finished work.
If you will collect the strays of Robin Fergusson, fish for material,
collect any last re-echoing of gossip, command me to do what you
prefer--to write the preface--to write the whole if you prefer:
anything, so that another monument (after Burns's) be set up to my
unhappy predecessor on the causey of Auld Reekie. You will never know,
nor will any man, how deep this feeling is: I believe Fergusson lives
in me. I do, but tell it not in Gath; every man has these fanciful
superstitions, coming, going, but yet enduring; only most men are so
wise (or the poet in them so dead) that they keep their follies for
themselves.--I am, yours very truly,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO EDMUND GOSSE

     _Vailima, April 1891._

MY DEAR GOSSE,--I have to thank you and Mrs. Gosse for many mementoes,
chiefly for your _Life_ of your father. There is a very delicate task,
very delicately done. I noted one or two carelessnesses, which I meant
to point out to you for another edition; but I find I lack the time, and
you will remark them for yourself against a new edition. There were two,
or perhaps three, flabbinesses of style which (in your work) amazed me.
Am I right in thinking you were a shade bored over the last chapters? or
was it my own fault that made me think them susceptible of a more
athletic compression? (The flabbinesses were not there, I think, but in
the more admirable part, where they showed the bigger.) Take it all
together, the book struck me as if you had been hurried at the last, but
particularly hurried over the proofs, and could still spend a very
profitable fortnight in earnest revision and (towards the end) heroic
compression. The book, in design, subject, and general execution, is
well worth the extra trouble. And even if I were wrong in thinking it
specially wanted, it will not be lost; for do we not know, in Flaubert's
dread confession, that "prose is never done"? What a medium to work in,
for a man tired, perplexed among different aims and subjects, and
spurred by the immediate need of "siller"! However, it's mine for what
it's worth; and it's one of yours, the devil take it; and you know, as
well as Flaubert, and as well as me, that it is _never done_; in other
words, it is a torment of the pit, usually neglected by the bards who
(lucky beggars!) approached the Styx in measure. I speak bitterly at the
moment, having just detected in myself the last fatal symptom, three
blank verses in succession--and I believe, God help me, a hemistich at
the tail of them; hence I have deposed the labourer, come out of hell by
my private trap, and now write to you from my little place in purgatory.
But I prefer hell: would I could always dig in those red coals--or else
be at sea in a schooner, bound for isles unvisited: to be on shore and
not to work is emptiness--suicidal vacancy.

I was the more interested in your _Life_ of your father, because I
meditate one of mine, or rather of my family. I have no such materials
as you, and (our objections already made) your attack fills me with
despair; it is direct and elegant, and your style is always admirable to
me--lenity, lucidity, usually a high strain of breeding, an elegance
that has a pleasant air of the accidental. But beware of purple
passages. I wonder if you think as well of your purple passages as I do
of mine? I wonder if you think as ill of mine as I do of yours? I
wonder; I can tell you at least what is wrong with yours--they are
treated in the spirit of verse. The spirit--I don't mean the measure, I
don't mean you fall into bastard cadences; what I mean is that they seem
vacant and smoothed out, ironed, if you like. And in a style which (like
yours) aims more and more successfully at the academic, one purple word
is already much; three--a whole phrase--is inadmissible. Wed yourself to
a clean austerity: that is your force. Wear a linen ephod, splendidly
candid. Arrange its folds, but do not fasten it with any brooch. I swear
to you, in your talking robes, there should be no patch of adornment;
and where the subject forces, let it force you no further than it must;
and be ready with a twinkle of your pleasantry. Yours is a fine tool,
and I see so well how to hold it; I wonder if you see how to hold mine?
But then I am to the neck in prose, and just now in the "dark
_interstylar_ cave," all methods and effects wooing me, myself in the
midst impotent to follow any. I look for dawn presently, and a full
flowing river of expression, running whither it wills. But these useless
seasons, above all, when a man _must_ continue to spoil paper, are
infinitely weary.

We are in our house after a fashion; without furniture, 'tis true,
camping there, like the family after a sale. But the bailiff has not yet
appeared; he will probably come after. The place is beautiful beyond
dreams; some fifty miles of the Pacific spread in front; deep woods all
round; a mountain making in the sky a profile of huge trees upon our
left; about us, the little island of our clearing, studded with brave
old gentlemen (or ladies, or "the twa o' them") whom we have spared. It
is a good place to be in; night and morning, we have Theodore Rousseaus
(always a new one) hung to amuse us on the walls of the world; and the
moon--this is our good season, we have a moon just now--makes the night
a piece of heaven. It amazes me how people can live on in the dirty
north; yet if you saw our rainy season (which is really a caulker for
wind, wet, and darkness--howling showers, roaring winds, pit-blackness
at noon) you might marvel how we could endure that. And we can't. But
there's a winter everywhere; only ours is in the summer. Mark my words:
there will be a winter in heaven--and in hell. _Cela rentre dans les
procédés du bon Dieu; et vous verrez!_ There's another very good thing
about Vailima, I am away from the little bubble of the literary life. It
is not all beer and skittles, is it? By the by, my _Ballads_ seem to
have been dam bad; all the crickets sing so in their crickety papers;
and I have no ghost of an idea on the point myself: verse is always to
me the unknowable. You might tell me how it strikes a professional bard:
not that it really matters, for, of course, good or bad, I don't think I
shall get into _that_ galley any more. But I should like to know if you
join the shrill chorus of the crickets. The crickets are the devil in
all to you: 'tis a strange thing, they seem to rejoice like a strong
man in their injustice. I trust you got my letter about your Browning
book. In case it missed, I wish to say again that your publication of
Browning's kind letter, as an illustration of _his_ character, was
modest, proper, and in radiant good taste.--In Witness whereof, etc.
etc.,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO MISS RAWLINSON

   The next is written to a young friend and visitor of Bournemouth days
   (see vol. xxiv. p. 227) on the news of her engagement to Mr. Alfred
   Spender.

     _Vailima, Apia, Samoa, April 1891._

MY DEAR MAY,--I never think of you by any more ceremonial name, so I
will not pretend. There is not much chance that I shall forget you until
the time comes for me to forget all this little turmoil in a corner
(though indeed I have been in several corners) of an inconsiderable
planet. You remain in my mind for a good reason, having given me (in so
short a time) the most delightful pleasure. I shall remember, and you
must still be beautiful. The truth is, you must grow more so, or you
will soon be less. It is not so easy to be a flower, even when you bear
a flower's name. And if I admired you so much, and still remember you,
it is not because of your face, but because you were then worthy of it,
as you must still continue.

Will you give my heartiest congratulations to Mr. Spender? He has my
admiration; he is a brave man; when I was young, I should have run away
from the sight of you, pierced with the sense of my unfitness. He is
more wise and manly. What a good husband he will have to be! And
you--what a good wife! Carry your love tenderly. I will never forgive
him--or you--it is in both your hands--if the face that once gladdened
my heart should be changed into one sour or sorrowful.

What a person you are to give flowers! It was so I first heard of you;
and now you are giving the May flower!

Yes, Skerryvore has passed; it was, for us. But I wish you could see us
in our new home on the mountain, in the middle of great woods, and
looking far out over the Pacific. When Mr. Spender is very rich, he must
bring you round the world and let you see it, and see the old gentleman
and the old lady. I mean to live quite a long while yet, and my wife
must do the same, or else I couldn't manage it; so, you see, you will
have plenty of time; and it's a pity not to see the most beautiful
places, and the most beautiful people moving there, and the real stars
and moon overhead, instead of the tin imitations that preside over
London. I do not think my wife very well; but I am in hopes she will now
have a little rest. It has been a hard business, above all for her; we
lived four months in the hurricane season in a miserable house,
overborne with work, ill-fed, continually worried, drowned in perpetual
rain, beaten upon by wind, so that we must sit in the dark in the
evenings; and then I ran away, and she had a month of it alone. Things
go better now; the back of the work is broken; and we are still foolish
enough to look forward to a little peace. I am a very different person
from the prisoner of Skerryvore. The other day I was three-and-twenty
hours in an open boat; it made me pretty ill; but fancy its not killing
me half-way! It is like a fairy story that I should have recovered
liberty and strength, and should go round again among my fellow-men,
boating, riding, bathing, toiling hard with a wood-knife in the forest.
I can wish you nothing more delightful than my fortune in life; I wish
it you; and better, if the thing be possible.

Lloyd is tinkling below me on the typewriter; my wife has just left the
room; she asks me to say she would have written had she been well
enough, and hopes to do it still.--Accept the best wishes of your
admirer,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

   This letter announces (1) the arrival of Mrs. Thomas Stevenson from
   Sydney, to take up her abode in her son's island home now that the
   conditions of life there had been made fairly comfortable; and (2)
   the receipt of a letter from me expressing the disappointment felt by
   Stevenson's friends at home at the impersonal and even tedious
   character of some portions of the South Sea Letters that had reached
   us. As a corrective of this opinion, I may perhaps mention here that
   there is a certain many-voyaged master-mariner as well as
   master-writer--no less a person than Mr. Joseph Conrad--who does not
   at all share it, and prefers _In the South Seas_ to _Treasure
   Island_.

     _[Vailima] April 29th, '91._

MY DEAR COLVIN,--I begin again. I was awake this morning about half-past
four. It was still night, but I made my fire, which is always a
delightful employment, and read Lockhart's _Scott_ until the day began
to peep. It was a beautiful and sober dawn, a dove-coloured dawn,
insensibly brightening to gold. I was looking at it some while over the
down-hill profile of our eastern road when I chanced to glance
northward, and saw with extraordinary pleasure the sea lying outspread.
It seemed as smooth as glass, and yet I knew the surf was roaring all
along the reef, and indeed, if I had listened, I could have heard
it--and saw the white sweep of it outside Matautu.

I am out of condition still, and can do nothing, and toil to be at my
pen, and see some ink behind me. I have taken up again _The High Woods
of Ulufanua_. I still think the fable too fantastic and far-fetched.
But, on a re-reading, fell in love with my first chapter, and for good
or evil I must finish it. It is really good, well fed with facts, true
to the manners, and (for once in my works) rendered pleasing by the
presence of a heroine who is pretty. Miss Uma is pretty; a fact. All my
other women have been as ugly as sin, and like Falconet's horse (I have
just been reading the anecdote in Lockhart), _mortes_ forbye.

News: our old house is now half demolished; it is to be rebuilt on a new
site; now we look down upon and through the open posts of it like a
bird-cage, to the woods beyond. My poor Paulo has lost his father and
succeeded to thirty thousand thalers (I think); he had to go down to the
consulate yesterday to send a legal paper; got drunk, of course, and is
still this morning in so bemused a condition that our breakfasts all went
wrong. Lafaele is absent at the deathbed of his fair spouse; fair she
was, but not in deed, acting as harlot to the wreckers at work on the
warships, to which society she probably owes her end, having fallen off a
cliff, or been thrust off it--_inter pocula_. Henry is the same, our
stand-by. In this transition stage he has been living in Apia; but the
other night he stayed up, and sat with us about the chimney in my room.
It was the first time he had seen a fire in a hearth; he could not look
at it without smiles, and was always anxious to put on another stick. We
entertained him with the fairy tales of civilisation--theatres, London,
blocks in the street, Universities, the Underground, newspapers, etc.,
and projected once more his visit to Sydney. If we can manage, it will be
next Christmas. (I see it will be impossible for me to afford a further
journey _this_ winter.) We have spent since we have been here about
£2,500, which is not much if you consider we have built on that three
houses, one of them of some size, and a considerable stable, made two
miles of road some three times, cleared many acres of bush, made some
miles of path, planted quantities of food, and enclosed a horse paddock
and some acres of pig run; but 'tis a good deal of money regarded simply
as money. K. is bosh; I have no use for him; but we must do what we can
with the fellow meanwhile; he is good-humoured and honest, but
inefficient, idle himself, the cause of idleness in others, grumbling, a
self-excuser--all the faults in a bundle. He owes us thirty weeks'
service--the wretched Paul about half as much. Henry is almost the only
one of our employés who has a credit.

_May 17th._--Well, am I ashamed of myself? I do not think so. I have
been hammering letters ever since, and got three ready and a fourth
about half through; all four will go by the mail, which is what I wish,
for so I keep at least my start. Days and days of unprofitable stubbing
and digging, and the result still poor as literature, left-handed,
heavy, unillumined, but I believe readable and interesting as matter. It
has been no joke of a hard time, and when my task was done, I had little
taste for anything but blowing on the pipe. A few necessary letters
filled the bowl to overflowing.

My mother has arrived, young, well, and in good spirits. By desperate
exertions, which have wholly floored Fanny, her room was ready for her,
and the dining-room fit to eat in. It was a famous victory. Lloyd never
told me of your portrait till a few days ago; fortunately, I had no
pictures hung yet; and the space over my chimney waits your counterfeit
presentment. I have not often heard anything that pleased me more; your
severe head shall frown upon me and keep me to the mark. But why has it
not come? Have you been as forgetful as Lloyd?

_18th._--Miserable comforters are ye all! I read your esteemed pages
this morning by lamplight and the glimmer of the dawn, and as soon as
breakfast was over, I must turn to and tackle these despised labours!
Some courage was necessary, but not wanting. There is one thing at least
by which I can avenge myself for my drubbing, for on one point you seem
impenetrably stupid. Can I find no form of words which will at last
convey to your intelligence the fact that _these letters were never
meant, and are not now meant, to be other than a quarry of materials
from which the book may be drawn_? There seems something incommunicable
in this (to me) simple idea; I know Lloyd failed to comprehend it, I
doubt if he has grasped it now; and I despair, after all these efforts,
that you should ever be enlightened. Still, oblige me by reading that
form of words once more, and see if a light does not break. You may be
sure, after the friendly freedoms of your criticism (necessary I am
sure, and wholesome I know, but untimely to the poor labourer in his
landslip) that mighty little of it will stand.

Our Paul has come into a fortune, and wishes to go home to the Hie
Germanie. This is a tile on our head, and if a shower, which is now
falling, lets up, I must go down to Apia, and see if I can find a
substitute of any kind. This is, from any point of view, disgusting;
above all, from that of work; for, whatever the result, the mill has to
be kept turning; apparently dust, and not flour, is the proceed. Well,
there is gold in the dust, which is a fine consolation, since--well, I
can't help it; night or morning, I do my darndest, and if I cannot
charge for merit, I must e'en charge for toil, of which I have plenty
and plenty more ahead before this cup is drained; sweat and hyssop are
the ingredients.

We are clearing from Carruthers' Road to the pig fence, twenty-eight
powerful natives with Catholic medals about their necks, all swiping in
like Trojans; long may the sport continue!

The invoice to hand. Ere this goes out, I hope to see your expressive,
but surely not benignant countenance! Adieu, O culler of offensive
expressions--'and a' to be a posy to your ain dear May!'--Fanny seems a
little revived again after her spasm of work. Our books and furniture
keep slowly draining up the road, in a sad state of scatterment and
disrepair; I wish the devil had had K. by his red beard before he had
packed my library. Odd leaves and sheets and boards--a thing to make a
bibliomaniac shed tears--are fished out of odd corners. But I am no
bibliomaniac, praise Heaven, and I bear up, and rejoice when I find
anything safe.

_19th._--However, I worked five hours on the brute, and finished my
Letter all the same, and couldn't sleep last night by consequence.
Haven't had a bad night since I don't know when; dreamed a large
handsome man (a New Orleans planter) had insulted my wife, and, do what
I pleased, I could not make him fight me; and woke to find it was the
eleventh anniversary of my marriage. A letter usually takes me from a
week to three days; but I'm sometimes two days on a page--I was once
three--and then my friends kick me. _C'est-y-bête!_ I wish letters of
that charming quality could be so timed as to arrive when a fellow
wasn't working at the truck in question; but, of course, that can't be.
Did not go down last night. It showered all afternoon, and poured heavy
and loud all night.

You should have seen our twenty-five popés (the Samoan phrase for a
Catholic, lay or cleric) squatting when the day's work was done on the
ground outside the verandah, and pouring in the rays of forty-eight eyes
through the back and the front door of the dining-room, while Henry and
I and the boss pope signed the contract. The second boss (an old man)
wore a kilt (as usual) and a Balmoral bonnet with a little tartan edging
and the tails pulled off. I told him that hat belong to my
country--Sekotia; and he said, yes, that was the place that he belonged
to right enough. And then all the Papists laughed till the woods rang;
he was slashing away with a cutlass as he spoke.

The pictures[20] have decidedly not come; they may probably arrive
Sunday.

TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE

   The reference in the first paragraph is to a previous letter
   concerning private matters, in which Stevenson had remonstrated with
   his correspondent on what seemed to him her mistaken reasons for a
   certain course of conduct.

     [_Vailima, May 1891._]

MY DEAR ADELAIDE,--I will own you just did manage to tread on my gouty
toe; and I beg to assure you with most people I should simply have
turned away and said no more. My cudgelling was therefore in the nature
of a caress or testimonial.

God forbid, I should seem to judge for you on such a point; it was what
you seemed to set forth as your reasons that fluttered my old
Presbyterian spirit--for, mind you, I am a child of the
Covenanters--whom I do not love, but they are mine after all, my
father's and my mother's--and they had their merits too, and their ugly
beauties, and grotesque heroisms, that I love them for, the while I
laugh at them; but in their name and mine do what you think right, and
let the world fall. That is the privilege and the duty of private
persons; and I shall think the more of you at the greater distance,
because you keep a promise to your fellow-man, your helper and creditor
in life, by just so much as I was tempted to think the less of you (O
not much, or I would never have been angry) when I thought you were the
swallower of a (tinfoil) formula.

I must say I was uneasy about my letter, not because it was too strong
as an expression of my unregenerate sentiments, but because I knew full
well it should be followed by something kinder. And the mischief has
been in my health. I fell sharply sick in Sydney, was put aboard the
_Lübeck_ pretty bad, got to Vailima, hung on a month there, and didn't
pick up as well as my work needed; set off on a journey, gained a great
deal, lost it again; and am back at Vailima, still no good at my
necessary work. I tell you this for my imperfect excuse that I should
not have written you again sooner to remove the bad taste of my last.

A road has been called Adelaide Road; it leads from the back of our
house to the bridge, and thence to the garden, and by a bifurcation to
the pig pen. It is thus much traversed, particularly by Fanny. An
oleander, the only one of your seeds that prospered in this climate,
grows there; and the name is now some week or ten days applied and
published. ADELAIDE ROAD leads also into the bush, to the banana patch
and by a second bifurcation over the left branch of the stream to the
plateau and the right hand of the gorges. In short, it leads to all
sorts of good, and is, besides, in itself a pretty winding path, bound
downhill among big woods to the margin of the stream.

What a strange idea, to think me a Jew-hater! Isaiah and David and Heine
are good enough for me; and I leave more unsaid. Were I of Jew blood, I
do not think I could ever forgive the Christians; the ghettos would get
in my nostrils like mustard or lit gunpowder. Just so you, as being a
child of the Presbytery, I retain--I need not dwell on that. The
ascendant hand is what I feel most strongly; I am bound in and in with
my forbears; were he one of mine, I should not be struck at all by Mr.
Moss of Bevis Marks, I should still see behind him Moses of the Mount
and the Tables and the shining face. We are all nobly born; fortunate
those who know it; blessed those who remember.

I am, my dear Adelaide, most genuinely yours,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Write by return to say you are better, and I will try to do the same.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

   The following refers again to the project of a long genealogical novel
   expanded from the original idea of _Henry Shovel_.

     _[Vailima] Tuesday, 19th May '91._

MY DEAR CHARLES,--I don't know what you think of me, not having written
to you at all during your illness. I find two sheets begun with your
name, but that is no excuse.... I am keeping bravely; getting about
better every day, and hope soon to be in my usual fettle. My books begin
to come; and I fell once more on the Old Bailey session papers. I have
1778, 1784, and 1786. Should you be able to lay hands on any other
volumes, above all a little later, I should be very glad you should buy
them for me. I particularly want _one_ or _two_ during the course of the
Peninsular War. Come to think, I ought rather to have communicated this
want to Bain. Would it bore you to communicate to that effect with the
great man? The sooner I have them, the better for me. 'Tis for _Henry
Shovel_. But _Henry Shovel_ has now turned into a work called _The
Shovels of Newton French: including Memoirs of Henry Shovel, a Private
in the Peninsular War_, which work is to begin in 1664 with the marriage
of Skipper, afterwards Alderman Shovel of Bristol, Henry's
great-great-grandfather, and end about 1832 with his own second marriage
to the daughter of his runaway aunt. Will the public ever stand such an
opus? Gude kens, but it tickles me. Two or three historical personages
will just appear: Judge Jeffreys, Wellington, Colquhoun, Grant, and I
think Townsend the runner. I know the public won't like it; let 'em lump
it then; I mean to make it good; it will be more like a saga.

Adieu.--Yours ever affectionately,

     R. L. STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

     _[Vailima] June 1891._

SIR,--To you, under your portrait, which is, in expression, your true,
breathing self, and up to now saddens me; in time, and soon, I shall be
glad to have it there; it is still only a reminder of your absence.
Fanny wept when we unpacked it, and you know how little she is given to
that mood; I was scarce Roman myself, but that does not count--I lift up
my voice so readily. These are good compliments to the artist.[21] I
write in the midst of a wreck of books, which have just come up, and
have for once defied my labours to get straight. The whole floor is
filled with them, and (what's worse) most of the shelves forbye; and
where they are to go to, and what is to become of the librarian, God
knows. It is hot to-night, and has been airless all day, and I am out of
sorts, and my work sticks, the devil fly away with it and me. We had an
alarm of war since last I wrote my screeds to you, and it blew over, and
is to blow on again, and the rumour goes they are to begin by killing
all the whites. I have no belief in this, and should be infinitely sorry
if it came to pass--I do not mean for us, that were otiose--but for the
poor, deluded schoolboys, who should hope to gain by such a step.

_Letter resumed, June 20th._--No diary this time. Why? you ask. I have
only sent out four Letters, and two chapters of _The Wrecker_. Yes, but
to get these I have written 132 pp., 66,000 words in thirty days; 2200
words a day; the labours of an elephant. God knows what it's like, and
don't ask me, but nobody shall say I have spared pains. I thought for
some time it wouldn't come at all. I was days and days over the first
letter of the lot--days and days writing and deleting and making no
headway whatever, till I thought I should have gone bust; but it came at
last after a fashion, and the rest went a thought more easily, though I
am not so fond as to fancy any better.

Your opinion as to the Letters as a whole is so damnatory that I put
them by. But there is a "hell of a want of" money this year. And these
Gilbert Island papers, being the most interesting in matter, and forming
a compact whole, and being well illustrated, I did think of as a
possible resource.

It would be called

  _Six Months in Melanesia,
  Two Island Kings,
  ---- Monarchies,
  Gilbert Island Kings,
  ---- Monarchies_,

and I dare say I'll think of a better yet--and would divide thus:--

    _Butaritari_

    I. A Town Asleep.
   II. The Three Brothers.
  III. Around our House.
   IV. A Tale of a Tapu.
    V. The Five Days' Festival.
   VI. Domestic Life--(which might be omitted, but not well, better be
         recast).

    _The King of Apemama_

  VII. The Royal Traders.
 VIII. Foundation of Equator Town.
   IX. The Palace of Mary Warren.
    X. Equator Town and the Palace.
   XI. King and Commons.
  XII. The Devil Work Box.
 XIII. The Three Corslets.
  XIV. Tail piece; the Court upon a Journey.

I wish you to watch these closely, judging them as a whole, and treating
them as I have asked you, and favour me with your damnatory advice. I
look up at your portrait, and it frowns upon me. You seem to view me
with reproach. The expression is excellent; Fanny wept when she saw it,
and you know she is not given to the melting mood. She seems really
better; I have a touch of fever again, I fancy overwork, and to-day,
when I have overtaken my letters, I shall blow on my pipe. Tell Mrs.
Sitwell I have been playing _Le Chant d'Amour_ lately, and have arranged
it, after awful trouble, rather prettily for two pipes; and it brought
her before me with an effect scarce short of hallucination. I could hear
her voice in every note; yet I had forgot the air entirely, and began to
pipe it from notes as something new, when I was brought up with a round
turn by this reminiscence. We are now very much installed; the
dining-room is done, and looks lovely. Soon we shall begin to photograph
and send you our circumstances. My room is still a howling wilderness. I
sleep on a platform in a window, and strike my mosquito bar and roll up
my bedclothes every morning, so that the bed becomes by day a divan. A
great part of the floor is knee-deep in books, yet nearly all the
shelves are filled, alas! It is a place to make a pig recoil, yet here
are my interminable labours begun daily by lamp-light, and sometimes not
yet done when the lamp has once more to be lighted. The effect of
pictures in this place is surprising. They give great pleasure.

_June 21st._--A word more. I had my breakfast this morning at 4.30! My
new cook has beaten me and (as Lloyd says) revenged all the cooks in the
world. I have been hunting them to give me breakfast early since I was
twenty; and now here comes Mr. Ratke, and I have to plead for mercy. I
cannot stand 4.30; I am a mere fevered wreck; it is now half-past eight,
and I can no more, and four hours divide me from lunch, the devil take
the man! Yesterday it was about 5.30, which I can stand; day before 5,
which is bad enough; to-day, I give out. It is like a London season, and
as I do not take a siesta once in a month, and then only five minutes, I
am being worn to the bones, and look aged and anxious.

We have Rider Haggard's brother here as a Land Commissioner; a nice kind
of a fellow; indeed, all the three Land Commissioners are very
agreeable.

TO E. L. BURLINGAME

   For the result of the suggestion made in the following, see
   Scribner's Magazine, October 1893, p. 494.

     _Vailima [Summer 1891]._

MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--I find among my grandfather's papers his own
reminiscences of his voyage round the north with Sir Walter, eighty
years ago, _labuntur anni!_ They are not remarkably good, but he was not
a bad observer, and several touches seem to me speaking. It has occurred
to me you might like them to appear in the Magazine. If you would,
kindly let me know, and tell me how you would like it handled. My
grandad's MS. runs to between six and seven thousand words, which I
could abbreviate of anecdotes that scarce touch Sir W. Would you like
this done? Would you like me to introduce the old gentleman? I had
something of the sort in my mind, and could fill a few columns rather _à
propos_. I give you the first offer of this, according to your request;
for though it may forestall one of the interests of my biography, the
thing seems to me particularly suited for prior appearance in a
magazine.

I see the first number of _The Wrecker_; I thought it went lively
enough; and by a singular accident, the picture is not unlike Tai-o-hae!

Thus we see the age of miracles, etc.--Yours very sincerely,

     R. L. S.

Proofs for next mail.

TO W. CRAIBE ANGUS

   Referring again to the Burns Exhibition and to his correspondent's
   request for an autograph in a special copy of _The Jolly Beggars_.

     _[Summer 1891.]_

DEAR MR. ANGUS,--You can use my letter as you will. The parcel has not
come; pray Heaven the next post bring it safe. Is it possible for me to
write a preface here? I will try if you like, if you think I must:
though surely there are Rivers in Assyria. Of course you will send me
sheets of the catalogue; I suppose it (the preface) need not be long;
perhaps it should be rather very short? Be sure you give me your views
upon these points. Also tell me what names to mention among those of
your helpers, and do remember to register everything, else it is not
safe.

The true place (in my view) for a monument to Fergusson were the
churchyard of Haddington. But as that would perhaps not carry many
votes, I should say one of the two following sites:--First, either as
near the site of the old Bedlam as we could get, or, second, beside the
Cross, the heart of his city. Upon this I would have a fluttering
butterfly, and, I suggest, the citation,

  Poor butterfly, thy case I mourn.

For the case of Fergusson is not one to pretend about. A more miserable
tragedy the sun never shone upon, or (in consideration of our climate) I
should rather say refused to brighten.--Yours truly,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

Where Burns goes will not matter. He is no local poet, like your Robin
the First; he is general as the casing air. Glasgow, as the chief city
of Scottish men, would do well; but for God's sake, don't let it be like
the Glasgow memorial to Knox; I remember, when I first saw this,
laughing for an hour by Shrewsbury clock.

     R. L. S.

TO H. C. IDE

   The following is written to the American Land Commissioner (later
   Chief Justice for a term) in Samoa, whose elder daughter, then at
   home in the States, had been born on a Christmas Day, and
   consequently regarded herself as defrauded of her natural rights to a
   private anniversary of her own.

     _[Vailima, June 19, 1891.]_

DEAR MR. IDE,--Herewith please find the DOCUMENT, which I trust will
prove sufficient in law. It seems to me very attractive in its
eclecticism; Scots, English, and Roman law phrases are all indifferently
introduced, and a quotation from the works of Haynes Bayly can hardly
fail to attract the indulgence of the Bench.--Yours very truly,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

I, Robert Louis Stevenson, Advocate of the Scots Bar, author of _The
Master of Ballantrae_ and _Moral Emblems_, stuck civil engineer, sole
owner and patentee of the Palace and Plantation known as Vailima in the
island of Upolu, Samoa, a British Subject, being in sound mind, and
pretty well, I thank you, in body;

In consideration that Miss Annie H. Ide, daughter of H. C. Ide, in the
town of Saint Johnsbury, in the county of Caledonia, in the state of
Vermont, United States of America, was born, out of all reason, upon
Christmas Day, and is therefore out of all justice denied the
consolation and profit of a proper birthday;

And considering that I, the said Robert Louis Stevenson, have attained
an age when O, we never mention it, and that I have now no further use
for a birthday of any description;

And in consideration that I have met H. C. Ide, the father of the said
Annie H. Ide, and found him about as white a land commissioner as I
require;

_Have transferred_, and _do hereby transfer_, to the said Annie H. Ide,
_all and whole_ my rights and privileges in the thirteenth day of
November, formerly my birthday, now, hereby, and henceforth, the
birthday of the said Annie H. Ide, to have, hold, exercise, and enjoy
the same in the customary manner, by the sporting of fine raiment,
eating of rich meats, and receipt of gifts, compliments, and copies of
verse, according to the manner of our ancestors;

_And I direct_ the said Annie H. Ide to add to the said name of Annie H.
Ide the name Louisa--at least in private; and I charge her to use my
said birthday with moderation and humanity, _et tamquam bona filia
familiæ_, the said birthday not being so young as it once was, and
having carried me in a very satisfactory manner since I can remember;

And in case the said Annie H. Ide shall neglect or contravene either of
the above conditions, I hereby revoke the donation and transfer my
rights in the said birthday to the President of the United States of
America for the time being;

In witness whereof I have hereto set my hand and seal this nineteenth
day of June in the year of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-one.

    [Illustration: SEAL]

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

_Witness_, LLOYD OSBOURNE,
_Witness_, HAROLD WATTS.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

   The misgivings herein expressed about the imminence of a native war
   were not realised until two years later, and the plans of defence
   into which Stevenson here enters with characteristic gusto were not
   put to the test.

     [_Vailima, June and July 1891._]

MY DEAR COLVIN,--I am so hideously in arrears that I know not where to
begin. However, here I am a prisoner in my room, unfit for work,
incapable of reading with interest, and trying to catch up a bit. We
have a guest here: a welcome guest: my Sydney music master, whose health
broke down, and who came with his remarkable simplicity, to ask a
month's lodging. He is newly married, his wife in the family way:
beastly time to fall sick. I have found, by good luck, a job for him
here which will pay some of his way: and in the meantime he is a
pleasant guest, for he plays the flute with little sentiment but great
perfection, and endears himself by his simplicity. To me, especially; I
am so weary of finding people approach me with precaution, pick their
words, flatter, and twitter; but the muttons of the good God are not at
all afraid of the lion. They take him as he comes, and he does not
bite--at least not hard. This makes us a party of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
8, at table; deftly waited on by Mary Carter, a very nice Sydney girl,
who served us at a boarding-house and has since come on--how long she
will endure this exile is another story; and gauchely waited on by
Faauma, the new left-handed wife of the famed Lafaele, a little creature
in native dress of course and as beautiful as a bronze candlestick, so
fine, clean and dainty in every limb; her arms and her little hips in
particular masterpieces. The rest of the crew may be stated briefly: the
great Henry Simelé, still to the front; King, of the yellow beard,
rather a disappointment--I am inclined on this point to republican
opinions: Ratke, a German cook, good--and Germanly bad, he don't make
_my_ kitchen; Paul, now working out his debts outdoor; Emma, a strange
weird creature--I suspect (from her colour) a quarter white--widow of a
white man, ugly, capable, a really good laundress; Java--yes, that is
the name--they spell it Siava, but pronounce it, and explain it
Java--her assistant, a creature I adore from her plain, wholesome,
bread-and-butter beauty. An honest, almost ugly, bright, good-natured
face; the rest (to my sense) merely exquisite. She comes steering into
my room of a morning, like Mrs. Nickleby, with elaborate precaution;
unlike her, noiseless. If I look up from my work, she is ready with an
explosive smile. I generally don't, and wait to look at her as she
stoops for the bellows, and trips tiptoe off again, a miracle of
successful womanhood in every line. I am amused to find plain, healthy
Java pass in my fancy so far before pretty young Faauma. I observed
Lloyd the other day to say that Java must have been lovely "when she was
young"; and I thought it an odd word, of a woman in the height of
health, not yet touched with fat, though (to be just) a little slack of
bust.

Our party you know: Fanny, Lloyd, my mother, Belle, and "the babe"--as
we call him--Austin. We have now three instruments; Boehm flageolet,
flute, and Bb clarinet; and we expect in a few days our piano. This is a
great pleasure to me; the band-mastering, the playing and all. As soon
as I am done with this stage of a letter, I shall return, not being
allowed to play, to band-master, being engaged in an attempt to arrange
an air with effect for the three pipes. And I'll go now, by jabers.

_July 3rd._--A long pause: occasioned, first by some days of hard work:
next by a vile quinsey--if that be the way to spell it. But to-day I
must write. For we have all kinds of larks on hand. The wars and rumours
of wars begin to take consistency, insomuch that we have landed the
weapons this morning, and inspected the premises with a view to defence.
Of course it will come to nothing; but as in all stories of massacres,
the one you don't prepare for is the one that comes off. All our natives
think ill of the business; none of the whites do. According to our
natives the demonstration threatened for to-day or to-morrow is one of
vengeance on the whites--small wonder--and if that begins--where will it
stop? Anyway I don't mean to go down for nothing, if I can help it; and
to amuse you I will tell you our plans.

There is the house, upper story. Our weak point is of course the sides
AB, AH; so we propose to place half our garrison in the space HGFD and
half in the opposite corner, BB'CD. We shall communicate through the
interior, there is a water-tank in the angle C, my mother and Austin are
to go in the loft. The holding of only these two corners and deserting
the corner C' is for economy and communication, two doors being in the
sides GF and CD; so that any one in the corner C' could only communicate
or be reinforced by exposure. Besides we are short of mattresses.
Garrison: R. L. S., Lloyd, Fanny, King, Ratke--doubtful, he may
go--Emma, Mary, Belle; weapons: eight revolvers and a shot gun, and
swords galore; but we're pretty far gone when we come to the swords. It
has been rather a lark arranging; but I find it a bore to write, and I
doubt it will be cruel stale to read about, when all's over and done, as
it will be ere this goes, I fancy: far more ere it reaches you.

_Date unknown._--Well, nothing as yet, though I don't swear by it yet.
There has been a lot of trouble, and there still is a lot of doubt as to
the future; and those who sit in the chief seats, who are all excellent,
pleasant creatures, are not, perhaps, the most wise of mankind. They
actually proposed to kidnap and deport Mataafa; a scheme which would
have loosed the avalanche at once. But some human being interfered and
choked off this pleasing scheme. You ask me in yours just received, what
will become of us if it comes to a war? Well, if it is a war of the old
sort, nothing. It will mean a little bother, and a great deal of theft,
and more amusement. But if it comes to the massacre lark, I can only
answer with the Bell of Old Bow. You are to understand that, in my
reading of the native character, every day that passes is a solid gain.
They put in the time public speaking; so wear out their energy, develop
points of difference and exacerbate internal ill-feeling. Consequently,
I feel less apprehension of difficulty now, by about a hundredfold. All
that I stick to, is that if war begins, there are ten chances to one we
shall have it bad. The natives have been scurvily used by all the white
powers without exception; and they labour under the belief, of which
they can't be cured, that they defeated Germany. This makes an awkward
complication.

I was extremely vexed to hear you were ill again. I hope you are better.
'Tis a long time we have known each other now, to be sure. Well, well!
you say you are sure to catch fever in the bush; so we do continually;
but you are to conceive Samoa fever as the least formidable malady under
heaven: implying only a day or so of slight headache and languor and ill
humour, easily reduced by quinine or antipyrine. The hot fever I had was
from over-exertion and blood poisoning, no doubt, and irritation of the
bladder; it went of its own accord and with rest. I have had since a bad
quinsey which knocked me rather useless for about a week, but I stuck to
my work, with great difficulty and small success.

_Date unknown._--But it's fast day and July, and the rude inclement
depth of winter, and the thermometer was 68 this morning and a few days
ago it was 63, and we have all been perishing with cold. All still seems
quiet. Your counterfeit presentments are all round us: the pastel over
my bed, the Dew-Smith photograph over my door, and the "celebrity" on
Fanny's table. My room is now done, and looks very gay, and chromatic
with its blue walls and my coloured lines of books.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

   This is the first letter in which Stevenson expresses the opinion
   which had been forcing itself upon him, and which he felt it his duty
   in the following year to express publicly in letters to the Times, of
   the unwisdom of the government established under the treaty between
   the Three Powers and the incompetence of the officials appointed to
   carry it out.

     _[Vailima] Sunday, Sept. 5(?), 1891._

MY DEAR COLVIN,--Yours from Lochinver has just come. You ask me if I am
ever homesick for the Highlands and the Isles. Conceive that for the
last month I have been living there between 1786 and 1850, in my
grandfather's diaries and letters. I _had_ to take a rest; no use
talking; so I put in a month over my _Lives of the Stevensons_ with
great pleasure and profit and some advance; one chapter and a part
drafted. The whole promises well. Chapter I. Domestic Annals. Chapter
II. The Northern Lights. Chapter III. The Bell Rock. Chapter IV. A
Family of Boys. Chap. V. The Grandfather. VI. Alan Stevenson. VII.
Thomas Stevenson. My materials for my great-grandfather are almost null;
for my grandfather copious and excellent. Name, a puzzle. _A Scottish
Family_, _A Family of Engineers_, _Northern Lights_, _The Engineers of
the Northern Lights: A Family History_. Advise; but it will take long.
Now, imagine if I have been homesick for Barrahead and Island Glass, and
Kirkwall, and Cape Wrath, and the Wells of the Pentland Firth; I could
have wept.

Now for politics. I am much less alarmed; I believe the _malo_ (= _raj_,
government) will collapse and cease like an overlain infant, without a
shot fired. They have now been months here on their big salaries--and
Cedercrantz, whom I specially like as a man, has done nearly nothing,
and the Baron, who is well-meaning, has done worse. They have these
large salaries, and they have all the taxes; they have made scarce a
foot of road; they have not given a single native a position--all to
white men; they have scarce laid out a penny on Apia, and scarce a penny
on the King; they have forgot they were in Samoa, or that such a thing
as Samoans existed, and had eyes and some intelligence. The Chief
Justice has refused to pay his customs! The President proposed to have
an expensive house built for himself, while the King, his master, has
none! I had stood aside, and been a loyal, and, above all, a silent
subject, up to then; but now I snap my fingers at their _malo_. It is
damned, and I'm damned glad of it. And this is not all. Last "_Wainiu_,"
when I sent Fanny off to Fiji, I hear the wonderful news that the Chief
Justice is going to Fiji and the Colonies to improve his mind. I showed
my way of thought to his guest, Count Wachtmeister, whom I have sent to
you with a letter--he will tell you all the news. Well, the Chief
Justice stayed, but they said he was to leave yesterday. I had intended
to go down, and see and warn him! But the President's house had come up
in the meanwhile, and I let them go to their doom, which I am only
anxious to see swiftly and (if it may be) bloodlessly fall.

Thus I have in a way withdrawn my unrewarded loyalty. Lloyd is down
to-day with Moors to call on Mataafa; the news of the excursion made a
considerable row in Apia, and both the German and the English consuls
besought Lloyd not to go. But he stuck to his purpose, and with my
approval. It's a poor thing if people are to give up a pleasure party
for a _malo_ that has never done anything for us but draw taxes, and is
going to go pop, and leave us at the mercy of the identical Mataafa,
whom I have not visited for more than a year, and who is probably
furious.

The sense of my helplessness here has been rather bitter; I feel it
wretched to see this dance of folly and injustice and unconscious
rapacity go forward from day to day, and to be impotent. I was not
consulted--or only by one man, and that on particular points; I did not
choose to volunteer advice till some pressing occasion; I have not even
a vote, for I am not a member of the municipality.

What ails you, miserable man, to talk of saving material? I have a whole
world in my head, a whole new society to work, but I am in no hurry; you
will shortly make the acquaintance of the Island of Ulufanua, on which
I mean to lay several stories; the _Bloody Wedding_, possibly the _High
Woods_--(O, it's so good, the _High Woods_, but the story is craziness;
that's the trouble)--a political story, the _Labour Slave_, etc.
Ulufanua is an imaginary island; the name is a beautiful Samoan word for
the _top_ of a forest; ulu=leaves or hair, fanua=land. The ground or
country of the leaves. "Ulufanua the isle of the sea," read that verse
dactylically and you get the beat; the u's are like our double oo; did
ever you hear a prettier word?

I do not feel inclined to make a volume of Essays,[22] but if I did, and
perhaps the idea is good--and any idea is better than the _South
Seas_--here would be my choice of the Scribner articles: _Dreams_,
_Beggars_, _Lantern-Bearers_, _Random Memories_. There was a paper
called the _Old Pacific Capital_ in Fraser, in Tulloch's time, which had
merit; there were two on Fontainebleau in the Magazine of Art in
Henley's time. I have no idea if they're any good; then there's the
_Emigrant Train_. _Pulvis et Umbra_ is in a different key, and wouldn't
hang on with the rest.

I have just interrupted my letter and read through the chapter of the
_High Woods_ that is written, a chapter and a bit, some sixteen pages,
really very fetching, but what do you wish? the story is so wilful, so
steep, so silly--it's a hallucination I have outlived, and yet I never
did a better piece of work, horrid, and pleasing, and extraordinarily
_true_; it's sixteen pages of the South Seas; their essence. What am I
to do? Lose this little gem--for I'll be bold, and that's what I think
it--or go on with the rest, which I don't believe in, and don't like,
and which can never make aught but a silly yarn? Make another end to it?
Ah, yes, but that's not the way I write; the whole tale is implied; I
never use an effect, when I can help it, unless it prepares the effects
that are to follow; that's what a story consists in. To make another
end, that is to make the beginning all wrong. The dénouement of a long
story is nothing; it is just a "full close," which you may approach and
accompany as you please--it is a coda, not an essential member in the
rhythm; but the body and end of a short story is bone of the bone and
blood of the blood of the beginning. Well, I shall end by finishing it
against my judgment; that fragment is my Delilah. Golly, it's good. I am
not shining by modesty; but I do just love the colour and movement of
that piece so far as it goes.

I was surprised to hear of your fishing. And you saw the _Pharos_,[23]
thrice fortunate man; I wish I dared go home, I would ask the
Commissioners to take me round for old sake's sake, and see all my
family pictures once more from the Mull of Galloway to Unst. However,
all is arranged for our meeting in Ceylon, except the date and the
blooming pounds. I have heard of an exquisite hotel in the country,
airy, large rooms, good cookery, not dear; we shall have a couple of
months there, if we can make it out, and converse or--as my grandfather
always said--"commune." "Communings with Mr. Kennedy as to Lighthouse
Repairs." He was a fine old fellow, but a droll.

_Evening._--Lloyd has returned. Peace and war were played before his
eyes at heads or tails. A German was stopped with levelled guns; he
raised his whip; had it fallen, we might have been now in war. Excuses
were made by Mataafa himself. Doubtless the thing was done--I mean the
stopping of the German--a little to show off before Lloyd. Meanwhile
---- was up here, telling how the Chief Justice was really gone for five
or eight weeks, and begging me to write to the Times and denounce the
state of affairs; many strong reasons he advanced; and Lloyd and I have
been since his arrival and ----'s departure, near half an hour, debating
what should be done. Cedercrantz is gone; it is not my fault; he knows
my views on that point--alone of all points;--he leaves me with my mouth
sealed. Yet this is a nice thing that because he is guilty of a fresh
offence--his flight--the mouth of the only possible influential witness
should be closed? I do not like this argument. I look like a cad, if I
do in the man's absence what I could have done in a more manly manner in
his presence. True; but why did he go? It is his last sin. And I, who
like the man extremely--that is the word--I love his society--he is
intelligent, pleasant, even witty, a gentleman--and you know how that
attaches--I loathe to seem to play a base part; but the poor
natives--who are like other folk, false enough, lazy enough, not heroes,
not saints--ordinary men damnably misused--are they to suffer because I
like Cedercrantz, and Cedercrantz has cut his lucky? This is a little
tragedy, observe well--a tragedy! I may be right, I may be wrong in my
judgment, but I am in treaty with my honour. I know not how it will seem
to-morrow. Lloyd thought the barrier of honour insurmountable, and it is
an ugly obstacle. He (Cedercrantz) will likely meet my wife three days
from now, may travel back with her, will be charming if he does; suppose
this, and suppose him to arrive and find that I have sprung a mine--or
the nearest approach to it I could find--behind his back? My position is
pretty. Yes, I am an aristocrat. I have the old petty, personal view of
honour? I should blush till I die if I do this; yet it is on the cards
that I may do it. So much I have written you in bed, as a man writes or
talks, in a _bittre Wahl_. Now I shall sleep, and see if I am more
clear. I will consult the missionaries at least--I place some reliance
in M. also--or I should if he were not a partisan; but a partisan he is.
There's a pity. To sleep! A fund of wisdom in the prostrate body and the
fed brain. Kindly observe R. L. S. in the talons of politics! 'Tis
funny--'tis sad. Nobody but these cursed idiots could have so driven me;
I cannot bear idiots.

My dear Colvin, I must go to sleep; it is long past ten--a dreadful hour
for me. And here am I lingering (so I feel) in the dining-room at the
Monument, talking to you across the table, both on our feet, and only
the two stairs to mount, and get to bed, and sleep, and be waked by dear
old George--to whom I wish my kindest remembrances--next morning. I look
round, and there is my blue room, and my long lines of shelves, and the
door gaping on a moonless night, and no word of S. C. but his twa
portraits on the wall. Good-bye, my dear fellow, and good-night. Queer
place the world!

_Monday._--No clearness of mind with the morning; I have no guess what I
should do. 'Tis easy to say that the public duty should brush aside
these little considerations of personal dignity; so it is that
politicians begin, and in a month you find them rat and flatter and
intrigue with brows of brass. I am rather of the old view, that a man's
first duty is to these little laws; the big he does not, he never will,
understand; I may be wrong about the Chief Justice and the Baron and the
state of Samoa; I cannot be wrong about the vile attitude I put myself
in if I blow the gaff on Cedercrantz behind his back.

_Tuesday._--One more word about the _South Seas_, in answer to a
question I observed I have forgotten to answer. The Tahiti part has
never turned up, because it has never been written. As for telling you
where I went or when, or anything about Honolulu, I would rather die;
that is fair and plain. How can anybody care when or how I left
Honolulu? A man of upwards of forty cannot waste his time in
communicating matter of that indifference. The letters, it appears, are
tedious; they would be more tedious still if I wasted my time upon such
infantile and sucking-bottle details. If ever I put in any such detail,
it is because it leads into something or serves as a transition. To
tell it for its own sake, never! The mistake is all through that I have
told too much; I had not sufficient confidence in the reader, and have
overfed him; and here are you anxious to learn how I--O Colvin! Suppose
it had made a book, all such information is given to one glance of an
eye by a map with a little dotted line upon it. But let us forget this
unfortunate affair.

_Wednesday._--Yesterday I went down to consult Clarke, who took the view
of delay. Has he changed his mind already? I wonder: here at least is
the news. Some little while back some men of Manono--what is Manono?--a
Samoan rotten borough, a small isle of huge political importance, heaven
knows why, where a handful of chiefs make half the trouble in the
country. Some men of Manono (which is strong Mataafa) burned down the
houses and destroyed the crops of some Malietoa neighbours. The
President went there the other day and landed alone on the island, which
(to give him his due) was plucky. Moreover, he succeeded in persuading
the folks to come up and be judged on a particular day in Apia. That day
they did not come; but did come the next, and, to their vast surprise,
were given six months' imprisonment and clapped in gaol. Those who had
accompanied them cried to them on the streets as they were marched to
prison, "Shall we rescue you?" The condemned, marching in the hands of
thirty men with loaded rifles, cried out "No"! And the trick was done.
But it was ardently believed a rescue would be attempted; the gaol was
laid about with armed men day and night; but there was some question of
their loyalty, and the commandant of the forces, a very nice young
beardless Swede, became nervous, and conceived a plan. How if he should
put dynamite under the gaol, and in case of an attempted rescue blow up
prison and all? He went to the President, who agreed; he went to the
American man-of-war for the dynamite and machine, was refused, and got
it at last from the Wreckers. The thing began to leak out, and there
arose a muttering in town. People had no fancy for amateur explosions,
for one thing. For another, it did not clearly appear that it was legal;
the men had been condemned to six months' prison, which they were
peaceably undergoing; they had not been condemned to death. And lastly,
it seemed a somewhat advanced example of civilisation to set before
barbarians. The mutter in short became a storm, and yesterday, while I
was down, a cutter was chartered, and the prisoners were suddenly
banished to the Tokelaus. Who has changed the sentence? We are going to
stir in the dynamite matter; we do not want the natives to fancy us
consenting to such an outrage.

Fanny has returned from her trip, and on the whole looks better. The
_High Woods_ are under way, and their name is now the _Beach of Falesá_,
and the yarn is cured. I have about thirty pages of it done; it will be
fifty to seventy I suppose. No supernatural trick at all; and escaped
out of it quite easily; can't think why I was so stupid for so long.
Mighty glad to have Fanny back to this "Hell of the South Seas," as the
German Captain called it. What will Cedercrantz think when he comes
back? To do him justice, had he been here, this Manono hash would not
have been.

Here is a pretty thing. When Fanny was in Fiji all the Samoa and Tokelau
folks were agog about our "flash" house; but the whites had never heard
of it.

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,
      Author of _The Beach of Falesá_.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

    _[Vailima], Sept. 28, 1891._

MY DEAR COLVIN,--Since I last laid down my pen, I have written and
rewritten _The Beach of Falesá_; something like sixty thousand words of
sterling domestic fiction (the story, you will understand, is only half
that length); and now I don't want to write any more again for ever, or
feel so; and I've got to overhaul it once again to my sorrow. I was all
yesterday revising, and found a lot of slacknesses and (what is worse in
this kind of thing) some literaryisms. One of the puzzles is this: It is
a first person story--a trader telling his own adventure in an island.
When I began I allowed myself a few liberties, because I was afraid of
the end; now the end proved quite easy, and could be done in the pace;
so the beginning remains about a quarter tone out (in places); but I
have rather decided to let it stay so. The problem is always delicate;
it is the only thing that worries me in first person tales, which
otherwise (quo' Alan) "set better wi' my genius." There is a vast deal
of fact in the story, and some pretty good comedy. It is the first
realistic South Sea story; I mean with real South Sea character and
details of life. Everybody else who has tried, that I have seen, got
carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham
epic, and the whole effect was lost--there was no etching, no human
grin, consequently no conviction. Now I have got the smell and look of
the thing a good deal. You will know more about the South Seas after you
have read my little tale than if you had read a library. As to whether
any one else will read it, I have no guess. I am in an off time, but
there is just the possibility it might make a hit; for the yarn is good
and melodramatic, and there is quite a love affair--for me; and Mr.
Wiltshire (the narrator) is a huge lark, though I say it. But there is
always the exotic question, and everything, the life, the place, the
dialects--trader's talk, which is a strange conglomerate of literary
expressions and English and American slang, and Beach de Mar, or native
English,--the very trades and hopes and fears of the characters, are all
novel, and may be found unwelcome to that great, hulking, bullering
whale, the public.

Since I wrote, I have been likewise drawing up a document to send in to
the President; it has been dreadfully delayed, not by me, but to-day
they swear it will be sent in. A list of questions about the dynamite
report are herein laid before him, and considerations suggested why he
should answer.

_October 5th._--Ever since my last snatch I have been much chivied about
over the President business; his answer has come, and is an evasion
accompanied with schoolboy insolence, and we are going to try to answer
it. I drew my answer and took it down yesterday; but one of the
signatories wants another paragraph added, which I have not yet been
able to draw, and as to the wisdom of which I am not yet convinced.

_Next day, Oct. 7th the right day._--We are all in rather a muddled
state with our President affair. I do loathe politics, but at the same
time, I cannot stand by and have the natives blown in the air
treacherously with dynamite. They are still quiet; how long this may
continue I do not know, though of course by mere prescription the
Government is strengthened, and is probably insured till the next taxes
fall due. But the unpopularity of the whites is growing. My native
overseer, the great Henry Simelé, announced to-day that he was "weary of
whites upon the beach. All too proud," said this veracious witness. One
of the proud ones had threatened yesterday to cut off his head with a
bush knife! These are "native outrages"; honour bright, and setting
theft aside, in which the natives are active, this is the main stream of
irritation. The natives are generally courtly, far from always civil,
but really gentle, and with a strong sense of honour of their own, and
certainly quite as much civilised as our dynamiting President.

We shall be delighted to see Kipling.[24] I go to bed usually about
half-past eight, and my lamp is out before ten; I breakfast at six. We
may say roughly we have no soda water on the island, and just now
truthfully no whisky. I _have_ heard the chimes at midnight; now no
more, I guess. _But_--Fanny and I, as soon as we can get coins for it,
are coming to Europe, not to England: I am thinking of Royat. Bar wars.
If not, perhaps the Apennines might give us a mountain refuge for two
months or three in summer. How is that for high? But the money must be
all in hand first.

_October 13th._--How am I to describe my life these last few days? I
have been wholly swallowed up in politics, a wretched business, with
fine elements of farce in it too, which repay a man in passing,
involving many dark and many moonlight rides, secret counsels which are
at once divulged, sealed letters which are read aloud in confidence to
the neighbours, and a mass of fudge and fun, which would have driven me
crazy ten years ago, and now makes me smile.

On Friday, Henry came and told us he must leave and go to "my poor old
family in Savaii"; why? I do not quite know--but, I suspect, to be
tattooed--if so, then probably to be married, and we shall see him no
more. I told him he must do what he thought his duty; we had him to
lunch, drank his health, and he and I rode down about twelve. When I got
down, I sent my horse back to help bring down the family later. My own
afternoon was cut out for me; my last draft for the President had been
objected to by some of the signatories. I stood out, and one of our
small number accordingly refused to sign. Him I had to go and persuade,
which went off very well after the first hottish moments; you have no
idea how stolid my temper is now. By about five the thing was done; and
we sat down to dinner at the Chinaman's--the Verrey or Doyen of
Apia--Gurr and I at each end as hosts; Gurr's wife--Fanua, late maid of
the village; her (adopted) father and mother, Seumanu and Faatulia,
Fanny, Belle, Lloyd, Austin, and Henry Simelé, his last appearance.
Henry was in a kilt of grey shawl, with a blue jacket, white shirt, and
black necktie, and looked like a dark genteel guest in a Highland
shooting-box. Seumanu (opposite Fanny, next G.) is chief of Apia, a
rather big gun in this place, looking like a large, fatted, military
Englishman, bar the colour. Faatulia, next me, is a bigger chief than
her husband. Henry is a chief too--his chief name, Iiga (Ee-eeng-a), he
has not yet "taken" because of his youth. We were in fine society, and
had a pleasant meal-time, with lots of fun. Then to the Opera--I beg
your pardon, I mean the Circus. We occupied the first row in the
reserved seats, and there in the row behind were all our
friends--Captain Foss and his Captain-Lieutenant, three of the American
officers, very nice fellows, the Dr., etc., so we made a fine show of
what an embittered correspondent of the local paper called "the shoddy
aristocracy of Apia"; and you should have seen how we carried on, and
how I clapped, and Captain Foss hollered "_wunderschön!_" and threw
himself forward in his seat, and how we all in fact enjoyed ourselves
like school-children, Austin not a shade more than his neighbours. Then
the Circus broke up, and the party went home, but I stayed down, having
business on the morrow.

Yesterday, October 12th, great news reaches me, and Lloyd and I, with
the mail just coming in, must leave all, saddle, and ride down. True
enough, the President had resigned! Sought to resign his presidency of
the council, and keep his advisership to the King; given way to the
consuls' objections and resigned all--then fell out with them about the
disposition of the funds, and was now trying to resign from his
resignation! Sad little President, so trim to look at, and I believe so
kind to his little wife! Not only so, but I meet Dunnet on the beach.
Dunnet calls me in consultation, and we make with infinite difficulty a
draft of a petition to the King.... Then to dinner at Moors's, a very
merry meal, interrupted before it was over by the arrival of the
committee. Slight sketch of procedure agreed upon, self appointed
spokesman, and the deputation sets off. Walk all through Matafele, all
along Mulinuu, come to the King's house; he has verbally refused to see
us in answer to our letter, swearing he is gasegase (chief sickness, not
common man's) and indeed we see him inside in bed. It is a miserable low
house, better houses by the dozen in the little hamlet (Tanugamanono) of
bushmen on our way to Vailima; and the President's house in process of
erection just opposite! We are told to return to-morrow; I refuse; and
at last we are very sourly received, sit on the mats, and I open out,
through a very poor interpreter, and sometimes hampered by unacceptable
counsels from my backers. I can speak fairly well in a plain way now. C.
asked me to write out my harangue for him this morning; I have done so,
and couldn't get it near as good. I suppose (talking and interpreting) I
was twenty minutes or half an hour on the deck; then his majesty replied
in the dying whisper of a big chief; a few words of rejoinder
(approving), and the deputation withdrew, rather well satisfied.

A few days ago this intervention would have been a deportable offence;
not now, I bet; I would like them to try. A little way back along
Mulinuu, Mrs. Gurr met us with her husband's horse; and he and she and
Lloyd and I rode back in a heavenly moonlight. Here ends a chapter in
the life of an island politician! Catch me at it again; 'tis easy to go
in, but it is not a pleasant trade. I have had a good team, as good as I
could get on the beach; but what trouble even so, and what fresh
troubles shaping. But I have on the whole carried all my points; I
believe all but one, and on that (which did not concern me) I had no
right to interfere. I am sure you would be amazed if you knew what a
good hand I am at keeping my temper, talking people over, and giving
reasons which are not my reasons, but calculated for the meridian of
the particular objection; so soon does falsehood await the politician
in his whirling path.

TO HENRY JAMES

   Stevenson had again been reading Mr. James's _Lesson of the Master_;
   Adela Chart is the heroine of the second story in that collection,
   called _The Marriages_.

     [_Vailima, October 1891._]

MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--From this perturbed and hunted being expect but a
line, and that line shall be but a whoop for Adela. O she's delicious,
delicious; I could live and die with Adela--die, rather the better of
the two; you never did a straighter thing, and never will.

_David Balfour_, second part of _Kidnapped_, is on the stocks at last;
and is not bad, I think. As for _The Wrecker_, it's a machine, you
know--don't expect aught else--a machine, and a police machine; but I
believe the end is one of the most genuine butcheries in literature; and
we point to our machine with a modest pride, as the only police machine
without a villain. Our criminals are a most pleasing crew, and leave the
dock with scarce a stain upon their character.

What a different line of country to be trying to draw Adela, and trying
to write the last four chapters of _The Wrecker_! Heavens, it's like two
centuries; and ours is such rude, transpontine business, aiming only at
a certain fervour of conviction and sense of energy and violence in the
men; and yours is so neat and bright and of so exquisite a surface!
Seems dreadful to send such a book to such an author; but your name is
on the list. And we do modestly ask you to consider the chapters on the
_Norah Creina_ with the study of Captain Nares, and the forementioned
last four, with their brutality of substance and the curious (and
perhaps unsound) technical manoeuvre of running the story together to
a point as we go along, the narrative becoming more succinct and the
details fining off with every page.--Sworn affidavit of

     R. L. S.

_No person now alive has beaten Adela: I adore Adela and her maker. Sic
subscrib._

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

    A Sublime Poem to follow.

  Adela, Adela, Adela Chart,
  What have you done to my elderly heart?
  Of all the ladies of paper and ink
  I count you the paragon, call you the pink.
  The word of your brother depicts you in part:
  "You raving maniac!" Adela Chart;
  But in all the asylums that cumber the ground,
  So delightful a maniac was ne'er to be found.

  I pore on you, dote on you, clasp you to heart,
  I laud, love, and laugh at you, Adela Chart,
  And thank my dear maker the while I admire
  That I can be neither your husband nor sire.

  Your husband's, your sire's were a difficult part;
  You're a byway to suicide, Adela Chart;
  But to read of, depicted by exquisite James,
  O, sure you're the flower and quintessence of dames.

     R. L. S.

    _Eructavit cor meum_

My heart was inditing a goodly matter about Adela Chart.

  Though oft I've been touched by the volatile dart,
  To none have I grovelled but Adela Chart,
  There are passable ladies, no question, in art--
  But where is the marrow of Adela Chart?

  I dreamed that to Tyburn I passed in the cart--
  I dreamed I was married to Adela Chart:
  From the first I awoke with a palpable start,
  The second dumbfoundered me, Adela Chart!

Another verse bursts from me, you see; no end to the violence of the
Muse.

To E. L. BURLINGAME

    _[Vailima], October 8th, 1891._

MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--All right, you shall have the _Tales of my
Grandfather_ soon, but I guess we'll try and finish off _The Wrecker_
first. _A propos_ of whom, please send some advanced sheets to
Cassell's--away ahead of you--so that they may get a dummy out.

Do you wish to illustrate _My Grandfather_? He mentions as excellent a
portrait of Scott by Basil Hall's brother. I don't think I ever saw this
engraved; would it not, if you could get track of it, prove a taking
embellishment? I suggest this for your consideration and inquiry. A new
portrait of Scott strikes me as good. There is a hard, tough,
constipated old portrait of my grandfather hanging in my aunt's house,
Mrs. Alan Stevenson, 16 St. Leonard's Terrace, Chelsea, which has never
been engraved--the better portrait, Joseph's bust, has been reproduced,
I believe, twice--and which, I am sure, my aunt would let you have a
copy of. The plate could be of use for the book when we get so far, and
thus to place it in the Magazine might be an actual saving.

I am swallowed up in politics for the first, I hope for the last, time
in my sublunary career. It is a painful, thankless trade; but one thing
that came up I could not pass in silence. Much drafting, addressing,
deputationising has eaten up all my time, and again (to my contrition)
I leave you Wreckerless. As soon as the mail leaves I tackle it
straight.--Yours very sincerely,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO E. L. BURLINGAME

     [_Vailima, October 1891._]

MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--The time draws nigh, the mail is near due, and I
snatch a moment of collapse so that you may have at least some sort of a
scratch of note along with the

  \ end
   \ of
    \ _The_
     \ _Wrecker_.     Hurray!

which I mean to go herewith. It has taken me a devil of a pull, but I
think it's going to be ready. If I did not know you were on the stretch
waiting for it and trembling for your illustrations, I would keep it for
another finish; but things being as they are, I will let it go the best
way I can get it. I am now within two pages of the end of Chapter XXV.,
which is the last chapter, the end with its gathering up of loose
threads, being the dedication to Low, and addressed to him; this is my
last and best expedient for the knotting up of these loose cards. 'Tis
possible I may not get that finished in time, in which case you'll
receive only Chapters XXII. to XXV. by this mail, which is all that can
be required for illustration.

I wish you would send me _Memoirs of Baron Marbot_ (French);
_Introduction to the Study of the History of Language_, Strong, Logeman
& Wheeler; _Principles of Psychology_, William James; Morris &
Magnusson's _Saga Library_, any volumes that are out; George Meredith's
_One of our Conquerors_; _Là Bas_, by Huysmans (French); O'Connor
Morris's _Great Commanders of Modern Times_; _Life's Handicap_, by
Kipling; of Taine's _Origines de la France Contemporaine_, I have only
as far as _la Révolution_, vol. iii.; if another volume is out, please
add that. There is for a book-box.

I hope you will like the end; I think it is rather strong meat. I have
got into such a deliberate, dilatory, expansive turn, that the effort to
compress this last yarn was unwelcome; but the longest yarn has to come
to an end some time. Please look it over for carelessnesses, and tell me
if it had any effect upon your jaded editorial mind. I'll see if ever I
have time to add more.

I add to my book-box list Adams' _Historical Essays_; the Plays of A. W.
Pinero--all that have appeared, and send me the rest in course as they
do appear; _Noughts and Crosses_ by Q.; Robertson's _Scotland under her
Early Kings_.

_Sunday._--The deed is done, didst thou not hear a noise? "The end" has
been written to this endless yarn, and I am once more a free man. What
will he do with it?

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

     _[Vailima] Monday, October 24th._

MY DEAR CARTHEW,[25]--See what I have written, but it's Colvin I'm
after--I have written two chapters, about thirty pages of _Wrecker_
since the mail left, which must be my excuse, and the bother I've had
with it is not to be imagined; you might have seen me the day before
yesterday weighing British sov.'s and Chili dollars to arrange my
treasure chest. And there was such a calculation, not for that only, but
for the ship's position and distances when--but I am not going to tell
you the yarn--and then, as my arithmetic is particularly lax, Lloyd had
to go over all my calculations; and then, as I had changed the amount
of money, he had to go over all _his_ as to the amount of the lay; and
altogether, a bank could be run with less effusion of figures than it
took to shore up a single chapter of a measly yarn. However, it's done,
and I have but one more, or at the outside two, to do, and I am Free!
and can do any damn thing I like.

Before falling on politics, I shall give you my day. Awoke somewhere
about the first peep of day, came gradually to, and had a turn on the
verandah before 5.55, when "the child" (an enormous Wallis Islander)
brings me an orange; at 6, breakfast; 6.10, to work; which lasts till,
at 10.30, Austin comes for his history lecture; this is rather
dispiriting, but education must be gone about in faith--and charity,
both of which pretty nigh failed me to-day about (of all things)
Carthage; 11, luncheon; after luncheon in my mother's room, I read
Chapter XXIII. of _The Wrecker_, then Belle, Lloyd, and I go up and make
music furiously till about 2 (I suppose), when I turn into work again
till 4; fool from 4 to half-past, tired out and waiting for the bath
hour; 4.30, bath; 4.40, eat two heavenly mangoes on the verandah, and
see the boys arrive with the pack-horses; 5, dinner; smoke, chat on
verandah, then hand of cards, and at last at 8 come up to my room with a
pint of beer and a hard biscuit, which I am now consuming, and as soon
as they are consumed I shall turn in.

Such are the innocent days of this ancient and outworn sportsman; to-day
there was no weeding, usually there is however, edged in somewhere. My
books for the moment are a crib to Phædo, and the second book of
Montaigne; and a little while back I was reading Frederic Harrison,
_Choice of Books_, etc.--very good indeed, a great deal of sense and
knowledge in the volume, and some very true stuff, _contra_ Carlyle,
about the eighteenth century. A hideous idea came over me that perhaps
Harrison is now getting _old_. Perhaps you are. Perhaps I am. Oh, this
infidelity must be stared firmly down. I am about twenty-three--say
twenty-eight; you about thirty, or, by'r lady, thirty-four; and as
Harrison belongs to the same generation, there is no good bothering
about him.

Here has just been a fine alert; I gave my wife a dose of chlorodyne.
"Something wrong," says she. "Nonsense," said I. "Embrocation," said
she. I smelt it, and--it smelt very funny. "I think it's just gone bad,
and to-morrow will tell." Proved to be so.

_Wednesday._--History of Tuesday.--Woke at usual time, very little work,
for I was tired, and had a job for the evening--to write parts for a new
instrument, a violin. Lunch, chat, and up to my place to practise; but
there was no practising for me--my flageolet was gone wrong, and I had
to take it all to pieces, clean it, and put it up again. As this is a
most intricate job--the thing dissolves into seventeen separate members,
most of these have to be fitted on their individual springs as fine as
needles, and sometimes two at once with the springs shoving different
ways--it took me till two. Then Lloyd and I rode forth on our errands;
first to Motootua, where we had a really instructive conversation on
weeds and grasses. Thence down to Apia, where we bought a fresh bottle
of chlorodyne and conversed on politics.

My visit to the King, which I thought at the time a particularly
nugatory and even schoolboy step, and only consented to because I had
held the reins so tight over my little band before, has raised a deuce
of a row--new proclamation, no one is to interview the sacred puppet
without consuls' permission, two days' notice, and an approved
interpreter--read (I suppose) spy. Then back; I should have said I was
trying the new horse; a tallish piebald, bought from the circus; he
proved steady and safe, but in very bad condition, and not so much the
wild Arab steed of the desert as had been supposed. The height of his
back, after commodious Jack, astonished me, and I had a great
consciousness of exercise and florid action, as I posted to his long,
emphatic trot. We had to ride back easy; even so he was hot and blown;
and when we set a boy to lead him to and fro, our last character for
sanity perished. We returned just neat for dinner; and in the evening
our violinist arrived, a young lady, no great virtuoso truly, but
plucky, industrious, and a good reader; and we played five pieces with
huge amusement, and broke up at nine. This morning I have read a
splendid piece of Montaigne, written this page of letter, and now turn
to _The Wrecker_.

_Wednesday._--November 16th or 17th--and I am ashamed to say mail day.
_The Wrecker_ is finished, that is the best of my news; it goes by this
mail to Scribner's; and I honestly think it a good yarn on the whole and
of its measly kind. The part that is genuinely good is Nares, the
American sailor; that is a genuine figure; had there been more Nares it
would have been a better book; but of course it didn't set up to be a
book, only a long tough yarn with some pictures of the manners of to-day
in the greater world--not the shoddy sham world of cities, clubs, and
colleges, but the world where men still live a man's life. The worst of
my news is the influenza; Apia is devastate; the shops closed, a ball
put off, etc. As yet we have not had it at Vailima, and, who knows? we
may escape. None of us go down, but of course the boys come and go.

Your letter had the most wonderful "I told you so" I ever heard in the
course of my life. Why, you madman, I wouldn't change my present
installation for any post, dignity, honour, or advantage conceivable to
me. It fills the bill; I have the loveliest time. And as for wars and
rumours of wars, you surely know enough of me to be aware that I like
that also a thousand times better than decrepit peace in Middlesex? I do
not quite like politics; I am too aristocratic, I fear, for that. God
knows I don't care who I chum with; perhaps like sailors best; but to go
round and sue and sneak to keep a crowd together--never. My
imagination, which is not the least damped by the idea of having my head
cut off in the bush, recoils aghast from the idea of a life like
Gladstone's, and the shadow of the newspaper chills me to the bone.
Hence my late eruption was interesting, but not what I like. All else
suits me in this (killed a mosquito) A1 abode.

About politics. A determination was come to by the President that he had
been an idiot; emissaries came to Gurr and me to kiss and be friends. My
man proposed I should have a personal interview; I said it was quite
useless, I had nothing to say; I had offered him the chance to inform
me, had pressed it on him, and had been very unpleasantly received, and
now "Time was." Then it was decided that I was to be made a culprit
against Germany; the German Captain--a delightful fellow and our
constant visitor--wrote to say that as "a German officer" he could not
come even to say farewell. We all wrote back in the most friendly
spirit, telling him (politely) that some of these days he would be
sorry, and we should be delighted to see our friend again. Since then I
have seen no German shadow.

Mataafa has been proclaimed a rebel; the President did this act, and
then resigned. By singular good fortune, Mataafa has not yet moved; no
thanks to our idiot governors. They have shot their bolt; they have made
a rebel of the only man (_to their own knowledge, on the report of their
own spy_) who held the rebel party in check; and having thus called on
war to fall, they can do no more, sit equally "expertes" of _vis_ and
counsel, regarding their handiwork. It is always a cry with these folks
that he (Mataafa) had no ammunition. I always said it would be found;
and we know of five boat-loads that have found their way to Malie
already. Where there are traders, there will be ammunition; aphorism by
R. L. S.

Now what am I to do next?

Lives of the Stevensons? _Historia Samoae_? A History for Children?
Fiction? I have had two hard months at fiction; I want a change.
Stevensons? I am expecting some more material; perhaps better wait.
Samoa? rather tempting; might be useful to the islands--and to me; for
it will be written in admirable temper; I have never agreed with any
party, and see merits and excuses in all; should do it (if I did) very
slackly and easily, as if half in conversation. History for Children?
This flows from my lessons to Austin; no book is any good. The best I
have seen is Freeman's _Old English History_; but his style is so
rasping, and a child can learn more, if he's clever. I found my sketch
of general Aryan history, given in conversation, to have been
practically correct--at least what I mean is, Freeman had very much the
same stuff in his early chapters, only not so much, and I thought not so
well placed; and the child remembered some of it. Now the difficulty is
to give this general idea of main place, growth, and movement; it is
needful to tack it on a yarn. Now Scotch is the only history I know; it
is the only history reasonably represented in my library; it is a very
good one for my purpose, owing to two civilisations having been face to
face throughout--or rather Roman civilisation face to face with our
ancient barbaric life and government, down to yesterday, to 1750 anyway.
But the _Tales of a Grandfather_ stand in my way; I am teaching them to
Austin now, and they have all Scott's defects and all Scott's hopeless
merit. I cannot compete with that; and yet, so far as regards teaching
History, how he has missed his chances! I think I'll try; I really have
some historic sense, I feel that in my bones. Then there's another
thing. Scott never knew the Highlands; he was always a Borderer. He has
missed that whole, long, strange, pathetic story of our savages, and,
besides, his style is not very perspicuous to childhood. Gad, I think
I'll have a flutter. Buridan's Ass! Whither to go, what to attack. Must
go to other letters; shall add to this, if I have time.

TO W. CRAIBE ANGUS

     _Vailima, Samoa, November 1891._

MY DEAR MR. ANGUS,--Herewith the invaluable sheets. They came months
after your letter, and I trembled; but here they are, and I have
scrawled my vile name on them, and "thocht shame" as I did it. I am
expecting the sheets of your catalogue, so that I may attack the
preface. Please give me all the time you can. The sooner the better; you
might even send me early proofs as they are sent out, to give me more
incubation. I used to write as slow as judgment; now I write rather
fast; but I am still "a slow study," and sit a long while silent on my
eggs. Unconscious thought, there is the only method: macerate your
subject, let it boil slow, then take the lid off and look in--and there
your stuff is, good or bad. But the journalist's method is the way to
manufacture lies; it is will-worship--if you know the luminous quaker
phrase; and the will is only to be brought in the field for study and
again for revision. The essential part of work is not an act, it is a
state.

I do not know why I write you this trash.

Many thanks for your handsome dedication. I have not yet had time to do
more than glance at Mrs. Begg; it looks interesting.--Yours very truly,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO MISS ANNIE H. IDE

     _Vailima, Samoa [November 1891]._

MY DEAR LOUISA,--Your picture of the church, the photograph of yourself
and your sister, and your very witty and pleasing letter, came all in a
bundle, and made me feel I had my money's worth for that birthday. I am
now, I must be, one of your nearest relatives; exactly what we are to
each other, I do not know, I doubt if the case has ever happened
before--your papa ought to know, and I don't believe he does; but I
think I ought to call you in the meanwhile, and until we get the advice
of counsel learned in the law, my name-daughter. Well, I was extremely
pleased to see by the church that my name-daughter could draw; by the
letter, that she was no fool; and by the photograph, that she was a
pretty girl, which hurts nothing. See how virtues are rewarded! My first
idea of adopting you was entirely charitable; and here I find that I am
quite proud of it, and of you, and that I chose just the kind of
name-daughter I wanted. For I can draw too, or rather I mean to say I
could before I forgot how; and I am very far from being a fool myself,
however much I may look it; and I am as beautiful as the day, or at
least I once hoped that perhaps I might be going to be. And so I might.
So that you see we are well met, and peers on these important points. I
am very glad also that you are older than your sister. So should I have
been, if I had had one. So that the number of points and virtues which
you have inherited from your name-father is already quite surprising.

I wish you would tell your father--not that I like to encourage my
rival--that we have had a wonderful time here of late, and that they are
having a cold day on Mulinuu, and the consuls are writing reports, and I
am writing to the Times, and if we don't get rid of our friends this
time I shall begin to despair of everything but my name-daughter.

You are quite wrong as to the effect of the birthday on your age. From
the moment the deed was registered (as it was in the public press with
every solemnity), the 13th of November became your own _and only_
birthday, and you ceased to have been born on Christmas Day. Ask your
father: I am sure he will tell you this is sound law. You are thus
become a month and twelve days younger than you were, but will go on
growing older for the future in the regular and human manner from one
13th November to the next. The effect on me is more doubtful; I may, as
you suggest, live for ever; I might, on the other hand, come to pieces
like the one-horse shay at a moment's notice; doubtless the step was
risky, but I do not the least regret that which enables me to sign
myself your revered and delighted name-father,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

     [_Vailima, November 1891._]

DEAR CHARLES,--[After dealing with some matters of business] I believe
that's a'. By this time, I suppose you will have heard from McClure, and
the _Beach of Falesá_ will be decided on for better for worse. The end
of _The Wrecker_ goes by this mail, an awfae relief. I am now free and
can do what I please. What do I please? I kenna. I'll bide a wee.
There's a child's history in the wind; and there's my grandfather's life
begun; and there's a hist^{ry} of Samoa in the last four or five years
begun--there's a kind of sense to this book; it may help the Samoans, it
may help me, for I am bound on the altar here for anti-Germanism. Then
there's _The Pearl Fisher_ about a quarter done; and there's various
short stories in various degrees of incompleteness. De'il, there's
plenty grist; but the mill's unco slaw! To-morrow or next day, when the
mail's through, I'll attack one or other, or maybe something else. All
these schemes begin to laugh at me, for the day's far through, and I
believe the pen grows heavy. However, I believe _The Wrecker_ is a good
yarn of its poor sort, and it is certainly well nourished with facts; no
realist can touch me there; for by this time I do begin to know
something of life in the XIXth century, which no novelist either in
France or England seems to know much of. You must have great larks over
masonry. You're away up in the ranks now and (according to works that I
have read) doubtless design assassinations. But I am an outsider; and I
have a certain liking for a light unto my path which would deter me from
joining the rank and file of so vast and dim a confraternity. At your
altitude it becomes (of course) amusing and perhaps useful. Yes, I
remember the L.J.R.,[26] and the constitution, and my homily on Liberty,
and yours on Reverence, which was never written--so I never knew what
reverence was. I remember I wanted to write Justice also; but I forget
who had the billet. My dear papa was in a devil of a taking; and I had
to go and lunch at Ferrier's in a strangely begrutten state, which was
_infra dig_. for a homilist on liberty. It was about four, I suppose,
that we met in the Lothian Road,--had we the price of two bitters
between us? questionable!

Your bookseller (I have lost his letter, I mean the maid has, arranging
my room, and so have to send by you) wrote me a letter about Old Bailey
Papers. Gosh, I near swarfed; dam'd, man, I near had dee'd o't. It's
only yin or twa volumes I want; say 500 or 1000 pages of the stuff; and
the worthy man (much doubting) proposed to bury me in volumes. Please
allay his rage, and apologise that I have not written him direct. His
note was civil and purposelike. And please send me a copy of Henley's
_Book of Verses_; mine has disappeared.

     R. L. S.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

     _Nov. 25th, 1891._

MY DEAR COLVIN, MY DEAR COLVIN,--I wonder how often I'm going to write
it. In spite of the loss of three days, as I have to tell, and a lot of
weeding and cacao planting, I have finished since the mail left four
chapters, forty-eight pages of my Samoa history. It is true that the
first three had been a good deal drafted two years ago, but they had all
to be written and re-written, and the fourth chapter is all new. Chapter
I. Elements of Discord--Native. II. Elements of Discord--Foreign. III.
The Success of Laupepa. IV. Brandeis. V. Will probably be called "The
Rise of Mataafa." VI. _Furor Consularis_--a devil of a long chapter.
VII. Stuebel the Pacificator. VIII. Government under the Treaty of
Berlin. IX. Practical Suggestions. Say three-sixths of it are done,
maybe more; by this mail five chapters should go, and that should be a
good half of it; say sixty pages. And if you consider that I sent by
last mail the end of _The Wrecker_, coming on for seventy or eighty
pages, and the mail before that the entire tale of the _Beach of Falesá,
_ I do not think I can be accused of idleness. This is my season; I
often work six and seven, and sometimes eight hours; and the same day I
am perhaps weeding or planting for an hour or two more--and I dare say
you know what hard work weeding is--and it all agrees with me at this
time of the year--like--like idleness, if a man of my years could be
idle.

My first visit to Apia was a shock to me; every second person the ghost
of himself, and the place reeking with infection. But I have not got the
thing yet, and hope to escape. This shows how much stronger I am; think
of me flitting through a town of influenza patients seemingly unscathed.
We are all on the cacao planting.

The next day my wife and I rode over to the German plantation, Vailele,
whose manager is almost the only German left to speak to us. Seventy
labourers down with influenza! It is a lovely ride, half-way down our
mountain towards Apia, then turn to the right, ford the river, and three
miles of solitary grass and cocoa palms, to where the sea beats and the
wild wind blows unceasingly about the plantation house. On the way down
Fanny said, "Now what would you do if you saw Colvin coming up?"

Next day we rode down to Apia to make calls.

Yesterday the mail came, and the fat was in the fire.

_Nov. 29th_ (?).--Book.[27] All right. I must say I like your order. And
the papers are some of them up to dick, and no mistake. I agree with you
the lights seem a little turned down. The truth is, I was far through
(if you understand Scots), and came none too soon to the South Seas,
where I was to recover peace of body and mind. No man but myself knew
all my bitterness in those days. Remember that, the next time you think
I regret my exile. And however low the lights are, the stuff is true,
and I believe the more effective; after all, what I wish to fight is the
best fought by a rather cheerless presentation of the truth. The world
must return some day to the word duty, and be done with the word reward.
There are no rewards, and plenty duties. And the sooner a man sees that
and acts upon it like a gentleman or a fine old barbarian, the better
for himself.

There is my usual puzzle about publishers. Chatto ought to have it, as
he has all the other essays; these all belong to me, and Chatto
publishes on terms. Longman has forgotten the terms we are on; let him
look up our first correspondence, and he will see I reserved explicitly,
as was my habit, the right to republish as I choose. Had the same
arrangement with Henley, Magazine of Art, and with Tulloch,
Fraser's.--For any necessary note or preface, it would be a real service
if you would undertake the duty yourself. I should love a preface by
you, as short or as long as you choose, three sentences, thirty pages,
the thing I should like is your name. And the excuse of my great
distance seems sufficient. I shall return with this the sheets corrected
as far as I have them; the rest I will leave, if you will, to you
entirely; let it be your book, and disclaim what you dislike in the
preface. You can say it was at my eager prayer. I should say I am the
less willing to pass Chatto over, because he behaved the other day in a
very handsome manner. He asked leave to reprint _Damien_; I gave it to
him as a present, explaining I could receive no emolument for a personal
attack. And he took out my share of profits, and sent them in my name to
the Leper Fund. I could not bear after that to take from him any of that
class of books which I have always given him. Tell him the same terms
will do. Clark to print, uniform with the others.

I have lost all the days since this letter began rehandling Chapter IV.
of the Samoa racket. I do not go in for literature; address myself to
sensible people rather than to sensitive. And, indeed, it is a kind of
journalism, I have no right to dally; if it is to help, it must come
soon. In two months from now it shall be done, and should be published
in the course of March. I propose Cassell gets it. I am going to call it
_A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa_, I believe. I
recoil from serious names; they seem so much too pretentious for a
pamphlet. It will be about the size of _Treasure Island_, I believe. Of
course, as you now know, my case of conscience cleared itself off, and I
began my intervention directly to one of the parties. The other, the
Chief Justice, I am to inform of my book the first occasion. God knows
if the book will do any good--or harm; but I judge it right to try.
There is one man's life certainly involved; and it may be all our lives.
I must not stand and slouch, but do my best as best I can. But you may
conceive the difficulty of a history extending to the present week, at
least, and where almost all the actors upon all sides are of my personal
acquaintance. The only way is to judge slowly, and write boldly, and
leave the issue to fate.... I am far indeed from wishing to confine
myself to creative work; that is a loss, the other repairs; the one
chance for a man, and, above all, for one who grows elderly, ahem, is to
vary drainage and repair. That is the one thing I understand--the
cultivation of the shallow solum of my brain. But I would rather, from
soon on, be released from the obligation to write. In five or six years
this plantation--suppose it and us still to exist--should pretty well
support us and pay wages; not before, and already the six years seem
long to me. If literature were but a pastime!

I have interrupted myself to write the necessary notification to the
Chief Justice.

I see in looking up Longman's letter that it was as usual the letter of
an obliging gentleman; so do not trouble him with my reminder. I wish
all my publishers were not so nice. And I have a fourth and a fifth
baying at my heels; but for these, of course, they must go wanting.

_Dec. 2nd._--No answer from the Chief Justice, which is like him, but
surely very wrong in such a case. The lunch bell! I have been off work,
playing patience and weeding all morning. Yesterday and the day before I
drafted eleven and revised nine pages of Chapter V., and the truth is, I
was extinct by lunch-time, and played patience sourly the rest of the
day. To-morrow or next day I hope to go in again and win. Lunch 2nd
Bell.

_Dec. 2nd, afternoon._--I have kept up the idleness; blew on the pipe to
Belle's piano; then had a ride in the forest all by my nainsel; back and
piped again, and now dinner nearing. Take up this sheet with nothing to
say. The weird figure of Faauma is in the room washing my windows, in a
black lavalava (kilt) with a red handkerchief hanging from round her
neck between her breasts; not another stitch; her hair close cropped and
oiled; when she first came here she was an angelic little stripling, but
she is now in full flower--or half-flower--and grows buxom. As I write,
I hear her wet cloth moving and grunting with some industry; for I had a
word this day with her husband on the matter of work and meal-time, when
she is always late. And she has a vague reverence for Papa, as she and
her enormous husband address me when anything is wrong. Her husband is
Lafaele, sometimes called the archangel, of whom I have writ you often.
Rest of our household, Talolo, cook; Pulu, kitchen boy, good, steady,
industrious lads; Henry, back again from Savaii, where his love affair
seems not to have prospered, with what looks like a spear-wound in the
back of his head, of which Mr. Reticence says nothing; Simi, Manuele,
and two other labourers outdoors. Lafaele is provost of the live-stock,
whereof now, three milk-cows, one bull-calf, one heifer, Jack,
Macfarlane, the mare, Harold, Tifaga Jack, Donald and Edinburgh--seven
horses--O, and the stallion--eight horses; five cattle; total, if my
arithmetic be correct, thirteen head of beasts; I don't know how the
pigs stand, or the ducks, or the chickens; but we get a good many eggs,
and now and again a duckling or a chickling for the table; the pigs are
more solemn, and appear only on birthdays and sich.

_Monday, Dec. 7._--On Friday morning about eleven 1500 cacao seeds
arrived, and we set to and toiled from twelve that day to six, and went
to bed pretty tired. Next day I got about an hour and a half at my
History, and was at it again by 8.10, and except an hour for lunch kept
at it till four P.M. Yesterday, I did some History in the morning, and
slept most of the afternoon; and to-day, being still averse from
physical labour, and the mail drawing nigh, drew out of the squad, and
finished for press the fifth chapter of my History; fifty-nine pages in
one month; which (you will allow me to say) is a devil of a large order;
it means at least 177 pages of writing; 89,000 words! and hours going to
and fro among my notes. However, this is the way it has to be done; the
job must be done fast, or it is of no use. And it is a curious yarn.
Honestly, I think people should be amused and convinced, if they could
be at the pains to look at such a damned outlandish piece of machinery,
which of course they won't. And much I care.

When I was filling baskets all Saturday, in my dull mulish way, perhaps
the slowest worker there, surely the most particular, and the only one
that never looked up or knocked off, I could not but think I should have
been sent on exhibition as an example to young literary men. Here is how
to learn to write, might be the motto. You should have seen us; the
verandah was like an Irish bog; our hands and faces were bedaubed with
soil; and Faauma was supposed to have struck the right note when she
remarked (_à propos_ of nothing), "Too much _eleele_ (soil) for me!" The
cacao (you must understand) has to be planted at first in baskets of
plaited cocoa-leaf. From four to ten natives were plaiting these in the
wood-shed. Four boys were digging up soil and bringing it by the boxful
to the verandah. Lloyd and I and Belle, and sometimes S. (who came to
bear a hand), were filling the baskets, removing stones and lumps of
clay; Austin and Faauma carried them when full to Fanny, who planted a
seed in each, and then set them, packed close, in the corners of the
verandah. From twelve on Friday till five P.M. on Saturday we planted
the first 1500, and more than 700 of a second lot. You cannot dream how
filthy we were, and we were all properly tired. They are all at it again
to-day, bar Belle and me, not required, and glad to be out of it. The
Chief Justice has not yet replied, and I have news that he received my
letter. What a man!

I have gone crazy over Bourget's _Sensations d'Italie_; hence the
enclosed dedication,[28] a mere cry of gratitude for the best fun I've
had over a new book this ever so!

TO FRED ORR

   The following is in answer to an application for an autograph from a
   young gentleman in the United  States:--

     _Vailima, Upolu, Samoa, November 28th, 1891._

DEAR SIR,--Your obliging communication is to hand. I am glad to find
that you have read some of my books, and to see that you spell my name
right. This is a point (for some reason) of great difficulty; and I
believe that a gentleman who can spell Stevenson with a v at sixteen,
should have a show for the Presidency before fifty. By that time

  I, nearer to the wayside inn,

predict that you will have outgrown your taste for autographs, but
perhaps your son may have inherited the collection, and on the morning
of the great day will recall my prophecy to your mind. And in the papers
of 1921 (say) this letter may arouse a smile.

Whatever you do, read something else besides novels and newspapers; the
first are good enough when they are good; the second, at their best, are
worth nothing. Read great books of literature and history; try to
understand the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages; be sure you do not
understand when you dislike them; condemnation is non-comprehension. And
if you know something of these two periods, you will know a little more
about to-day, and may be a good President.

I send you my best wishes, and am yours,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,

  _Author of a vast quantity of little books_.

TO E. L. BURLINGAME

   The next letter announces to his New York publishers the beginning of
   his volume on the troubles of Samoa, _A Footnote to History_.

     [_Vailima, December 1891._]

MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--The end of _The Wrecker_ having but just come in,
you will, I dare say, be appalled to receive three (possibly four)
chapters of a new book of the least attractive sort: a history of
nowhere in a corner, or no time to mention, running to a volume! Well,
it may very likely be an illusion; it is very likely no one could
possibly wish to read it, but I wish to publish it. If you don't cotton
to the idea, kindly set it up at my expense, and let me know your terms
for publishing. The great affair to me is to have per return (if it
might be) four or five--better say half a dozen--sets of the roughest
proofs that can be drawn. There are a good many men here whom I want to
read the blessed thing, and not one would have the energy to read MS. At
the same time, if you care to glance at it, and have the time, I should
be very glad of your opinion as to whether I have made any step at all
towards possibly inducing folk at home to read matter so extraneous and
outlandish. I become heavy and owlish; years sit upon me; it begins to
seem to me to be a man's business to leave off his damnable faces and
say his say. Else I could have made it pungent and light and lively. In
considering, kindly forget that I am R. L. S.; think of the four
chapters as a book you are reading, by an inhabitant of our "lovely but
fatil" islands; and see if it could possibly amuse the hebetated public.
I have to publish anyway, you understand; I have a purpose beyond; I am
concerned for some of the parties to this quarrel. What I want to hear
is from curiosity; what I want you to judge of is what we are to do with
the book in a business sense. To me it is not business at all; I had
meant originally to lay all the profits to the credit of Samoa; when it
comes to the pinch of writing, I judge this unfair--I give too much--and
I mean to keep (if there be any profit at all) one-half for the artisan;
the rest I shall hold over to give to the Samoans _for that which I
choose and against work done_. I think I have never heard of greater
insolence than to attempt such a subject; yet the tale is so strange and
mixed, and the people so oddly charactered--above all, the whites--and
the high note of the hurricane and the warships is so well prepared to
take popular interest, and the latter part is so directly in the day's
movement, that I am not without hope that some may read it; and if they
don't, a murrain on them! Here is, for the first time, a tale of
Greeks--Homeric Greeks--mingled with moderns, and all true; Odysseus
along-side of Rajah Brooke, _proportion gardée_; and all true. Here is
for the first time since the Greeks (that I remember) the history of a
handful of men, where all know each other in the eyes, and live close in
a few acres, narrated at length, and with the seriousness of history.
Talk of the modern novel; here is a modern history. And if I had the
misfortune to found a school, the legitimate historian might lie down
and die, for he could never overtake his material. Here is a little tale
that has not "caret"-ed its "vates"; "sacer" is another point.

     R. L. S.

TO HENRY JAMES

   Mr. Henry James was in the habit of sending out for Stevenson's
   reading books that seemed likely to interest him, and among the last
   had been M. Paul Bourget's _Sensations d'Italie_.

     _December 7th, 1891._

MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--Thanks for yours; your former letter was lost; so
it appears was my long and masterly treatise on the _Tragic Muse_. I
remember sending it very well, and there went by the same mail a long
and masterly tractate to Gosse about his daddy's life, for which I have
been long expecting an acknowledgment, and which is plainly gone to the
bottom with the other. If you see Gosse, please mention it. These gems
of criticism are now lost literature, like the tomes of Alexandria. I
could not do 'em again. And I must ask you to be content with a dull
head, a weary hand, and short commons, for to-day, as I am physically
tired with hard work of every kind, the labours of the planter and the
author both piled upon me mountain deep. I am delighted beyond
expression by Bourget's book: he has phrases which affect me almost like
Montaigne; I had read ere this a masterly essay of his on Pascal; this
book does it; I write for all his essays by this mail, and shall try to
meet him when I come to Europe. The proposal is to pass a summer in
France, I think in Royat, where the faithful could come and visit me;
they are now not many. I expect Henry James to come and break a crust or
two with us. I believe it will be only my wife and myself; and she will
go over to England, but not I, or possibly incog. to Southampton, and
then to Boscombe to see poor Lady Shelley. I am writing--trying to write
in a Babel fit for the bottomless pit; my wife, her daughter, her
grandson and my mother, all shrieking at each other round the house--not
in war, thank God! but the din is ultra martial, and the note of Lloyd
joins in occasionally, and the cause of this to-do is simply cacao,
whereof chocolate comes. You may drink of our chocolate perhaps in five
or six years from now, and not know it. It makes a fine bustle, and
gives us some hard work, out of which I have slunk for to-day.

I have a story coming out: God knows when or how; it answers to the name
of the _Beach of Falesá_, and I think well of it. I was delighted with
the _Tragic Muse_; I thought the Muse herself one of your best works; I
was delighted also to hear of the success of your piece, as you know I
am a dam failure,[29] and might have dined with the dinner club that
Daudet and these parties frequented.

_Next day._--I have just been breakfasting at Baiae and Brindisi, and
the charm of Bourget hag-rides me. I wonder if this exquisite fellow,
all made of fiddle-strings and scent and intelligence, could bear any of
my bald prose. If you think he could, ask Colvin to send him a copy of
these last essays of mine when they appear; and tell Bourget they go to
him from a South Sea Island as literal homage. I have read no new book
for years that gave me the same literary thrill as his _Sensations
d'Italie_. If (as I imagine) my cut-and-dry literature would be death to
him, and worse than death--journalism--be silent on the point. For I
have a great curiosity to know him, and if he doesn't know my work, I
shall have the better chance of making his acquaintance. I read _The
Pupil_ the other day with great joy; your little boy is admirable; why
is there no little boy like that unless he hails from the Great
Republic?

Here I broke off, and wrote Bourget a dedication; no use resisting; it's
a love affair. O, he's exquisite, I bless you for the gift of him. I
have really enjoyed this book as I--almost as I--used to enjoy books
when I was going twenty-twenty-three; and these are the years for
reading!

     R. L. S.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

     _[Vailima] Tuesday, Dec. 1891._

SIR,--I have the honour to report further explorations of the course of
the river Vaea, with accompanying sketch plan. The party under my
command consisted of one horse, and was extremely insubordinate and
mutinous, owing to not being used to go into the bush, and being
half-broken anyway--and that the wrong half. The route indicated for my
party was up the bed of the so-called river Vaea, which I accordingly
followed to a distance of perhaps two or three furlongs eastward from
the house of Vailima, where the stream being quite dry, the bush thick,
and the ground very difficult, I decided to leave the main body of the
force under my command tied to a tree, and push on myself with the point
of the advance guard, consisting of one man. The valley had become very
narrow and airless; foliage close shut above; dry bed of the stream much
excavated, so that I passed under fallen trees without stooping.
Suddenly it turned sharply to the north, at right angles to its former
direction; I heard living water, and came in view of a tall face of rock
and the stream spraying down it; it might have been climbed, but it
would have been dangerous, and I had to make my way up the steep earth
banks, where there is nowhere any looting for man, only for trees, which
made the rounds of my ladder. I was near the top of this climb, which
was very hot and steep, and the pulses were buzzing all over my body,
when I made sure there was one external sound in my ears, and paused to
listen. No mistake; a sound of a mill-wheel thundering, I thought, close
by, yet below me, a huge mill-wheel, yet not going steadily, but with a
_schottische_ movement, and at each fresh impetus shaking the mountain.
There, where I was, I just put down the sound to the mystery of the
bush; where no sound now surprises me--and any sound alarms; I only
thought it would give Jack a fine fright, down where he stood tied to a
tree by himself, and he was badly enough scared when I left him. The
good folks at home identified it; it was a sharp earthquake.

  1. _Mepi tree._                 4, 4. _Banana patches_
  2. _Carruthers' Road._             5. _Waterfall._
  3. _Vailima Plantation House._     6. _Banyan tree._]

At the top of the climb I made my way again to the watercourse; it is
here running steady and pretty full; strange these intermittencies--and
just a little below the main stream is quite dry, and all the original
brook has gone down some lava gallery of the mountain--and just a little
further below, it begins picking up from the left hand in little boggy
tributaries, and in the inside of a hundred yards has grown a brook
again.[30] The general course of the brook was, I guess, S.E.; the
valley still very deep and whelmed in wood. It seemed a swindle to have
made so sheer a climb and still find yourself at the bottom of a well.
But gradually the thing seemed to shallow, the trees to seem poorer and
smaller; I could see more and more of the silver sprinkles of sky among
the foliage, instead of the sombre piling up of tree behind tree. And
here I had two scares--first, away up on my right hand I heard a bull
low; I think it was a bull from the quality of the low, which was
singularly songful and beautiful; the bulls belong to me, but how did I
know that the bull was aware of that? and my advance guard not being at
all properly armed, we advanced with great precaution until I was
satisfied that I was passing eastward of the enemy. It was during this
period that a pool of the river suddenly boiled up in my face in a
little fountain. It was in a very dreary, marshy part among dilapidated
trees that you see through holes in the trunks of; and if any kind of
beast or elf or devil had come out of that sudden silver ebullition, I
declare I do not think I should have been surprised. It was perhaps a
thing as curious--a fish, with which these head waters of the stream
are alive. They are some of them as long as my finger, should be easily
caught in these shallows, and some day I'll have a dish of them.

Very soon after I came to where the stream collects in another banana
swamp, with the bananas bearing well. Beyond, the course is again quite
dry; it mounts with a sharp turn a very steep face of the mountain, and
then stops abruptly at the lip of a plateau, I suppose the top of Vaea
mountain: plainly no more springs here--there was no smallest furrow of
a watercourse beyond--and my task might be said to be accomplished. But
such is the animated spirit in the service that the whole advance guard
expressed a sentiment of disappointment that an exploration, so far
successfully conducted, should come to a stop in the most promising view
of fresh successes. And though unprovided either with compass or
cutlass, it was determined to push some way along the plateau, marking
our direction by the laborious process of bending down, sitting upon,
and thus breaking the wild cocoanut trees. This was the less regretted
by all from a delightful discovery made of a huge banyan growing here in
the bush, with flying-buttressed flying buttresses, and huge arcs of
trunk hanging high overhead and trailing down new complications of root.
I climbed some way up what seemed the original beginning; it was easier
to climb than a ship's rigging, even rattled; everywhere there was
foot-hold and hand-hold. It was judged wise to return and rally the main
body, who had now been left alone for perhaps forty minutes in the bush.

The return was effected in good order, but unhappily I only arrived
(like so many other explorers) to find my main body or rear-guard in a
condition of mutiny; the work, it is to be supposed, of terror. It is
right I should tell you the Vaea has a bad name, an _aitu
fafine_--female devil of the woods--succubus--haunting it, and doubtless
Jack had heard of her; perhaps, during my absence, saw her; lucky Jack!
Anyway, he was neither to hold nor to bind, and finally, after nearly