TO SIDNEY COLVIN

   It should be remembered that the Marquesas, the Paumotus, and the
   Tahitian group are all dependencies of France.

     Yacht Casco, Anaho Bay, Nukahiva, Marquesas Islands [July 1888].

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­From this somewhat (ahem) out of the way place, I write to say how d’ye do.  It is all a swindle:  I chose these isles as having the most beastly population, and they are far better, and far more civilised than we.  I know one old chief Ko-o-amua, a great cannibal in his day, who ate his enemies even as he walked home from killing ’em, and he is a perfect gentleman and exceedingly amiable and simple-minded:  no fool, though.

The climate is delightful; and the harbour where we lie one of the loveliest spots imaginable.  Yesterday evening we had near a score natives on board; lovely parties.  We have a native god; very rare now.  Very rare and equally absurd to view.

This sort of work is not favourable to correspondence:  it takes me all the little strength I have to go about and see, and then come home and note, the strangeness around us.  I shouldn’t wonder if there came trouble here some day, all the same.  I could name a nation that is not beloved in certain islands ­and it does not know it!  Strange:  like ourselves, perhaps, in India!  Love to all and much to yourself.

     R. L. S.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

  Yacht Casco, at sea, near the Paumotus,
    7 A.M., September 6th, 1888, with a dreadful pen.

MY DEAR CHARLES, ­Last night as I lay under my blanket in the cockpit, courting sleep, I had a comic seizure.  There was nothing visible but the southern stars, and the steersman there out by the binnacle lamp; we were all looking forward to a most deplorable landfall on the morrow, praying God we should fetch a tuft of palms which are to indicate the Dangerous Archipelago; the night was as warm as milk, and all of a sudden I had a vision of ­Drummond Street.  It came on me like a flash of lightning:  I simply returned thither, and into the past.  And when I remember all I hoped and feared as I pickled about Rutherford’s in the rain and the east wind; how I feared I should make a mere shipwreck, and yet timidly hoped not; how I feared I should never have a friend, far less a wife, and yet passionately hoped I might; how I hoped (if I did not take to drink) I should possibly write one little book, etc. etc.  And then now ­what a change!  I feel somehow as if I should like the incident set upon a brass plate at the corner of that dreary thoroughfare for all students to read, poor devils, when their hearts are down.  And I felt I must write one word to you.  Excuse me if I write little:  when I am at sea, it gives me a headache; when I am in port, I have my diary crying “Give, give.”  I shall have a fine book of travels, I feel sure; and will tell you more of the South Seas after very few months than any other writer has done ­except Herman Melville perhaps, who is a howling cheese.  Good luck to you, God bless you. ­Your affectionate friend,

     R. L. S.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

The signature used at foot of this letter and occasionally elsewhere, “The Old Man Virulent,” alludes to the fits of uncontrollable anger to which he was often in youth, but by this time very rarely, subject:  fits occasioned sometimes by instances of official stolidity or impertinence or what he took for such, more often by acts savouring of cruelty, meanness, or injustice.

     Fakarava, Low Archipelago, September 21st, 1888.

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­Only a word.  Get out your big atlas, and imagine a straight line from San Francisco to Anaho, the N.E. corner of Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas Islands; imagine three weeks there:  imagine a day’s sail on August 12th round the eastern end of the island to Tai-o-hae, the capital; imagine us there till August 22nd:  imagine us skirt the east side of Ua-pu ­perhaps Rona-Poa on your atlas ­and through the Bordelais straits to Taa-hauku in Hiva-Oa, where we arrive on the 23rd; imagine us there until September 4th, when we sailed for Fakarava, which we reached on the 9th, after a very difficult and dangerous passage among these isles.  Tuesday, we shall leave for Taiti, where I shall knock off and do some necessary work ashore.  It looks pretty bald in the atlas; not in fact; nor I trust in the 130 odd pages of diary which I have just been looking up for these dates:  the interest, indeed, has been incredible:  I did not dream there were such places or such races.  My health has stood me splendidly; I am in for hours wading over the knees for shells; I have been five hours on horseback:  I have been up pretty near all night waiting to see where the Casco would go ashore, and with my diary all ready ­simply the most entertaining night of my life.  Withal I still have colds; I have one now, and feel pretty sick too; but not as at home:  instead of being in bed, for instance, I am at this moment sitting snuffling and writing in an undershirt and trousers; and as for colour, hands, arms, feet, legs, and face, I am browner than the berry:  only my trunk and the aristocratic spot on which I sit retain the vile whiteness of the north.

Please give my news and kind love to Henley, Henry James, and any whom you see of well-wishers.  Accept from me the very best of my affection:  and believe me ever yours,

     THE OLD MAN VIRULENT.

     Papeete, Taiti, October 7th, 1888.

Never having found a chance to send this off, I may add more of my news.  My cold took a very bad turn, and I am pretty much out of sorts at this particular, living in a little bare one-twentieth-furnished house, surrounded by mangoes, etc.  All the rest are well, and I mean to be soon.  But these Taiti colds are very severe and, to children, often fatal; so they were not the thing for me.  Yesterday the brigantine came in from San Francisco, so we can get our letters off soon.  There are in Papeete at this moment, in a little wooden house with grated verandahs, two people who love you very much, and one of them is

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

     Taiti, as ever was, 6th October 1888.

MY DEAR CHARLES, ­ ...  You will receive a lot of mostly very bad proofs of photographs:  the paper was so bad.  Please keep them very private, as they are for the book.  We send them, having learned so dread a fear of the sea, that we wish to put our eggs in different baskets.  We have been thrice within an ace of being ashore:  we were lost (!) for about twelve hours in the Low Archipelago, but by God’s blessing had quiet weather all the time; and once in a squall, we cam so near gaun heels ower hurdies, that I really dinnae ken why we didnae a’thegither.  Hence, as I say, a great desire to put our eggs in different baskets, particularly on the Pacific (aw-haw-haw) Pacific Ocean.

You can have no idea what a mean time we have had, owing to incidental beastlinesses, nor what a glorious, owing to the intrinsic interest of these isles.  I hope the book will be a good one; nor do I really very much doubt that ­the stuff is so curious; what I wonder is, if the public will rise to it.  A copy of my journal, or as much of it as is made, shall go to you also; it is, of course, quite imperfect, much being to be added and corrected; but O, for the eggs in the different baskets.

All the rest are well enough, and all have enjoyed the cruise so far, in spite of its drawbacks.  We have had an awfae time in some ways, Mr. Baxter; and if I wasnae sic a verrà patient man (when I ken that I have to be) there wad hae been a braw row; and ance if I hadnae happened to be on deck about three in the marnin’, I think there would have been murder done.  The American Mairchant Marine is a kent service; ye’ll have heard its praise, I’m thinkin’; an’ if ye never did, ye can get Twa Years Before the Mast, by Dana, whaur forbye a great deal o’ pleisure, ye’ll get a’ the needcessary information.  Love to your father and all the family. ­Ever your affectionate friend,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE

   This lady, as we have seen, had made Stevenson a present of a
   paper-cutter when he left Bournemouth; and it is in the character of
   the paper-cutter that he now writes.

     Taiti, October 10th, 1888.

DEAR GIVER, ­I am at a loss to conceive your object in giving me to a person so locomotory as my proprietor.  The number of thousand miles that I have travelled, the strange bed-fellows with which I have been made acquainted, I lack the requisite literary talent to make clear to your imagination.  I speak of bed-fellows; pocket-fellows would be a more exact expression, for the place of my abode is in my master’s right-hand trouser-pocket; and there, as he waded on the resounding beaches of Nukahiva, or in the shallow tepid water on the reef of Fakarava, I have been overwhelmed by and buried among all manner of abominable South Sea shells, beautiful enough in their way, I make no doubt, but singular company for any self-respecting paper-cutter.  He, my master ­or as I more justly call him, my bearer; for although I occasionally serve him, does not he serve me daily and all day long, carrying me like an African potentate on my subject’s legs? ­he is delighted with these isles, and this climate, and these savages, and a variety of other things.  He now blows a flageolet with singular effects:  sometimes the poor thing appears stifled with shame, sometimes it screams with agony; he pursues his career with truculent insensibility.  Health appears to reign in the party.  I was very nearly sunk in a squall.  I am sorry I ever left England, for here there are no books to be had, and without books there is no stable situation for, dear Giver, your affectionate

     WOODEN PAPER-CUTTER.

A neighbouring pair of scissors snips a kiss in your direction.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

The ballad referred to in the letter which follows is the Feast of Famine, published with others in the collection of 1890 Ballads (Chatto & Windus).  I never very much admired his South Sea ballads for any quality except their narrative vigour, thinking them unequal and uncertain both in metre and style.

     Taiti, October 16th, 1888.

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­The cruiser for San Francisco departs to-morrow morning bearing you some kind of a scratch.  This much more important packet will travel by way of Auckland.  It contains a ballant; and I think a better ballant than I expected ever to do.  I can imagine how you will wag your pow over it; and how ragged you will find it, etc., but has it not spirit all the same? and though the verse is not all your fancy painted it, has it not some life?  And surely, as narrative, the thing has considerable merit!  Read it, get a typewritten copy taken, and send me that and your opinion to the Sandwiches.  I know I am only courting the most excruciating mortification; but the real cause of my sending the thing is that I could bear to go down myself, but not to have much MS. go down with me.  To say truth, we are through the most dangerous; but it has left in all minds a strong sense of insecurity, and we are all for putting eggs in various baskets.

We leave here soon, bound for Uahiva, Raiatea, Bora-Bora, and the Sandwiches.

  O, how my spirit languishes
  To step ashore on the Sanguishes;
  For there my letters wait,
  There shall I know my fate. 
  O, how my spirit languidges
  To step ashore on the Sanguidges.

18th. ­I think we shall leave here if all is well on Monday.  I am quite recovered, astonishingly recovered.  It must be owned these climates and this voyage have given me more strength than I could have thought possible.  And yet the sea is a terrible place, stupefying to the mind and poisonous to the temper, the sea, the motion, the lack of space, the cruel publicity, the villainous tinned foods, the sailors, the captain, the passengers ­but you are amply repaid when you sight an island, and drop anchor in a new world.  Much trouble has attended this trip, but I must confess more pleasure.  Nor should I ever complain, as in the last few weeks, with the curing of my illness indeed, as if that were the bursting of an abscess, the cloud has risen from my spirits and to some degree from my temper.  Do you know what they called the Casco at Fakarava?  The Silver Ship.  Is that not pretty?  Pray tell Mrs. Jenkin, die silberne Frau, as I only learned it since I wrote her.  I think of calling the book by that name:  The Cruise of the Silver Ship ­so there will be one poetic page at least ­the title.  At the Sandwiches we shall say farewell to the S.  S. with mingled feelings.  She is a lovely creature:  the most beautiful thing at this moment in Taiti.

Well, I will take another sheet, though I know I have nothing to say.  You would think I was bursting:  but the voyage is all stored up for the book, which is to pay for it, we fondly hope; and the troubles of the time are not worth telling; and our news is little.

Here I conclude (Octh, I think), for we are now stored, and the Blue Peter metaphorically flies.

     R. L. S.

TO WILLIAM AND THOMAS ARCHER

   Stevenson addresses a part of this letter, as well as the whole of
   another later on, to a young son of Mr. Archer’s, but rather to amuse
   himself than his nominal correspondent, who was then aged three

     Taiti, October 17th, 1888.

DEAR ARCHER, ­Though quite unable to write letters I nobly send you a line signifying nothing.  The voyage has agreed well with all; it has had its pains, and its extraordinary pleasures; nothing in the world can equal the excitement of the first time you cast anchor in some bay of a tropical island, and the boats begin to surround you, and the tattooed people swarm aboard.  Tell Tomarcher, with my respex, that hide-and-seek is not equal to it; no, nor hidee-in-the-dark; which, for the matter of that, is a game for the unskilful:  the artist prefers daylight, a good-sized garden, some shrubbery, an open paddock, and ­come on, Macduff.

TOMARCHER, I am now a distinguished litterytour, but that was not the real bent of my genius.  I was the best player of hide-and-seek going; not a good runner, I was up to every shift and dodge, I could jink very well, I could crawl without any noise through leaves, I could hide under a carrot plant, it used to be my favourite boast that I always walked into the den.  You may care to hear, Tomarcher, about the children in these parts; their parents obey them, they do not obey their parents; and I am sorry to tell you (for I dare say you are already thinking the idea a good one) that it does not pay one halfpenny.  There are three sorts of civilisation, Tomarcher:  the real old-fashioned one, in which children either had to find out how to please their dear papas, or their dear papas cut their heads off.  This style did very well, but is now out of fashion.  Then the modern European style:  in which children have to behave reasonably well, and go to school and say their prayers, or their dear papas will know the reason why.  This does fairly well.  Then there is the South Sea Island plan, which does not do one bit.  The children beat their parents here; it does not make their parents any better; so do not try it.

Dear Tomarcher, I have forgotten the address of your new house, but will send this to one of your papa’s publishers.  Remember us all to all of you, and believe me, yours respectably,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO CHARLES BAXTER LETTER I

   Tautira (The Garden of the World), otherwise called
      Hans-Christian-Andersen-ville [November 1888].

MY DEAR CHARLES, ­Whether I have a penny left in the wide world, I know not, nor shall know, till I get to Honolulu, where I anticipate a devil of an awakening.  It will be from a mighty pleasant dream at least:  Tautira being mere Heaven.  But suppose, for the sake of argument, any money to be left in the hands of my painful doer, what is to be done with it?  Save us from exile would be the wise man’s choice, I suppose; for the exile threatens to be eternal.  But yet I am of opinion ­in case there should be some dibbs in the hand of the P.D., i.e. painful doer; because if there be none, I shall take to my flageolet on the high-road, and work home the best way I can, having previously made away with my family ­I am of opinion that if ­ and his are in the customary state, and you are thinking of an offering, and there should be still some funds over, you would be a real good P.D. to put some in with yours and tak’ the credit o’t, like a wee man!  I know it’s a beastly thing to ask, but it, after all, does no earthly harm, only that much good.  And besides, like enough there’s nothing in the till, and there is an end.  Yet I live here in the full lustre of millions; it is thought I am the richest son of man that has yet been to Tautira:  I! ­and I am secretly eaten with the fear of lying in pawn, perhaps for the remainder of my days, in San Francisco.  As usual, my colds have much hashed my finances.

Do tell Henley I write this just after having dismissed Ori the sub-chief, in whose house I live, Mrs. Ori, and Pairai, their adopted child, from the evening hour of music:  during which I Publickly (with a k) Blow on the Flageolet.  These are words of truth.  Yesterday I told Ori about W. E. H., counterfeited his playing on the piano and the pipe, and succeeded in sending the six feet four there is of that sub-chief somewhat sadly to his bed; feeling that his was not the genuine article after all.  Ori is exactly like a colonel in the Guards. ­I am, dear Charles, ever yours affectionately,

     R. L. S.

TO CHARLES BAXTER LETTER II

   The stanzas which end this letter are well known, having been
   printed, with one additional, in Songs of Travel; but they gain
   effect, I think, from being given here in their place.

     Tautira, 10th November ’88.

MY DEAR CHARLES, ­Our mainmast is dry-rotten, and we are all to the devil; I shall lie in a debtor’s jail.  Never mind, Tautira is first chop.  I am so besotted that I shall put on the back of this my attempt at words to Wandering Willie; if you can conceive at all the difficulty, you will also conceive the vanity with which I regard any kind of result; and whatever mine is like, it has some sense, and Burns’s has none.

  Home no more home to me, whither must I wander? 
    Hunger my driver, I go where I must. 
  Cold blows the winter wind over hill and heather;
    Thick drives the rain, and my roof is in the dust. 
  Loved of wise men was the shade of my roof-tree;
    The true word of welcome was spoken in the door ­
  Dear days of old, with the faces in the firelight,
    Kind folks of old, you come again no more.

  Home was home then, my dear, full of kindly faces,
    Home was home then, my dear, happy for the child. 
  Fire and the windows bright glittered on the moorland;
    Song, tuneful song, built a palace in the wild. 
  Now, when day dawns on the brow of the moorland,
    Lone stands the house, and the chimney-stone is cold. 
  Lone let it stand, now the friends are all departed,
    The kind hearts, the true hearts, that loved the place of old.

     R. L. S.

TO JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

   The following is the draft of a proposed dedication to the South Sea
   travel-book which was to be the fruit of the present voyages, as is
   explained in a note at the end.

     November 11th, 1888.

One November night, in the village of Tautira, we sat at the high table in the hall of assembly, hearing the natives sing.  It was dark in the hall, and very warm; though at times the land wind blew a little shrewdly through the chinks, and at times, through the larger openings, we could see the moonlight on the lawn.  As the songs arose in the rattling Tahitian chorus, the chief translated here and there a verse.  Farther on in the volume you shall read the songs themselves; and I am in hopes that not you only, but all who can find a savour in the ancient poetry of places, will read them with some pleasure.  You are to conceive us, therefore, in strange circumstances and very pleasing; in a strange land and climate, the most beautiful on earth; surrounded by a foreign race that all travellers have agreed to be the most engaging; and taking a double interest in two foreign arts.

We came forth again at last, in a cloudy moonlight, on the forest lawn which is the street of Tautira.  The Pacific roared outside upon the reef.  Here and there one of the scattered palm-built lodges shone out under the shadow of the wood, the lamplight bursting through the crannies of the wall.  We went homeward slowly, Ori a Ori carrying behind us the lantern and the chairs, properties with which we had just been enacting our part of the distinguished visitor.  It was one of those moments in which minds not altogether churlish recall the names and deplore the absence of congenial friends; and it was your name that first rose upon our lips.  “How Symonds would have enjoyed this evening!” said one, and then another.  The word caught in my mind; I went to bed, and it was still there.  The glittering, frosty solitudes in which your days are cast arose before me:  I seemed to see you walking there in the late night, under the pine-trees and the stars; and I received the image with something like remorse.

There is a modern attitude towards Fortune; in this place I will not use a graver name.  Staunchly to withstand her buffets and to enjoy with equanimity her favours was the code of the virtuous of old.  Our fathers, it should seem, wondered and doubted how they had merited their misfortunes:  we, rather how we have deserved our happiness.  And we stand often abashed, and sometimes revolted, at those partialities of fate by which we profit most.  It was so with me on that November night:  I felt that our positions should be changed.  It was you, dear Symonds, who should have gone upon that voyage and written this account.  With your rich stores of knowledge, you could have remarked and understood a thousand things of interest and beauty that escaped my ignorance; and the brilliant colours of your style would have carried into a thousand sickrooms the sea air and the strong sun of tropic islands.  It was otherwise decreed.  But suffer me at least to connect you, if only in name and only in the fondness of imagination, with the voyage of the Silver Ship.

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

DEAR SYMONDS, ­I send you this (November 11th), the morning of its completion.  If I ever write an account of this voyage, may I place this letter at the beginning?  It represents ­I need not tell you, for you too are an artist ­a most genuine feeling, which kept me long awake last night; and though perhaps a little elaborate, I think it a good piece of writing.  We are in heaven here.  Do not forget.

     R. L. S.

Please keep this:  I have no perfect copy.

Tautira, on the peninsula of Taiti.

TO THOMAS ARCHER

     Tautira, Island of Taiti [November 1888].

DEAR TOMARCHER, ­This is a pretty state of things! seven o’clock and no word of breakfast!  And I was awake a good deal last night, for it was full moon, and they had made a great fire of cocoa-nut husks down by the sea, and as we have no blinds or shutters, this kept my room very bright.  And then the rats had a wedding or a school-feast under my bed.  And then I woke early, and I have nothing to read except Virgil’s Æneid, which is not good fun on an empty stomach, and a Latin dictionary, which is good for naught, and by some humorous accident, your dear papa’s article on Skerryvore.  And I read the whole of that, and very impudent it is, but you must not tell your dear papa I said so, or it might come to a battle in which you might lose either a dear papa or a valued correspondent, or both, which would be prodigal.  And still no breakfast; so I said “Let’s write to Tomarcher.”

This is a much better place for children than any I have hitherto seen in these seas.  The girls (and sometimes the boys) play a very elaborate kind of hopscotch.  The boys play horses exactly as we do in Europe; and have very good fun on stilts, trying to knock each other down, in which they do not often succeed.  The children of all ages go to church and are allowed to do what they please, running about the aisles, rolling balls, stealing mamma’s bonnet and publicly sitting on it, and at last going to sleep in the middle of the floor.  I forgot to say that the whips to play horses, and the balls to roll about the church ­at least I never saw them used elsewhere ­grow ready made on trees; which is rough on toy-shops.  The whips are so good that I wanted to play horses myself; but no such luck! my hair is grey, and I am a great, big, ugly man.  The balls are rather hard, but very light and quite round.  When you grow up and become offensively rich, you can charter a ship in the port of London, and have it come back to you entirely loaded with these balls; when you could satisfy your mind as to their character, and give them away when done with to your uncles and aunts.  But what I really wanted to tell you was this:  besides the tree-top toys (Hush-a-by, toy-shop, on the tree-top!), I have seen some real made toys, the first hitherto observed in the South Seas.

This was how.  You are to imagine a four-wheeled gig; one horse; in the front seat two Tahiti natives, in their Sunday clothes, blue coat, white shirt, kilt (a little longer than the Scotch) of a blue stuff with big white or yellow flowers, legs and feet bare; in the back seat me and my wife, who is a friend of yours; under our feet, plenty of lunch and things:  among us a great deal of fun in broken Tahitian, one of the natives, the sub-chief of the village, being a great ally of mine.  Indeed we have exchanged names; so that he is now called Rui, the nearest they can come to Louis, for they have no l and no s in their language.  Rui is six feet three in his stockings, and a magnificent man.  We all have straw hats, for the sun is strong.  We drive between the sea, which makes a great noise, and the mountains; the road is cut through a forest mostly of fruit trees, the very creepers, which take the place of our ivy, heavy with a great and delicious fruit, bigger than your head and far nicer, called Barbedine.  Presently we came to a house in a pretty garden, quite by itself, very nicely kept, the doors and windows open, no one about, and no noise but that of the sea.  It looked like a house in a fairy-tale, and just beyond we must ford a river, and there we saw the inhabitants.  Just in the mouth of the river, where it met the sea waves, they were ducking and bathing and screaming together like a covey of birds:  seven or eight little naked brown boys and girls as happy as the day was long; and on the banks of the stream beside them, real toys ­toy ships, full rigged, and with their sails set, though they were lying in the dust on their beam ends.  And then I knew for sure they were all children in a fairy-story, living alone together in that lonely house with the only toys in all the island; and that I had myself driven, in my four-wheeled gig, into a corner of the fairy-story, and the question was, should I get out again?  But it was all right; I guess only one of the wheels of the gig had got into the fairy-story; and the next jolt the whole thing vanished, and we drove on in our sea-side forest as before, and I have the honour to be Tomarcher’s valued correspondent, TERIITERA, which he was previously known as

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

[MRS. R. L. STEVENSON TO SIDNEY COLVIN

This letter from Mrs. Stevenson serves to fill out and explain allusions in the three or four preceding.  The beautiful brown princess is Princess Moë, ex-queen of Raiatea, well known to readers of Pierre Loti and Miss Gordon Cumming.  The move away from Papeete, where Stevenson had fallen seriously ill, had been made in hopes of finding on the island a climate that would suit him better.

     Tautira, Tahiti, Deth .

DEAR, long neglected, though never forgotten Custodian, I write you from fairyland, where we are living in a fairy story, the guests of a beautiful brown princess.  We came to stay a week, five weeks have passed, and we are still indefinite as to our time of leaving.  It was chance brought us here, for no one in Papeete could tell us a word about this part of the island except that it was very fine to look at, and inhabited by wild people ­“almost as wild as the people of Anaho!” That touch about the people of Anaho inclined our hearts this way, so we finally concluded to take a look at the other side of Tahiti.  The place of our landing was windy, uninhabited except by mosquitoes, and Louis was ill.  The first day Lloyd and the Captain made an exploration, but came back disgusted.  They had found a Chinaman, a long way off, who seemed to have some horses, but no desire to hire them to strangers, and they had found nothing else whatever.  The next morning I took Valentine and went on a prospecting tour of my own.  I found the Chinaman, persuaded him to let me have two horses and a wagon, and went back for the rest of my family.  When asked where I wished to go, I could only say to the largest native village and the most wild.  Ill as Louis was, I brought him the next day, and shall never cease to be thankful for my courage, for he has gained health and strength every day.  He takes sea baths and swims, and lives almost entirely in the open air as nearly without clothes as possible, a simple pyjama suit of striped light flannel his only dress.  As to shoes and stockings we all have scorned them for months except Mrs. Stevenson, who often goes barefoot and never, I believe, wears stockings.  Lloyd’s costume, in which he looks remarkably well, consists of a striped flannel shirt and a pareu.  The pareu is no more or less than a large figured blue and white cotton window curtain twisted about the waist, and hanging a little below the bare knees.  Both Louis and Lloyd wear wreaths of artificial flowers, made of the dried pandanus leaf, on their hats.

Moë has gone to Papeete by the command of the king, whose letter was addressed “To the great Princess at Tautira.  P.V.”  P.V. stands for Pomaré 5th.  Every evening, before she went, we played Van John lying in a circle on pillows in the middle of the floor with our heads together:  and hardly an evening passed but it struck us afresh how very much you would like Moë, and we told her of you again.  The house (really here a palace) in which we live, belongs to the sub-chief, Ori, a subject and relation of the Princess.  He, and his whole family, consisting of his wife, his two little adopted sons, his daughter and her two young babies, turned out to live in a little bird-cage hut of one room.  Ori is the very finest specimen of a native we have seen yet; he is several inches over six feet, of perfect though almost gigantic proportions, and looks more like a Roman Emperor in bronze than words can express.  One day, when Moë gave a feast, it being the correct thing to do, we all wore wreaths of golden yellow leaves on our heads; when Ori walked in and sat down at the table, as with one voice we all cried out in admiration.  His manners and I might say his habit of thought are English.  In some ways, he is so like a Colonel of the Guards that we often call him Colonel.  It was either the day before, or the morning of our public feast, that Louis asked the Princess if she thought Ori would accept his name.  She was sure of it, and much pleased at the idea.  I wish you could have seen Louis, blushing like a schoolgirl, when Ori came in, and the brotherhood was offered.  So now if you please, Louis is no more Louis, having given that name away in the Tahitian form of Rui, but is known as Terii-Tera (pronounced Ter_ee_terah) that being Ori’s Christian name.  “Ori a Ori” is his clan name.

Let me tell you of our village feast.  The chief, who was our guide in the matter, found four large fat hogs, which Louis bought, and four cases of ship’s biscuit were sent over from the Casco, which is lying at Papeete for repairs.  Our feast cost in all about eighty dollars.  Every Sunday all things of public interest are announced in the Farehau (an enormous public bird cage) and the news of the week read aloud from the Papeete journal, if it happens to turn up.  Our feast was given on a Wednesday, and was announced by the chief the Sunday before, who referred to Louis as “the rich one.”  Our hogs were killed in the morning, washed in the sea, and roasted whole in a pit with hot stones.  When done they were laid on their stomachs in neat open coffins of green basket work, each hog with his case of biscuits beside him.  Early in the morning the entire population began bathing, a bath being the preliminary to everything.  At about three o’clock ­four was the hour set ­there was a general movement towards our premises, so that I had to hurry Louis into his clothes, all white, even to his shoes.  Lloyd was also in white, but barefoot.  I was not prepared, so had to appear in a red and white muslin gown, also barefoot.  As Mrs. Stevenson had had a feast of her own, conducted on religious principles, she kept a little in the background, so that her dress did not matter so much.  The chief, who speaks French very well, stood beside Louis to interpret for him.  By the time we had taken our respective places on the veranda in front of our door, an immense crowd had assembled.  They came in five, instead of four detachments which was what the chief expected, and he was a little confused at first, as he and Louis had been arranging a speech to four sets of people, which ran in this order.  The clergyman at the head of the Protestants:  the chief, council, and irreligious: ­one of the council at their head.  The schoolmaster with the schoolchildren:  the catechist and the Catholics:  but there was another very small sect, by some strange mischance called Mormons, which it was supposed would be broken up and swallowed by the others.  But no, the Mormons came in a body alone, marshalled by the best and wittiest speaker ­bar Rui ­in Tautira.  Each set of people came bending under the weight of bamboo poles laden with fruits, pigs, fowls, etc.  All were dressed in their gayest pareus, and many had wreaths of leaves or flowers on their heads.  The prettiest sight of all was the children, who came marching two and two abreast, the bamboo poles lying lengthwise across their shoulders.

When all the offerings had been piled in five great heaps upon the ground, Louis made his oration to the accompaniment of the squealing of pigs, the cackling of hens, and the roar of the surf which beats man-high upon the roof.  A speech was made in return on behalf of the village, and then each section sent forth its orator, the speeches following in the order I have given above.  Each speaker finished by coming forward with one of the smaller things in his hand, which he offered personally to Louis, and then shook hands with us all and retired.  Among these smaller presents were many fish-hooks for large fishing, laboriously carved from mother-of-pearl shell.  One man came with one egg in each hand saying, “carry these to Scotland with you, let them hatch into cocks, and their song shall remind you of Tautira.”  The schoolmaster, with a leaf-basket of rose apples, made his speech in French.  Somehow the whole effect of the scene was like a story out of the Bible, and I am not ashamed that Louis and I both shed tears when we saw the enchanting procession of schoolchildren.  The Catholic priest, Father Bruno, a great friend of ours, said that for the next fifty years the time of the feast of the rich one will be talked of:  which reminds me of our friend Donat, of Fakarava, who was temporary resident at the time we were there.  “I am so glad,” he said, “that the Casco came in just now, otherwise I should be forgotten:  but now the people will always say this or that happened so long before ­or so long after ­the coming of the Silver Ship, when Donat represented the government.”

In front of our house is a broad stretch of grass, dotted with cocoanuts, breadfruits, mangoes, and the strange pandanus tree.  I wish you could have seen them, their lower branches glowing with the rich colours of the fruits hung upon them by Ori and his men, and great heaps lying piled against their roots, on the evening of our feast.  From the bamboo poles that they were carried upon, a pen was made for the ten pigs, and a fowl house for the twenty-three fowls that were among the presents.  But there was a day of reckoning at hand.  Time after time we ran down to the beach to look for the Casco, until we were in despair.  For over a month we had lived in Ori’s house, causing him infinite trouble and annoyance, and not even his, at that.  Areia (the chief ­Areia means the Prince) went to Papeete and came back with a letter to say that more work had to be done upon the Casco, and it might be any time before she could get to Tautira.  We had used up all our stores, and had only a few dollars of money left in Tautira, and not very much in Papeete.  Could we stand the journey to Papeete, we could not live upon the yacht in the midst of the workmen, and we had not money enough left to live at an hotel.  We were playing cards on the floor, as usual, when this message came, and you can imagine its effect.  I knew perfectly well that Rui would force us to stay on with him, but what depressed me the most of all, was the fact of Louis having made brothers with him just before this took place.  Had there been a shadow of doubt on our dear Rui’s face, I should have fled from before him.  Sitting there on the floor waiting for him was too much for my nerves and I burst into tears, upon which the princess wept bitterly.  In the meantime the priest had dropped in, so that we had him and Moë, and Areia, as witnesses to our humiliating position.  First came Madame Rui, who heard the story, and sat down on the floor in silence, which was very damping for a beginning, and then Ori of Ori, the magnificent, who listened to the tale of the shipwrecked mariners with serious dignity, asking one or two questions, and then spoke to this effect.  “You are my brother:  all that I have is yours.  I know that your food is done, but I can give you plenty of fish and taro.  We like you, and wish to have you here.  Stay where you are till the Casco comes.  Be happy ­et ne pleurez pas.”  Louis dropped his head into his hands and wept, and then we all went up to Rui and shook hands with him and accepted his offer.  Madame Rui, who had been silent only as a dutiful wife, that her husband might speak first, poured forth manifold reasons for our staying on as long as we could possibly manage.  During all this scene, an attendant of the princess had been sitting on the floor behind us, a baby in his arms, where he had ensconced himself for the purpose of watching the game.  He understood nothing of what was going on; we wondered afterwards what he thought of it.  Reduced as we were, we still had a few bottles of champagne left.  Champagne being an especial weakness of our gigantic friend, it occurred to some one that this was a proper occasion to open a couple of bottles.  Louis, the Princess, and I were quite, as the Scotch so well say, “begrutten,” Areia’s immense eyes were fairly melting out of his head with emotion, the priest was wiping his eyes and blowing his nose:  and then for no apparent cause we suddenly fell to drinking and clinking glasses quite merrily:  the bewildered attendant clinked and drank too, and then sat down and waited in case there should be any repetition of the drinking part of the performance.  And sure enough there was, for in the midst of an animated discussion as to ways and means, Mrs. Stevenson announced that it was St. Andrew’s day, so again the attendant clinked and drank with Ori’s mad foreigners.

It is quite true that we live almost entirely upon native food; our luncheon to-day consisted of raw fish with sauce made of cocoanut milk mixed with sea water and lime juice, taro poi-poi, and bananas roasted in hot stones in a little pit in the ground, with cocoanut cream to eat with them.  Still we like coffee in the evening, a little wine at dinner, and a few other products of civilisation.  It would be possible, the chief said, to send a boat, but that would cost sixty dollars.  A final arrangement, which we were forced to accept, was that Rui should go in his own boat, and the chief would appoint a substitute for some public work that he was then engaged upon.  Early the next morning, amidst a raging sea and a storming wind, Rui departed with three men to help him.  It is forty miles to Papeete, and Rui, starting in the early morning, arrived there at nine o’clock; but alas, the wind was against him, and it was altogether six days before he got back.

Louis has done a great deal of work on his new story, The Master of Ballantrae, almost finished it in fact, while Mrs. Stevenson and I are deep in the mysteries of hatmaking, which is a ladies’ accomplishment taking the place of water-colour drawing in England.  It is a small compliment to present a hat to an acquaintance.  Altogether we have about thirteen.  Next door to us is Areia’s out-of-door house, where he and the ladies of his family sleep and eat:  it has a thatched roof of palm branches, and a floor of boards, the sides and ends being open to the world.  On the floor are spread mats plaited of pandanus leaves, and pillows stuffed with silk cotton from the cotton tree.  We make little calls upon the ladies, lie upon the mats, and smoke cigarettes made of tobacco leaves rolled in a bit of dried pandanus, and admire their work, or get a lesson; or they call upon us, and lie upon our mats.  One day there was an election in the Farehau.  It takes place all over the island once a year, and among others, the sub-chief and head-councillor is chosen.  For the latter, our Rui was a candidate.  In the beginning, the French deposed the born chiefs and told the people to elect men for themselves.  The choice of Tautira fell upon Rui, who declined the honour, saying that Areia was his natural chief, and he could not take a position that should belong to his superior; upon which the people elected Areia chief, and Rui sub-chief and head-councillor.  We all went over to the Farehau, where Areia sat in the middle of his councillors on a dais behind a long table.  The Farehau is an immense bird-cage of bamboos tied together with pandanus fibre, and thatched with palms.  In front of the dais the ground is deeply covered with dried leaves.  The costume of the dignitaries was rather odd.  Areia wore a white shirt and blue flannel coat, which was well enough; but on his plump legs were a pair of the most incredible trousers:  light blue calico with a small red pattern, such as servant girls wear for gowns in England:  on his feet were neat little shoes and stockings.  Rui was a fine sight, and we were very proud of him; he sat, exactly like an English gentleman, holding himself well in hand, alert as a fox and keen as a greyhound:  several men spoke from the farther end of the hall, making objections of some sort, we could see.  Rui listened with a half satirical, half kindly smile in his eyes, and then dropped a quiet answer without rising from his seat, which had the effect of raising a shout of laughter, and quite demolishing his opponent.  Voters came up to the table and dropped their bits of paper into a slit in a box:  some led children by the hand, and some carried babies in their arms; across the centre of the great room children and dogs ran chasing each other and playing.  I noticed two little maids who walked up and down for a long time with their arms intertwined about each other’s waists.  Near where we sat (we were on the dais, above the common herd), a pretty young lady having tied up her dog’s mouth with a tuft of grass, industriously caught and cracked fleas from its back.  Both Lloyd and I grew very sleepy, and as we did not like to leave till the election was decided, we just threw ourselves down and took a nap at the feet of the councillors:  nor did we wake till the chief called out to us in English “it is finished.”  I never thought I should be able to calmly sleep at a public meeting on a platform in the face of several hundred people:  but it is wonderful how quickly one takes up the ways of a people when you live with them as intimately as we do.

I hear dinner coming on the table, so with much love from us all to you and other dear ones, including our dear friend Henry James, believe me, affectionately yours,

     FANNY V. de G. STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

     Yacht Casco, at Sea, 14th January 1889.

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­Twenty days out from Papeete.  Yes, sir, all that, and only (for a guess) in 4° north or at the best 4°30’, though already the wind seems to smell a little of the North Pole.  My handwriting you must take as you get, for we are speeding along through a nasty swell, and I can only keep my place at the table by means of a foot against the divan, the unoccupied hand meanwhile gripping the ink-bottle.  As we begin (so very slowly) to draw near to seven months of correspondence, we are all in some fear; and I want to have letters written before I shall be plunged into that boiling pot of disagreeables which I constantly expect at Honolulu.  What is needful can be added there.

We were kept two months at Tautira in the house of my dear old friend, Ori a Ori, till both the masts of this invaluable yacht had been repaired.  It was all for the best:  Tautira being the most beautiful spot, and its people the most amiable, I have ever found.  Besides which, the climate suited me to the ground; I actually went sea-bathing almost every day, and in our feasts (we are all huge eaters in Taiarapu) have been known to apply four times for pig.  And then again I got wonderful materials for my book, collected songs and legends on the spot; songs still sung in chorus by perhaps a hundred persons, not two of whom can agree on their translation; legends, on which I have seen half a dozen seniors sitting in conclave and debating what came next.  Once I went a day’s journey to the other side of the island to Tati, the high chief of the Tevas ­my chief that is, for I am now a Teva and Teriitera, at your service ­to collect more and correct what I had already.  In the meanwhile I got on with my work, almost finished The Master of Ballantrae, which contains more human work than anything of mine but Kidnapped, and wrote the half of another ballad, the Song of Rahero, on a Taiarapu legend of my own clan, sir ­not so much fire as the Feast of Famine, but promising to be more even and correct.  But the best fortune of our stay at Tautira was my knowledge of Ori himself, one of the finest creatures extant.  The day of our parting was a sad one.  We deduced from it a rule for travellers:  not to stay two months in one place ­which is to cultivate regrets.

At last our contemptible ship was ready; to sea we went, bound for Honolulu and the letter-bag, on Christmas Day; and from then to now have experienced every sort of minor misfortune, squalls, calms, contrary winds and seas, pertinacious rains, declining stores, till we came almost to regard ourselves as in the case of Vanderdecken.  Three days ago our luck seemed to improve, we struck a leading breeze, got creditably through the doldrums, and just as we looked to have the N.E. trades and a straight run, the rains and squalls and calms began again about midnight, and this morning, though there is breeze enough to send us along, we are beaten back by an obnoxious swell out of the north.  Here is a page of complaint, when a verse of thanksgiving had perhaps been more in place.  For all this time we must have been skirting past dangerous weather, in the tail and circumference of hurricanes, and getting only annoyance where we should have had peril, and ill-humour instead of fear.

I wonder if I have managed to give you any news this time, or whether the usual damn hangs over my letter?  “The midwife whispered, Be thou dull!” or at least inexplicit.  Anyway I have tried my best, am exhausted with the effort, and fall back into the land of generalities.  I cannot tell you how often we have planned our arrival at the Monument:  two nights ago, the 12th January, we had it all planned out, arrived in the lights and whirl of Waterloo, hailed a hansom, span up Waterloo Road, over the bridge, etc. etc., and hailed the Monument gate in triumph and with indescribable delight.  My dear Custodian, I always think we are too sparing of assurances:  Cordelia is only to be excused by Regan and Goneril in the same nursery; I wish to tell you that the longer I live, the more dear do you become to me; nor does my heart own any stronger sentiment.  If the bloody schooner didn’t send me flying in every sort of direction at the same time, I would say better what I feel so much; but really, if you were here, you would not be writing letters, I believe; and even I, though of a more marine constitution, am much perturbed by this bobbery and wish ­O ye Gods, how I wish! ­that it was done, and we had arrived, and I had Pandora’s Box (my mail-bag) in hand, and was in the lively hope of something eatable for dinner instead of salt horse, tinned mutton, duff without any plums, and pie fruit, which now make up our whole repertory.  O Pandora’s Box!  I wonder what you will contain.  As like as not you will contain but little money:  if that be so, we shall have to retire to ’Frisco in the Casco, and thence by sea via Panama to Southampton, where we should arrive in April.  I would like fine to see you on the tug:  ten years older both of us than the last time you came to welcome Fanny and me to England.  If we have money, however, we shall do a little differently:  send the Casco away from Honolulu empty of its high-born lessees, for that voyage to ’Frisco is one long dead beat in foul and at last in cold weather; stay awhile behind, follow by steamer, cross the States by train, stay awhile in New York on business, and arrive probably by the German Line in Southampton.  But all this is a question of money.  We shall have to lie very dark awhile to recruit our finances:  what comes from the book of the cruise, I do not want to touch until the capital is repaid.

     R. L. S.

TO E. L. BURLINGAME

     Honolulu, January 1889.

MY DEAR BURLINGAME, ­Here at last I have arrived.  We could not get away from Tahiti till Christmas Day, and then had thirty days of calms and squalls, a deplorable passage.  This has thrown me all out of gear in every way.  I plunge into business.

1. The Master. Herewith go three more parts.  You see he grows in bulk; this making ten already, and I am not yet sure if I can finish it in an eleventh; which shall go to you quam primum ­I hope by next mail.

2. Illustrations to M. I totally forgot to try to write to Hole.  It was just as well, for I find it impossible to forecast with sufficient precision.  You had better throw off all this and let him have it at once. Please do:  all, and at once:  see further; and I should hope he would still be in time for the later numbers.  The three pictures I have received are so truly good that I should bitterly regret having the volume imperfectly equipped.  They are the best illustrations I have seen since I don’t know when.

3. Money. To-morrow the mail comes in, and I hope it will bring me money either from you or home, but I will add a word on that point.

4.  My address will be Honolulu ­no longer Yacht Casco, which I am packing off ­till probably April.

5.  As soon as I am through with The Master, I shall finish The Game of Bluff ­now rechristened The Wrong Box.  This I wish to sell, cash down.  It is of course copyright in the States; and I offer it to you for five thousand dollars.  Please reply on this by return.  Also please tell the typewriter who was so good as to be amused by our follies that I am filled with admiration for his piece of work.

6. Master again.  Please see that I haven’t the name of the Governor of New York wrong (1764 is the date) in part ten.  I have no book of reference to put me right.  Observe you now have up to August inclusive in hand, so you should begin to feel happy.

Is this all?  I wonder, and fear not.  Henry the Trader has not yet turned up:  I hope he may to-morrow, when we expect a mail.  Not one word of business have I received either from the States or England, nor anything in the shape of coin; which leaves me in a fine uncertainty and quite penniless on these islands.  H.M. (who is a gentleman of a courtly order and much tinctured with letters) is very polite; I may possibly ask for the position of palace doorkeeper.  My voyage has been a singular mixture of good and ill fortune.  As far as regards interest and material, the fortune has been admirable; as far as regards time, money, and impediments of all kinds, from squalls and calms to rotten masts and sprung spars, simply detestable.  I hope you will be interested to hear of two volumes on the wing.  The cruise itself, you are to know, will make a big volume with appendices; some of it will first appear as (what they call) letters in some of M’Clure’s papers.  I believe the book when ready will have a fair measure of serious interest:  I have had great fortune in finding old songs and ballads and stories, for instance, and have many singular instances of life in the last few years among these islands.

The second volume is of ballads.  You know Ticonderoga.  I have written another:  The Feast of Famine, a Marquesan story.  A third is half done:  The Song of Rahero, a genuine Tahitian legend.  A fourth dances before, me.  A Hawaiian fellow this, The Priest’s Drought, or some such name.  If, as I half suspect, I get enough subjects out of the islands, Ticonderoga shall be suppressed, and we’ll call the volume South Sea Ballads.  In health, spirits, renewed interest in life, and, I do believe, refreshed capacity for work, the cruise has proved a wise folly.  Still we’re not home, and (although the friend of a crowned head) are penniless upon these (as one of my correspondents used to call them) “lovely but fatil islands.”  By the way, who wrote the Lion of the Nile?  My dear sir, that is Something Like.  Overdone in bits, it has a true thought and a true ring of language.  Beg the anonymous from me, to delete (when he shall republish) the two last verses, and end on “the lion of the Nile.”  One Lampman has a good sonnet on a “Winter Evening” in, I think, the same number:  he seems ill named, but I am tempted to hope a man is not always answerable for his name. For instance, you would think you knew mine.  No such matter.  It is ­at your service and Mr. Scribner’s and that of all of the faithful ­Teriitera (pray pronounce Tayree-Tayra) or (gallicé) Téri-téra.

     R. L. S.

More when the mail shall come.

I am an idiot.  I want to be clear on one point.  Some of Hole’s drawings must of course be too late; and yet they seem to me so excellent I would fain have the lot complete.  It is one thing for you to pay for drawings which are to appear in that soul-swallowing machine, your magazine:  quite another if they are only to illustrate a volume.  I wish you to take a brisk (even a fiery) decision on the point; and let Hole know.  To resume my desultory song, I desire you would carry the same fire (hereinbefore suggested) into your decision on The Wrong Box; for in my present state of benighted ignorance as to my affairs for the last seven months ­I know not even whether my house or my mother’s house have been let ­I desire to see something definite in front of me ­outside the lot of palace doorkeeper.  I believe the said Wrong Box is a real lark; in which, of course, I may be grievously deceived; but the typewriter is with me.  I may also be deceived as to the numbers of The Master now going and already gone; but to me they seem First Chop, sir, First Chop.  I hope I shall pull off that damned ending; but it still depresses me:  this is your doing, Mr. Burlingame:  you would have it there and then, and I fear it ­I fear that ending.

     R. L. S.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

     Honolulu, February 8th, 1889.

MY DEAR CHARLES, ­Here we are at Honolulu, and have dismissed the yacht, and lie here till April anyway, in a fine state of haze, which I am yet in hopes some letter of yours (still on the way) may dissipate.  No money, and not one word as to money!  However, I have got the yacht paid off in triumph, I think; and though we stay here impignorate, it should not be for long, even if you bring us no extra help from home.  The cruise has been a great success, both as to matter, fun, and health; and yet, Lord, man! we’re pleased to be ashore!  Yon was a very fine voyage from Tahiti up here, but ­the dry land’s a fine place too, and we don’t mind squalls any longer, and eh, man, that’s a great thing.  Blow, blow, thou wintry wind, thou hast done me no appreciable harm beyond a few grey hairs!  Altogether, this foolhardy venture is achieved; and if I have but nine months of life and any kind of health, I shall have both eaten my cake and got it back again with usury.  But, man, there have been days when I felt guilty, and thought I was in no position for the head of a house.

Your letter and accounts are doubtless at S. F., and will reach me in course.  My wife is no great shakes; she is the one who has suffered most.  My mother has had a Huge Old Time; Lloyd is first chop; I so well that I do not know myself ­sea-bathing, if you please, and what is far more dangerous, entertaining and being entertained by His Majesty here, who is a very fine intelligent fellow, but O, Charles! what a crop for the drink!  He carries it, too, like a mountain with a sparrow on its shoulders.  We calculated five bottles of champagne in three hours and a half (afternoon), and the sovereign quite presentable, although perceptibly more dignified at the end....

The extraordinary health I enjoy and variety of interests I find among these islands would tempt me to remain here; only for Lloyd, who is not well placed in such countries for a permanency; and a little for Colvin, to whom I feel I owe a sort of filial duty.  And these two considerations will no doubt bring me back ­to go to bed again ­in England. ­Yours ever affectionately,

     R. L. S.

TO R. A. M. STEVENSON

  Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands, February 1889.

MY DEAR BOB, ­My extremely foolhardy venture is practically over.  How foolhardy it was I don’t think I realised.  We had a very small schooner, and, like most yachts, over-rigged and over-sparred, and like many American yachts on a very dangerous sail plan.  The waters we sailed in are, of course, entirely unlighted, and very badly charted; in the Dangerous Archipelago, through which we were fools enough to go, we were perfectly in ignorance of where we were for a whole night and half the next day, and this in the midst of invisible islands and rapid and variable currents; and we were lucky when we found our whereabouts at last.  We have twice had all we wanted in the way of squalls:  once, as I came on deck, I found the green sea over the cockpit coamings and running down the companion like a brook to meet me; at that same moment the foresail sheet jammed and the captain had no knife; this was the only occasion on the cruise that ever I set a hand to a rope, but I worked like a Trojan, judging the possibility of hemorrhage better than the certainty of drowning.  Another time I saw a rather singular thing:  our whole ship’s company as pale as paper from the captain to the cook; we had a black squall astern on the port side and a white squall ahead to starboard; the complication passed off innocuous, the black squall only fetching us with its tail, and the white one slewing off somewhere else.  Twice we were a long while (days) in the close vicinity of hurricane weather, but again luck prevailed, and we saw none of it.  These are dangers incident to these seas and small craft.  What was an amazement, and at the same time a powerful stroke of luck, both our masts were rotten, and we found it out ­I was going to say in time, but it was stranger and luckier than that.  The head of the mainmast hung over so that hands were afraid to go to the helm; and less than three weeks before ­I am not sure it was more than a fortnight ­we had been nearly twelve hours beating off the lee shore of Eimeo (or Moorea, next island to Tahiti) in half a gale of wind with a violent head sea:  she would neither tack nor wear once, and had to be boxed off with the mainsail ­you can imagine what an ungodly show of kites we carried ­and yet the mast stood.  The very day after that, in the southern bight of Tahiti, we had a near squeak, the wind suddenly coming calm; the reefs were close in with, my eye! what a surf!  The pilot thought we were gone, and the captain had a boat cleared, when a lucky squall came to our rescue.  My wife, hearing the order given about the boats, remarked to my mother, “Isn’t that nice?  We shall soon be ashore!” Thus does the female mind unconsciously skirt along the verge of eternity.  Our voyage up here was most disastrous ­calms, squalls, head sea, waterspouts of rain, hurricane weather all about, and we in the midst of the hurricane season, when even the hopeful builder and owner of the yacht had pronounced these seas unfit for her.  We ran out of food, and were quite given up for lost in Honolulu:  people had ceased to speak to Belle about the Casco, as a deadly subject.

But the perils of the deep were part of the programme; and though I am very glad to be done with them for a while and comfortably ashore, where a squall does not matter a snuff to any one, I feel pretty sure I shall want to get to sea again ere long.  The dreadful risk I took was financial, and double-headed.  First, I had to sink a lot of money in the cruise, and if I didn’t get health, how was I to get it back?  I have got health to a wonderful extent; and as I have the most interesting matter for my book, bar accidents, I ought to get all I have laid out and a profit.  But, second (what I own I never considered till too late), there was the danger of collisions, of damages and heavy repairs, of disablement, towing, and salvage; indeed, the cruise might have turned round and cost me double.  Nor will this danger be quite over till I hear the yacht is in San Francisco; for though I have shaken the dust of her deck from my feet, I fear (as a point of law) she is still mine till she gets there.

From my point of view, up to now the cruise has been a wonderful success.  I never knew the world was so amusing.  On the last voyage we had grown so used to sea-life that no one wearied, though it lasted a full month, except Fanny, who is always ill.  All the time our visits to the islands have been more like dreams than realities:  the people, the life, the beachcombers, the old stories and songs I have picked up, so interesting; the climate, the scenery, and (in some places) the women, so beautiful.  The women are handsomest in Tahiti, the men in the Marquesas; both as fine types as can be imagined.  Lloyd reminds me, I have not told you one characteristic incident of the cruise from a semi-naval point of view.  One night we were going ashore in Anaho Bay; the most awful noise on deck; the breakers distinctly audible in the cabin; and there I had to sit below, entertaining in my best style a negroid native chieftain, much the worse for rum!  You can imagine the evening’s pleasure.

This naval report on cruising in the South Seas would be incomplete without one other trait.  On our voyage up here I came one day into the dining-room, the hatch in the floor was open, the ship’s boy was below with a baler, and two of the hands were carrying buckets as for a fire; this meant that the pumps had ceased working.

One stirring day was that in which we sighted Hawaii.  It blew fair, but very strong; we carried jib, foresail, and mainsail, all single-reefed, and she carried her lee rail under water and flew.  The swell, the heaviest I have ever been out in ­I tried in vain to estimate the height, at least fifteen feet ­came tearing after us about a point and a half off the wind.  We had the best hand ­old Louis ­at the wheel; and, really, he did nobly, and had noble luck, for it never caught us once.  At times it seemed we must have it; old Louis would look over his shoulder with the queerest look and dive down his neck into his shoulders; and then it missed us somehow, and only sprays came over our quarter, turning the little outside lane of deck into a mill race as deep as to the cockpit coamings.  I never remember anything more delightful and exciting.  Pretty soon after we were lying absolutely becalmed under the lee of Hawaii, of which we had been warned; and the captain never confessed he had done it on purpose, but when accused, he smiled.  Really, I suppose he did quite right, for we stood committed to a dangerous race, and to bring her to the wind would have been rather a heart-sickening manoeuvre.

     R. L. S.

TO MARCEL SCHWOB

At Honolulu, Stevenson found awaiting him, among the accumulations of the mail-bag, two letters of friendly homage ­the first, I think, he had received from any foreign confrère ­addressed to him by the distinguished young French scholar and man of letters, M. Marcel Schwob, since deceased.

     Honolulu, Sandwich Islands, February 8th, 1889.

DEAR SIR, ­I thank you ­from the midst of such a flurry as you can imagine, with seven months’ accumulated correspondence on my table ­for your two friendly and clever letters.  Pray write me again.  I shall be home in May or June, and not improbably shall come to Paris in the summer.  Then we can talk; or in the interval I may be able to write, which is to-day out of the question.  Pray take a word from a man of crushing occupations, and count it as a volume.  Your little conte is delightful.  Ah yes, you are right, I love the eighteenth century; and so do you, and have not listened to its voice in vain. ­The Hunted One,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

     Honolulu, 8th March 1889.

MY DEAR CHARLES, ­At last I have the accounts:  the Doer has done excellently, and in the words of ­, “I reciprocate every step of your behaviour."...  I send a letter for Bob in your care, as I don’t know his Liverpool address, by which (for he is to show you part of it) you will see we have got out of this adventure ­or hope to have ­with wonderful fortune.  I have the retrospective horrors on me when I think of the liabilities I incurred; but, thank God, I think I’m in port again, and I have found one climate in which I can enjoy life.  Even Honolulu is too cold for me; but the south isles were a heaven upon earth to a puir, catarrhal party like Johns’one.  We think, as Tahiti is too complete a banishment, to try Madeira.  It’s only a week from England, good communications, and I suspect in climate and scenery not unlike our dear islands; in people, alas! there can be no comparison.  But friends could go, and I could come in summer, so I should not be quite cut off.

Lloyd and I have finished a story, The Wrong Box.  If it is not funny, I am sure I do not know what is.  I have split over writing it.  Since I have been here, I have been toiling like a galley slave:  three numbers of The Master to rewrite, five chapters of The Wrong Box to write and rewrite, and about five hundred lines of a narrative poem to write, rewrite, and re-rewrite.  Now I have The Master waiting me for its continuation, two numbers more; when that’s done, I shall breathe.  This spasm of activity has been chequered with champagne parties:  Happy and Glorious, Hawaii Ponoi paua:  kou moi ­(Native Hawaiians, dote upon your monarch!) Hawaiian God save the King. (In addition to my other labours, I am learning the language with a native moonshee.) Kalakaua is a terrible companion; a bottle of fizz is like a glass of sherry to him; he thinks nothing of five or six in an afternoon as a whet for dinner.  You should see a photograph of our party after an afternoon with H. H. M.:  my! what a crew! ­Yours ever affectionately,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

   Ill-health and pressing preoccupations, together with uncertainty as
   to when and where letters would reach him, had kept me from writing
   during the previous autumn and winter.

     Honolulu, March 1889.

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­Still not a word from you!  I am utterly cast down; but I will try to return good for evil and for once give you news.  We are here in the suburb of Honolulu in a rambling house or set of houses in a great garden.

1.  Lloyd’s roo.  My mother’s roo.  A room kept dark for photograph.  The kitche.  Balcon.  The Lanai, an open room or summer parlour, partly surrounded with Venetian shutters, in part quite open, which is the living-roo.  A crazy dirty cottage used for the art.  Another crazy dirty cottage, where Fanny and I live.  The town is some three miles away, but the house is connected by telephone with the chief shops, and the tramway runs to within a quarter of a mile of us.  I find Honolulu a beastly climate after Tahiti and have been in bed a little; but my colds took on no catarrhal symptom, which is staggeringly delightful.  I am studying Hawaiian with a native, a Mr. Joseph Poepoe, a clever fellow too:  the tongue is a little bewildering; I am reading a pretty story in native ­no, really it is pretty, although wandering and wordy; highly pretty with its continual traffic from one isle to another of the soothsayer, pursuing rainbows.  Fanny is, I think, a good deal better on the whole, having profited like me by the tropics; my mother and Lloyd are first-rate.  I do not think I have heard from you since last May; certainly not since June; and this really frightens me.  Do write, even now.  Scribner’s Sons it should be; we shall probably be out of this some time in April, home some time in June.  But the world whirls to me perceptibly, a mass of times and seasons and places and engagements, and seas to cross, and continents to traverse, so that I scarce know where I am.  Well, I have had a brave time. Et ego in Arcadia ­though I don’t believe Arcadia was a spot upon Tahiti.  I have written another long narrative poem:  the Song of Rahero.  Privately, I think it good:  but your ominous silence over the Feast of Famine leads me to fear we shall not be agreed.  Is it possible I have wounded you in some way?  I scarce like to dream that it is possible; and yet I know too well it may be so.  If so, don’t write, and you can pitch into me when we meet.  I am, admittedly, as mild as London Stout now; and the Old Man Virulent much a creature of the past.  My dear Colvin, I owe you and Fleeming Jenkin, the two older men who took the trouble and knew how to make a friend of me, everything that I have or am:  if I have behaved ill, just hold on and give me a chance, you shall have the slanging of me and I bet I shall prefer it to this silence. ­Ever, my dear Colvin, your most affectionate

     R. L. S.

[MRS. R. L. STEVENSON to MRS. SITWELL

   This letter brought to friends in England the first news of the
   intended prolongation of the cruise among the remoter islands of the
   Pacific.

     Honolulu, towards the end of March 1889.

MY DEAR FRIEND, ­Louis has improved so wonderfully in the delicious islands of the South Seas, that we think of trying yet one more voyage.  We are a little uncertain as to how we shall go, whether in a missionary ship, or by hiring schooners from point to point, but the “unregenerate” islands we must see.  I suppose we shall be off some time in June, which will fetch us back to England in another year’s time.  You could hardly believe it if you could see Louis now.  He looks as well as he ever did in his life, and has had no sign of cough or hemorrhage (begging pardon of Nemesis) for many months.  It seems a pity to return to England until his health is firmly reestablished, and also a pity not to see all that we can see quite easily starting from this place:  and which will be our only opportunity in life.  Of course there is the usual risk from hostile natives, and the horrible sea, but a positive risk is so much more wholesome than a negative one, and it is all such joy to Louis and Lloyd.  As for me, I hate the sea, and am afraid of it (though no one will believe that because in time of danger I do not make an outcry ­nevertheless I am afraid of it, and it is not kind to me), but I love the tropic weather, and the wild people, and to see my two boys so happy.  Mrs. Stevenson is going back to Scotland in May, as she does not like to be longer away from her old sister, who has been very ill.  And besides, we do not feel justified in taking her to the sort of places we intend to visit.  As for me, I can get comfort out of very rough surroundings for my people, I can work hard and enjoy it; I can even shoot pretty well, and though I “don’t want to fight, by jingo if I must,” why I can.  I don’t suppose there will be any occasion for that sort of thing ­only in case.

I am not quite sure of the names, but I think our new cruise includes the Gilberts, the Fijis, and the Solomons.  A letter might go from the Fijis; Louis will write the particulars, of which I am not sure.  As for myself, I have had more cares than I was really fit for.  To keep house on a yacht is no easy thing.  When Louis and I broke loose from the ship and lived alone amongst the natives I got on very well.  It was when I was deathly sea-sick, and the question was put to me by the cook, “What shall we have for the cabin dinner, what for to-morrow’s breakfast, what for lunch? and what about the sailors’ food?  Please come and look at the biscuits, for the weevils have got into them, and show me how to make yeast that will rise of itself, and smell the pork which seems pretty high, and give me directions about making a pudding with molasses ­and what is to be done about the bugs?” ­etc. etc.  In the midst of heavy dangerous weather, when I was lying on the floor clutching a basin, down comes the mate with a cracked head, and I must needs cut off the hair matted with blood, wash and dress the wound, and administer restoratives.  I do not like being “the lady of the yacht,” but ashore!  O, then I felt I was repaid for all.  I wonder did any of my letters from beautiful Tautira ever come to hand, with the descriptions of our life with Louis’s adopted brother Ori a Ori?  Ori wrote to us, if no one else did, and I mean to give you a translation of his letter.  It begins with our native names.

     Tautira, 26 De.

To Teriitera (Louis) and Tapina Tutu (myself) and Aromaiterai (Lloyd) and Teiriha (Mrs. Stevenson) Salutation in the true Jesus.

I make you to know my great affection.  At the hour when you left us, I was filled with tears; my wife, Rui Tehini, also, and all of my household.  When you embarked I felt a great sorrow.  It is for this that I went upon the road, and you looked from that ship, and I looked at you on the ship with great grief until you had raised the anchor and hoisted the sails.  When the ship started, I ran along the beach to see you still; and when you were on the open sea I cried out to you, “farewell Louis”:  and when I was coming back to my house I seemed to hear your voice crying “Rui farewell.”  Afterwards I watched the ship as long as I could until the night fell; and when it was dark I said to myself, “if I had wings I should fly to the ship to meet you, and to sleep amongst you, so that I might be able to come back to shore and to tell Rui Tehini, ‘I have slept upon the ship of Teriitera.’” After that we passed that night in the impatience of grief.  Towards eight o’clock I seemed to hear your voice, “Teriitera ­Rui ­here is the hour for putter and tiro” (cheese and syrup).  I did not sleep that night, thinking continually of you, my very dear friend, until the morning:  being then awake I went to see Tapina Tutu on her bed, and alas, she was not there.  Afterwards I looked into your rooms; they did not please me as they used to do.  I did not hear your voice crying, “hail Rui.”  I thought then that you had gone, and that you had left me.  Rising up I went to the beach to see your ship, and I could not see it.  I wept, then, till the night, telling myself continually, “Teriitera returns into his own country and leaves his dear Rui in grief, so that I suffer for him, and weep for him.”  I will not forget you in my memory.  Here is the thought:  I desire to meet you again.  It is my dear Teriitera makes the only riches I desire in this world.  It is your eyes that I desire to see again.  It must be that your body and my body shall eat together at our table:  there is what would make my heart content.  But now we are separated.  May God be with you all.  May His word and His mercy go with you, so that you may be well and we also, according to the words of Paul.

  ORI A ORI; that is to say, RUI.

After reading this to me Louis has left in tears saying that he is not worthy that such a letter should be written to him.  We hope to so manage that we shall stop at Tahiti and see Rui once more.  I tell myself that pleasant story when I wake in the night.

I find my head swimming so that I cannot write any more.  I wish some rich Catholic would send a parlour organ to Père Bruno of Tautira.  I am going to try and save money to do it myself, but he may die before I have enough.  I feel ashamed to be sitting here when I think of that old man who cannot draw because of scrivener’s paralysis, who has no one year in and year out to speak to but natives (our Rui is a Protestant not bigoted like the rest of them ­but still a Protestant) and the only pastime he has is playing on an old broken parlour organ whose keys are mostly dumb.  I know no more pathetic figure.  Have you no rich Catholic friends who would send him an organ that he could play upon?  Of course I am talking nonsense, and yet I know somewhere that person exists if only I knew the place.

Our dearest love to you all.

     FANNY.]

TO HENRY JAMES

     Honolulu [March 1889].

MY DEAR JAMES, ­Yes ­I own up ­I am untrue to friendship and (what is less, but still considerable) to civilisation.  I am not coming home for another year.  There it is, cold and bald, and now you won’t believe in me at all, and serve me right (says you) and the devil take me.  But look here, and judge me tenderly.  I have had more fun and pleasure of my life these past months than ever before, and more health than any time in ten long years.  And even here in Honolulu I have withered in the cold; and this precious deep is filled with islands, which we may still visit; and though the sea is a deathful place, I like to be there, and like squalls (when they are over); and to draw near to a new island, I cannot say how much I like.  In short, I take another year of this sort of life, and mean to try to work down among the poisoned arrows, and mean (if it may be) to come back again when the thing is through, and converse with Henry James as heretofore; and in the meanwhile issue directions to H. J. to write to me once more.  Let him address here at Honolulu, for my views are vague; and if it is sent here it will follow and find me, if I am to be found; and if I am not to be found, the man James will have done his duty, and we shall be at the bottom of the sea, where no post-office clerk can be expected to discover us, or languishing on a coral island, the philosophic drudges of some barbarian potentate:  perchance, of an American Missionary.  My wife has just sent to Mrs. Sitwell a translation (tant bien que mal) of a letter I have had from my chief friend in this part of the world:  go and see her, and get a hearing of it; it will do you good; it is a better method of correspondence than even Henry James’s.  I jest, but seriously it is a strange thing for a tough, sick, middle-aged scrivener like R. L. S. to receive a letter so conceived from a man fifty years old, a leading politician, a crack orator, and the great wit of his village:  boldly say, “the highly popular M.P. of Tautira.”  My nineteenth century strikes here, and lies alongside of something beautiful and ancient.  I think the receipt of such a letter might humble, shall I say even ? and for me, I would rather have received it than written Redgauntlet or the sixth Æneid.  All told, if my books have enabled or helped me to make this voyage, to know Rui, and to have received such a letter, they have (in the old prefatorial expression) not been writ in vain.  It would seem from this that I have been not so much humbled as puffed up; but, I assure you, I have in fact been both.  A little of what that letter says is my own earning; not all, but yet a little; and the little makes me proud, and all the rest ashamed; and in the contrast, how much more beautiful altogether is the ancient man than him of to-day!

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.  And to curry favour with him, I wish I could be more explicit; but, indeed, I am still of necessity extremely vague, and cannot tell what I am to do, nor where I am to go for some while yet.  As soon as I am sure, you shall hear.  All are fairly well ­the wife, your countrywoman, least of all; troubles are not entirely wanting; but on the whole we prosper, and we are all affectionately yours,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

     Honolulu, April 2nd, 1889.

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­I am beginning to be ashamed of writing on to you without the least acknowledgment, like a tramp; but I do not care ­I am hardened; and whatever be the cause of your silence, I mean to write till all is blue.  I am outright ashamed of my news, which is that we are not coming home for another year.  I cannot but hope it may continue the vast improvement of my health:  I think it good for Fanny and Lloyd; and we have all a taste for this wandering and dangerous life.  My mother I send home, to my relief, as this part of our cruise will be (if we can carry it out) rather difficult in places.  Here is the idea:  about the middle of June (unless the Boston Board objects) we sail from Honolulu in the missionary ship (barquentine auxiliary steamer) Morning Star:  she takes us through the Gilberts and Marshalls, and drops us (this is my great idea) on Ponape, one of the volcanic islands of the Carolines.  Here we stay marooned among a doubtful population, with a Spanish vice-governor and five native kings, and a sprinkling of missionaries all at loggerheads, on the chance of fetching a passage to Sydney in a trader, a labour ship or (maybe, but this appears too bright) a ship of war.  If we can’t get the Morning Star (and the Board has many reasons that I can see for refusing its permission) I mean to try to fetch Fiji, hire a schooner there, do the Fijis and Friendlies, hit the course of the Richmond at Tonga Tabu, make back by Tahiti, and so to S. F., and home:  perhaps in June 1890.  For the latter part of the cruise will likely be the same in either case.  You can see for yourself how much variety and adventure this promises, and that it is not devoid of danger at the best; but if we can pull it off in safety, gives me a fine book of travel, and Lloyd a fine lecture and diorama, which should vastly better our finances.

I feel as if I were untrue to friendship; believe me, Colvin, when I look forward to this absence of another year, my conscience sinks at thought of the Monument; but I think you will pardon me if you consider how much this tropical weather mends my health.  Remember me as I was at home, and think of me sea-bathing and walking about, as jolly as a sandboy:  you will own the temptation is strong; and as the scheme, bar fatal accidents, is bound to pay into the bargain, sooner or later, it seems it would be madness to come home now, with an imperfect book, no illustrations to speak of, no diorama, and perhaps fall sick again by autumn.  I do not think I delude myself when I say the tendency to catarrh has visibly diminished.

It is a singular thing that as I was packing up old papers ere I left Skerryvore, I came on the prophecies of a drunken Highland sibyl, when I was seventeen.  She said I was to be very happy, to visit America, and to be much upon the sea.  It seems as if it were coming true with a vengeance.  Also, do you remember my strong, old, rooted belief that I shall die by drowning?  I don’t want that to come true, though it is an easy death; but it occurs to me oddly, with these long chances in front.  I cannot say why I like the sea; no man is more cynically and constantly alive to its perils; I regard it as the highest form of gambling; and yet I love the sea as much as I hate gambling.  Fine, clean emotions; a world all and always beautiful; air better than wine; interest unflagging; there is upon the whole no better life. ­Yours ever,

     R. L. S.

TO E. L. BURLINGAME

     [Honolulu, April 1889.]

MY DEAR BURLINGAME, ­This is to announce the most prodigious change of programme.  I have seen so much of the South Seas that I desire to see more, and I get so much health here that I dread a return to our vile climates.  I have applied accordingly to the missionary folk to let me go round in the Morning Star; and if the Boston Board should refuse, I shall get somehow to Fiji, hire a trading schooner, and see the Fijis and Friendlies and Samoa.  He would be a South Seayer, Mr. Burlingame.  Of course, if I go in the Morning Star, I see all the eastern (or western?) islands.

Before I sail, I shall make out to let you have the last of The Master:  though I tell you it sticks! ­and I hope to have had some proofs forbye, of the verses anyway.  And now to business.

I want (if you can find them) in the British sixpenny edition, if not, in some equally compact and portable shape ­Seaside Library, for instance ­the Waverley Novels entire, or as entire as you can get ’em, and the following of Marryat:  Phantom Ship, Peter Simple, Percival Keene, Privateersman, Children of the New Forest, Frank Mildmay, Newton Forster, Dog Fiend (Snarleyyow).  Also Midshipman Easy, Kingsburn, Carlyle’s French Revolution, Motley’s Dutch Republic, Lang’s Letters on Literature, a complete set of my works, Jenkin, in duplicate; also Familiar Studies, ditto.

I have to thank you for the accounts, which are satisfactory indeed, and for the cheque for $1000.  Another account will have come and gone before I see you.  I hope it will be equally roseate in colour.  I am quite worked out, and this cursed end of The Master hangs over me like the arm of the gallows; but it is always darkest before dawn, and no doubt the clouds will soon rise; but it is a difficult thing to write, above all in Mackellarese; and I cannot yet see my way clear.  If I pull this off, The Master will be a pretty good novel or I am the more deceived; and even if I don’t pull if off, it’ll still have some stuff in it.

We shall remain here until the middle of June anyway; but my mother leaves for Europe early in May.  Hence our mail should continue to come here; but not hers.  I will let you know my next address, which will probably be Sydney.  If we get on the Morning Star, I propose at present to get marooned on Ponape, and take my chance of getting a passage to Australia.  It will leave times and seasons mighty vague, and the cruise is risky; but I shall know something of the South Seas when it is done, or else the South Seas will contain all there is of me.  It should give me a fine book of travels, anyway.

Low will probably come and ask some dollars of you.  Pray let him have them, they are for outfit.  O, another complete set of my books should go to Captain A. H. Otis, care of Dr. Merritt, Yacht Casco, Oakland, Cal. ­In haste,

     R. L. S.

TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE

     Honolulu, April 6th, 1889.

MY DEAR MISS BOODLE, ­Nobody writes a better letter than my Gamekeeper:  so gay, so pleasant, so engagingly particular, answering (by some delicate instinct) all the questions she suggests.  It is a shame you should get such a poor return as I can make, from a mind essentially and originally incapable of the art epistolary.  I would let the paper-cutter take my place; but I am sorry to say the little wooden seaman did after the manner of seamen, and deserted in the Societies.  The place he seems to have stayed at ­seems, for his absence was not observed till we were near the Equator ­was Tautira, and, I assure you, he displayed good taste, Tautira being as “nigh hand heaven” as a paper-cutter or anybody has a right to expect.

I think all our friends will be very angry with us, and I give the grounds of their probable displeasure bluntly ­we are not coming home for another year.  My mother returns next month.  Fanny, Lloyd, and I push on again among the islands on a trading schooner, the Equator ­first for the Gilbert group, which we shall have an opportunity to explore thoroughly; then, if occasion serve, to the Marshalls and Carolines; and if occasion (or money) fail, to Samoa, and back to Tahiti.  I own we are deserters, but we have excuses.  You cannot conceive how these climates agree with the wretched house-plant of Skerryvore:  he wonders to find himself sea-bathing, and cutting about the world loose, like a grown-up person.  They agree with Fanny too, who does not suffer from her rheumatism, and with Lloyd also.  And the interest of the islands is endless; and the sea, though I own it is a fearsome place, is very delightful.  We had applied for places in the American missionary ship, the Morning Star, but this trading schooner is a far preferable idea, giving us more time and a thousandfold more liberty; so we determined to cut off the missionaries with a shilling.

The Sandwich Islands do not interest us very much; we live here, oppressed with civilisation, and look for good things in the future.  But it would surprise you if you came out to-night from Honolulu (all shining with electric lights, and all in a bustle from the arrival of the mail, which is to carry you these lines) and crossed the long wooden causeway along the beach, and came out on the road through Kapiolani park, and seeing a gate in the palings, with a tub of gold-fish by the wayside, entered casually in.  The buildings stand in three groups by the edge of the beach, where an angry little spitfire sea continually spirts and thrashes with impotent irascibility, the big seas breaking further out upon the reef.  The first is a small house, with a very large summer parlour, or lanai, as they call it here, roofed, but practically open.  There you will find the lamps burning and the family sitting about the table, dinner just done:  my mother, my wife, Lloyd, Belle, my wife’s daughter, Austin her child, and to-night (by way of rarity) a guest.  All about the walls our South Sea curiosities, war clubs, idols, pearl shells, stone axes, etc.; and the walls are only a small part of a lanai, the rest being glazed or latticed windows, or mere open space.  You will see there no sign of the Squire, however; and being a person of a humane disposition, you will only glance in over the balcony railing at the merrymakers in the summer parlour, and proceed further afield after the Exile.  You look round, there is beautiful green turf, many trees of an outlandish sort that drop thorns ­look out if your feet are bare; but I beg your pardon, you have not been long enough in the South Seas ­and many oleanders in full flower.  The next group of buildings is ramshackle, and quite dark; you make out a coach-house door, and look in ­only some cocoanuts; you try round to the left and come to the sea front, where Venus and the moon are making luminous tracks on the water, and a great swell rolls and shines on the outer reef; and here is another door ­all these places open from the outside ­and you go in, and find photography, tubs of water, negatives steeping, a tap, and a chair and an ink-bottle, where my wife is supposed to write; round a little further, a third door, entering which you find a picture upon the easel and a table sticky with paints; a fourth door admits you to a sort of court, where there is a hen sitting ­I believe on a fallacious egg.  No sign of the Squire in all this.  But right opposite the studio door you have observed a third little house, from whose open door lamp-light streams and makes hay of the strong moonlight shadows.  You had supposed it made no part of the grounds, for a fence runs round it lined with oleander; but as the Squire is nowhere else, is it not just possible he may be here?  It is a grim little wooden shanty; cobwebs bedeck it; friendly mice inhabit its recesses; the mailed cockroach walks upon the wall; so also, I regret to say, the scorpion.  Herein are two pallet beds, two mosquito curtains, strung to the pitch-boards of the roof, two tables laden with books and manuscripts, three chairs, and, in one of the beds, the Squire busy writing to yourself, as it chances, and just at this moment somewhat bitten by mosquitoes.  He has just set fire to the insect powder, and will be all right in no time; but just now he contemplates large white blisters, and would like to scratch them, but knows better.  The house is not bare; it has been inhabited by Kanakas, and ­you know what children are! ­the bare wood walls are pasted over with pages from the Graphic, Harper’s Weekly, etc.  The floor is matted, and I am bound to say the matting is filthy.  There are two windows and two doors, one of which is condemned; on the panels of that last a sheet of paper is pinned up, and covered with writing.  I cull a few plums: ­

  “A duck-hammock for each person. 
   A patent organ like the commandant’s at Taiohae. 
   Cheap and bad cigars for presents. 
   Revolvers. 
   Permanganate of potass. 
   Liniment for the head and sulphur. 
   Fine tooth-comb.”

What do you think this is?  Simply life in the South Seas foreshortened.  These are a few of our desiderata for the next trip, which we jot down as they occur.

There, I have really done my best and tried to send something like a letter ­one letter in return for all your dozens.  Pray remember us all to yourself, Mrs. Boodle, and the rest of your house.  I do hope your mother will be better when this comes.  I shall write and give you a new address when I have made up my mind as to the most probable, and I do beg you will continue to write from time to time and give us airs from home.  To-morrow ­think of it ­I must be off by a quarter to eight to drive in to the palace and breakfast with his Hawaiian Majesty at 8.30:  I shall be dead indeed.  Please give my news to Scott, I trust he is better; give him my warm regards.  To you we all send all kinds of things, and I am the absentee Squire,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO CHARLES BAXTER LETTER I

     Honolulu, April 1889.

MY DEAR CHARLES, ­As usual, your letter is as good as a cordial, and I thank you for it, and all your care, kindness, and generous and thoughtful friendship, from my heart.  I was truly glad to hear a word of Colvin, whose long silence has terrified me; and glad to hear that you condoned the notion of my staying longer in the South Seas, for I have decided in that sense.  The first idea was to go in the Morning Star, missionary ship; but now I have found a trading schooner, the Equator, which is to call for me here early in June and carry us through the Gilberts.  What will happen then, the Lord knows.  My mother does not accompany us:  she leaves here for home early in May, and you will hear of us from her; but not, I imagine, anything more definite.  We shall get dumped on Butaritari, and whether we manage to go on to the Marshalls and Carolines, or whether we fall back on Samoa, Heaven must decide; but I mean to fetch back into the course of the Richmond ­(to think you don’t know what the Richmond is! ­the steamer of the Eastern South Seas, joining New Zealand, Tongatabu, the Samoas, Taheite, and Rarotonga, and carrying by last advices sheep in the saloon!) ­into the course of the Richmond and make Tahiti again on the home track.  Would I like to see the Scots Observer?  Wouldn’t I not?  But whaur?  I’m direckit at space.  They have nae post offishes at the Gilberts, and as for the Car’lines!  Ye see, Mr. Baxter, we’re no just in the punkshewal centre o’ civ’lisation.  But pile them up for me, and when I’ve decided on an address, I’ll let you ken, and ye’ll can send them stavin’ after me. ­Ever your affectionate

     R. L. S.

TO CHARLES BAXTER LETTER II

The reference in the first paragraph is to the publication in the press, which Mr. Baxter had permitted, of one of Stevenson’s letters written during the earlier part of his voyage.  R. L. S. had remonstrated, always greatly disliking the publication of private letters during the writer’s lifetime; and now writes to soften the effect of his remonstrance.

     Honolulu, 10th May 1889.

MY DEAR CHARLES, ­I am appalled to gather from your last just to hand that you have felt so much concern about the letter.  Pray dismiss it from your mind.  But I think you scarce appreciate how disagreeable it is to have your private affairs and private unguarded expressions getting into print.  It would soon sicken any one of writing letters.  I have no doubt that letter was very wisely selected, but it just shows how things crop up.  There was a raging jealousy between the two yachts; our captain was nearly in a fight over it.  However, no more; and whatever you think, my dear fellow, do not suppose me angry with you or ­; although I was annoyed at the circumstance ­a very different thing.  But it is difficult to conduct life by letter, and I continually feel I may be drifting into some matter of offence, in which my heart takes no part.

I must now turn to a point of business.  This new cruise of ours is somewhat venturesome; and I think it needful to warn you not to be in a hurry to suppose us dead.  In these ill-charted seas, it is quite on the cards we might be cast on some unvisited, or very rarely visited, island; that there we might lie for a long time, even years, unheard of; and yet turn up smiling at the hinder end.  So do not let me be “rowpit” till you get some certainty we have gone to Davie Jones in a squall, or graced the feast of some barbarian in the character of Long Pig.

I have just been a week away alone on the lee coast of Hawaii, the only white creature in many miles, riding five and a half hours one day, living with a native, seeing four lepers shipped off to Molokai, hearing native causes, and giving my opinion as amicus curiæ as to the interpretation of a statute in English; a lovely week among God’s best ­at least God’s sweetest works ­Polynesians.  It has bettered me greatly.  If I could only stay there the time that remains, I could get my work done and be happy; but the care of my family keeps me in vile Honolulu, where I am always out of sorts, amidst heat and cold and cesspools and beastly haoles. What is a haole?  You are one; and so, I am sorry to say, am I. After so long a dose of whites, it was a blessing to get among Polynesians again even for a week.

Well, Charles, there are waur haoles than yoursel’, I’ll say that for ye; and trust before I sail I shall get another letter with more about yourself. ­Ever your affectionate friend,

     R. L. S.

TO W. H. LOW

The allusions in the latter half of this letter are to the departure for Europe of the young Hawaiian princess Kaiulani (see the poem beginning “When from her land to mine she goes,” in Songs of Travel), and to the circumstances of the great hurricane at Apia on March 15th, 1889.

     Honolulu, (about) 20th May ’89.

MY DEAR LOW, ­ ...  The goods have come; many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all. ­I have at length finished The Master; it has been a sore cross to me; but now he is buried, his body’s under hatches, ­his soul, if there is any hell to go to, gone to hell; and I forgive him:  it is harder to forgive Burlingame for having induced me to begin the publication, or myself for suffering the induction. ­Yes, I think Hole has done finely; it will be one of the most adequately illustrated books of our generation; he gets the note, he tells the story ­my story:  I know only one failure ­the Master standing on the beach. ­You must have a letter for me at Sydney ­till further notice.  Remember me to Mrs. Will.  H., the godlike sculptor, and any of the faithful.  If you want to cease to be a republican, see my little Kaiulani, as she goes through ­but she is gone already.  You will die a red:  I wear the colours of that little royal maiden, Nous allons chanter à la ronde, si vous voulez! only she is not blonde by several chalks, though she is but a half-blood, and the wrong half Edinburgh Scots like mysel’.  But, O Low, I love the Polynesian:  this civilisation of ours is a dingy, ungentlemanly business; it drops out too much of man, and too much of that the very beauty of the poor beast:  who has his beauties in spite of Zola and Co.  As usual, here is a whole letter with no news:  I am a bloodless, inhuman dog; and no doubt Zola is a better correspondent. ­Long live your fine old English admiral ­yours, I mean ­the U.S.A. one at Samoa; I wept tears and loved myself and mankind when I read of him:  he is not too much civilised.  And there was Gordon, too; and there are others, beyond question.  But if you could live, the only white folk, in a Polynesian village; and drink that warm, light vin du pays of human affection and enjoy that simple dignity of all about you ­I will not gush, for I am now in my fortieth year, which seems highly unjust, but there it is, Mr. Low, and the Lord enlighten your affectionate

     R. L. S.

[MRS. R. L. STEVENSON TO SIDNEY COLVIN

   This letter shows the writer in her character of wise and anxious
   critic of her husband’s work.  The result, in the judgment of most of
   his friends, went far to justify her misgivings.

     Honolulu, May 21st, 1889.

BEST OF FRIENDS, ­It was a joy inexpressible to get a word from you at last.  Fortunately for our peace of mind, we were almost positive that your letters had been sent to the places we had already left.  Still it was a bitter disappointment to get nothing from you when we arrived here.  I wish you could have seen us both throwing over the immense package of letters searching for your handwriting.  Now that we know you have been ill, please do let some one send us a line to our next address telling us how you are.  What that next address may be we do not yet know, as our final movements are a little uncertain.  To begin with, a trading schooner, the Equator, will come along some time in the first part of June, lie outside the harbour here and signal to us.  Within forty-eight hours we shall pack up our possessions, our barrel of sauer kraut, our barrel of salt onions, our bag of cocoanuts, our native garments, our tobacco, fish hooks, red combs, and Turkey red calicoes (all the latter for trading purposes), our hand organ, photograph and painting materials, and finally our magic lantern ­all these upon a large whaleboat, and go out to the Equator.  Lloyd, also, takes a fiddle, a guitar, a native instrument something like a banjo, called a taropatch fiddle, and a lot of song books.  We shall be carried first to one of the Gilberts, landing at Butaritari.  The Equator is going about amongst the Gilbert group, and we have the right to keep her over when we like within reasonable limits.  Finally she will leave us, and we shall have to take the chances of what happens next.  We hope to see the Marshalls, the Carolines, the Fijis, Tonga and Samoa (also other islands that I do not remember), perhaps staying a little while in Sydney, and stopping on our way home to see our friends in Tahiti and the Marquesas.  I am very much exercised by one thing.  Louis has the most enchanting material that any one ever had in the whole world for his book, and I am afraid he is going to spoil it all.  He has taken into his Scotch Stevenson head that a stern duty lies before him, and that his book must be a sort of scientific and historical impersonal thing, comparing the different languages (of which he knows nothing, really) and the different peoples, the object being to settle the question as to whether they are of common Malay origin or not.  Also to compare the Protestant and Catholic missions, etc., and the whole thing to be impersonal, leaving out all he knows of the people themselves.  And I believe there is no one living who has got so near to them, or who understands them as he does.  Think of a small treatise on the Polynesian races being offered to people who are dying to hear about Ori a Ori, the making of brothers with cannibals, the strange stories they told, and the extraordinary adventures that befell us: ­suppose Herman Melville had given us his theories as to the Polynesian language and the probable good or evil results of the missionary influence instead of Omoo and Typee, or Kinglake instead of Eothen.  Louis says it is a stern sense of duty that is at the bottom of it, which is more alarming than anything else.  I am so sure that you will agree with me that I am going to ask you to throw the weight of your influence as heavily as possible in the scales with me.  Please refer to the matter in the letters we shall receive at our first stopping place, otherwise Louis will spend a great deal of time in Sydney actually reading up other people’s books on the Islands.  What a thing it is to have a “man of genius” to deal with.  It is like managing an overbred horse.  Why with my own feeble hand I could write a book that the whole world would jump at.  Please keep any letters of mine that contain any incidents of our wanderings.  They are very exact as to facts, and Louis may, in this conscientious state of mind (indeed I am afraid he has), put nothing in his diary but statistics.  Even if I thought it a desirable thing to write what he proposes, I should still think it impossible unless after we had lived and studied here some twenty years or more.

Now I am done with my complaining, and shall turn to the pleasanter paths.  Louis went to one of the other islands a couple of weeks ago, quite alone, got drenched with rain and surf, rode over mountain paths ­five and a half hours one day ­and came back none the worse for it.  To-day he goes to Molokai, the leper island.  He never has a sign of hemorrhage, the air cushion is a thing of the past, and altogether he is a new man.  How he will do in the English climate again I do not know, but in these latitudes he is very nearly a well man, nothing seems to do him harm but overwork.  That, of course, is sometimes difficult to prevent.  Now, however, the Master is done, we have enough money to go upon and there is no need to work at all.  I must stop.  My dear love to you all.

     FANNY V. DE G. STEVENSON.]

TO MRS. R. L. STEVENSON

   The following two letters were written during and immediately after
   Stevenson’s trip to the noted leper settlement, the scene of Father
   Damien’s labours, at Molokai.

     Kalawao, Molokai [May 1889].

DEAR FANNY, ­I had a lovely sail up.  Captain Cameron and Mr. Gilfillan, both born in the States, yet the first still with a strong Highland, and the second still with a strong Lowland accent, were good company; the night was warm, the victuals plain but good.  Mr. Gilfillan gave me his berth, and I slept well, though I heard the sisters sick in the next stateroom, poor souls.  Heavy rolling woke me in the morning; I turned in all standing, so went right on the upper deck.  The day was on the peep out of a low morning bank, and we were wallowing along under stupendous cliffs.  As the lights brightened, we could see certain abutments and buttresses on their front where wood clustered and grass grew brightly.  But the whole brow seemed quite impassable, and my heart sank at the sight.  Two thousand feet of rock making 19° (the Captain guesses) seemed quite beyond my powers.  However, I had come so far; and, to tell you the truth, I was so cowed with fear and disgust that I dared not go back on the adventure in the interests of my own self-respect.  Presently we came up with the leper promontory:  lowland, quite bare and bleak and harsh, a little town of wooden houses, two churches, a landing-stair, all unsightly, sour, northerly, lying athwart the sunrise, with the great wall of the pali cutting the world out on the south.  Our lepers were sent on the first boat, about a dozen, one poor child very horrid, one white man, leaving a large grown family behind him in Honolulu, and then into the second stepped the sisters and myself.  I do not know how it would have been with me had the sisters not been there.  My horror of the horrible is about my weakest point; but the moral loveliness at my elbow blotted all else out; and when I found that one of them was crying, poor soul, quietly under her veil, I cried a little myself; then I felt as right as a trivet, only a little crushed to be there so uselessly.  I thought it was a sin and a shame she should feel unhappy; I turned round to her, and said something like this:  “Ladies, God Himself is here to give you welcome.  I’m sure it is good for me to be beside you; I hope it will be blessed to me; I thank you for myself and the good you do me.”  It seemed to cheer her up; but indeed I had scarce said it when we were at the landing-stairs, and there was a great crowd, hundreds of (God save us!) pantomime masks in poor human flesh, waiting to receive the sisters and the new patients.

Every hand was offered:  I had gloves, but I had made up my mind on the boat’s voyage not to give my hand; that seemed less offensive than the gloves.  So the sisters and I went up among that crew, and presently I got aside (for I felt I had no business there) and set off on foot across the promontory, carrying my wrap and the camera.  All horror was quite gone from me:  to see these dread creatures smile and look happy was beautiful.  On my way through Kalaupapa I was exchanging cheerful alohas with the patients coming galloping over on their horses; I was stopping to gossip at house-doors; I was happy, only ashamed of myself that I was here for no good.  One woman was pretty, and spoke good English, and was infinitely engaging and (in the old phrase) towardly; she thought I was the new white patient; and when she found I was only a visitor, a curious change came in her face and voice ­the only sad thing, morally sad, I mean ­that I met that morning.  But for all that, they tell me none want to leave.  Beyond Kalaupapa the houses became rare; dry stone dykes, grassy, stony land, one sick pandanus; a dreary country; from overhead in the little clinging wood shogs of the pali chirruping of birds fell; the low sun was right in my face; the trade blew pure and cool and delicious; I felt as right as ninepence, and stopped and chatted with the patients whom I still met on their horses, with not the least disgust.  About half-way over, I met the superintendent (a leper) with a horse for me, and O, wasn’t I glad!  But the horse was one of those curious, dogged, cranky brutes that always dully want to go somewhere else, and my traffic with him completed my crushing fatigue.  I got to the guest-house, an empty house with several rooms, kitchen, bath, etc.  There was no one there, and I let the horse go loose in the garden, lay down on the bed, and fell asleep.

Dr. Swift woke me and gave me breakfast, then I came back and slept again while he was at the dispensary, and he woke me for dinner; and I came back and slept again, and he woke me about six for supper; and then in about an hour I felt tired again, and came up to my solitary guest-house, played the flageolet, and am now writing to you.  As yet, you see, I have seen nothing of the settlement, and my crushing fatigue (though I believe that was moral and a measure of my cowardice) and the doctor’s opinion make me think the pali hopeless.  “You don’t look a strong man,” said the doctor; “but are you sound?” I told him the truth; then he said it was out of the question, and if I were to get up at all, I must be carried up.  But, as it seems, men as well as horses continually fall on this ascent:  the doctor goes up with a change of clothes ­it is plain that to be carried would in itself be very fatiguing to both mind and body; and I should then be at the beginning of thirteen miles of mountain road to be ridden against time.  How should I come through?  I hope you will think me right in my decision:  I mean to stay, and shall not be back in Honolulu till Saturday, June first.  You must all do the best you can to make ready.

Dr. Swift has a wife and an infant son, beginning to toddle and run, and they live here as composed as brick and mortar ­at least the wife does, a Kentucky German, a fine enough creature, I believe, who was quite amazed at the sisters shedding tears!  How strange is mankind!  Gilfillan too, a good fellow I think, and far from a stupid, kept up his hard Lowland Scottish talk in the boat while the sister was covering her face; but I believe he knew, and did it (partly) in embarrassment, and part perhaps in mistaken kindness.  And that was one reason, too, why I made my speech to them.  Partly, too, I did it, because I was ashamed to do so, and remembered one of my golden rules, “When you are ashamed to speak, speak up at once.”  But, mind you, that rule is only golden with strangers; with your own folks, there are other considerations.  This is a strange place to be in.  A bell has been sounded at intervals while I wrote, now all is still but a musical humming of the sea, not unlike the sound of telegraph wires; the night is quite cool and pitch dark, with a small fine rain; one light over in the leper settlement, one cricket whistling in the garden, my lamp here by my bedside, and my pen cheeping between my inky fingers.

Next day, lovely morning, slept all night, 80° in the shade, strong, sweet Anaho trade-wind.

     LOUIS.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

     Honolulu, June 1889.

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­I am just home after twelve days’ journey to Molokai, seven of them at the leper settlement, where I can only say that the sight of so much courage, cheerfulness, and devotion strung me too high to mind the infinite pity and horror of the sights.  I used to ride over from Kalawao to Kalaupapa (about three miles across the promontory, the cliff-wall, ivied with forest and yet inaccessible from steepness, on my left), go to the Sisters’ home, which is a miracle of neatness, play a game of croquet with seven leper girls (90° in the shade), got a little old-maid meal served me by the Sisters, and ride home again, tired enough, but not too tired.  The girls have all dolls, and love dressing them.  You who know so many ladies delicately clad, and they who know so many dressmakers, please make it known it would be an acceptable gift to send scraps for doll dressmaking to the Reverend Sister Maryanne, Bishop Home, Kalaupapa, Molokai, Hawaiian Islands.

I have seen sights that cannot be told, and heard stories that cannot be repeated:  yet I never admired my poor race so much, nor (strange as it may seem) loved life more than in the settlement.  A horror of moral beauty broods over the place:  that’s like bad Victor Hugo, but it is the only way I can express the sense that lived with me all these days.  And this even though it was in great part Catholic, and my sympathies flow never with so much difficulty as towards Catholic virtues.  The passbook kept with heaven stirs me to anger and laughter.  One of the sisters calls the place “the ticket office to heaven.”  Well, what is the odds?  They do their darg, and do it with kindness and efficiency incredible; and we must take folks’ virtues as we find them, and love the better part.  Of old Damien, whose weaknesses and worse perhaps I heard fully, I think only the more.  It was a European peasant:  dirty, bigoted, untruthful, unwise, tricky, but superb with generosity, residual candour and fundamental good-humour:  convince him he had done wrong (it might take hours of insult) and he would undo what he had done and like his corrector better.  A man, with all the grime and paltriness of mankind, but a saint and hero all the more for that.  The place as regards scenery is grand, gloomy, and bleak.  Mighty mountain walls descending sheer along the whole face of the island into a sea unusually deep; the front of the mountain ivied and furred with clinging forest, one viridescent cliff:  about half-way from east to west, the low, bare, stony promontory edged in between the cliff and the ocean; the two little towns (Kalawao and Kalaupapa) seated on either side of it, as bare almost as bathing machines upon a beach; and the population ­gorgons and chimaeras dire.  All this tear of the nerves I bore admirably; and the day after I got away, rode twenty miles along the opposite coast and up into the mountains:  they call it twenty, I am doubtful of the figures:  I should guess it nearer twelve; but let me take credit for what residents allege; and I was riding again the day after, so I need say no more about health.  Honolulu does not agree with me at all:  I am always out of sorts there, with slight headache, blood to the head, etc.  I had a good deal of work to do and did it with miserable difficulty; and yet all the time I have been gaining strength, as you see, which is highly encouraging.  By the time I am done with this cruise I shall have the material for a very singular book of travels:  names of strange stories and characters, cannibals, pirates, ancient legends, old Polynesian poetry, ­never was so generous a farrago.  I am going down now to get the story of a shipwrecked family, who were fifteen months on an island with a murderer:  there is a specimen.  The Pacific is a strange place; the nineteenth century only exists there in spots:  all round, it is a no man’s land of the ages, a stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilisations, virtues and crimes.

It is good of you to let me stay longer, but if I had known how ill you were, I should be now on my way home.  I had chartered my schooner and made all arrangements before (at last) we got definite news.  I feel highly guilty; I should be back to insult and worry you a little.  Our address till further notice is to be c/o R. Towns & Co., Sydney.  That is final:  I only got the arrangement made yesterday; but you may now publish it abroad. ­Yours ever,

     R. L. S.

TO JAMES PAYN

   The following was written to his old friend of Cornhill Magazine
   days, Mr. James Payn, on receiving in Hawaii news of that gentleman’s
   ill health and gathering deafness.

     Honolulu, H.I., June 13th, 1889.

MY DEAR JAMES PAYN, ­I get sad news of you here at my offsetting for further voyages:  I wish I could say what I feel.  Sure there was never any man less deserved this calamity; for I have heard you speak time and again, and I remember nothing that was unkind, nothing that was untrue, nothing that was not helpful, from your lips.  It is the ill-talkers that should hear no more.  God knows, I know no word of consolation; but I do feel your trouble.  You are the more open to letters now; let me talk to you for two pages.  I have nothing but happiness to tell; and you may bless God you are a man so sound-hearted that (even in the freshness of your calamity) I can come to you with my own good fortune unashamed and secure of sympathy.  It is a good thing to be a good man, whether deaf or whether dumb; and of all our fellow-craftsmen (whom yet they count a jealous race), I never knew one but gave you the name of honesty and kindness:  come to think of it gravely, this is better than the finest hearing.  We are all on the march to deafness, blindness, and all conceivable and fatal disabilities; we shall not all get there with a report so good.  My good news is a health astonishingly reinstated.  This climate; these voyagings; these landfalls at dawn; new islands peaking from the morning bank; new forested harbours; new passing alarms of squalls and surf; new interests of gentle natives, ­the whole tale of my life is better to me than any poem.

I am fresh just now from the leper settlement of Molokai, playing croquet with seven leper girls, sitting and yarning with old, blind, leper beachcombers in the hospital, sickened with the spectacle of abhorrent suffering and deformation amongst the patients, touched to the heart by the sight of lovely and effective virtues in their helpers:  no stranger time have I ever had, nor any so moving.  I do not think it a little thing to be deaf, God knows, and God defend me from the same! ­but to be a leper, or one of the self-condemned, how much more awful! and yet there’s a way there also.  “There are Molokais everywhere,” said Mr. Dutton, Father Damien’s dresser; you are but new landed in yours; and my dear and kind adviser, I wish you, with all my soul, that patience and courage which you will require.  Think of me meanwhile on a trading schooner bound for the Gilbert Islands, thereafter for the Marshalls, with a diet of fish and cocoanut before me; bound on a cruise of ­well, of investigation to what islands we can reach, and to get (some day or other) to Sydney, where a letter addressed to the care of R. Towns & Co. will find me sooner or later; and if it contain any good news, whether of your welfare or the courage with which you bear the contrary, will do me good. ­Yours affectionately (although so near a stranger),

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO LADY TAYLOR

     Honolulu, June 19th, 1889.

MY DEAR LADY TAYLOR, ­Our new home, the Equator, trading schooner, rides at the buoy to-night, and we are for sea shortly.  All your folk of the Roost held us for phantoms and things of the night from our first appearance; but I do wish you would try to believe in our continued existence, as flesh and blood obscurely tossed in the Pacific, or walking coral shores, and in our affection, which is more constant than becomes the breasts of such absconders.  My good health does not cease to be wonderful to myself:  Fanny is better in these warm places; it is the very thing for Lloyd; and in the matter of interest, the spice of life, etc., words cannot depict what fun we have.  Try to have a little more patience with the fugitives, and think of us now and again among the Gilberts, where we ought to be about the time when you receive this scrap.  They make no great figure on the atlas, I confess; but you will see the name there, if you look ­which I wish you would, and try to conceive us as still extant.  We all send the kindest remembrances to all of you; please make one of the girls write us the news to the care of R. Towns & Co., Sydney, New South Wales, where we hope to bring up about the end of the year ­or later.  Do not forget yours affectionately,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN LETTER I

Stevenson and his party sailed accordingly on the trading schooner Equator, “on a certain bright June day in 1889,” for the Gilbert Islands, a scattered group of atolls in the Western Pacific.  Their expectation was to come back into civilisation again by way of the Carolines, Manila, and the China ports; but instead of this, circumstances which occurred to change the trader’s course took them southwards to Samoa, where they arrived in December of the same year.  Their second voyage was thus of six months’ duration; in the course of it they spent two periods of about six weeks each on land, first at one and then at another of the two island capitals, Butaritari and Apemama.  The following letter is the first which reached Stevenson’s friends from this part of his voyage, and was written in two instalments, the first from on board the Equator in the lagoon of the island of Apaiang; the second, six weeks later, from the settlement on shore at Apemama, which the king, his friend Temhinoka, allowed him and his party to occupy during their stay.  The account of this stay at Apemama and of the character of the king is far the most interesting and attractive part of the volume called In the South Seas, which was the literary result of these voyages.

     Schooner Equator, Apaiang Lagoon, August 22nd, 1889.

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­The missionary ship is outside the reef trying (vainly) to get in; so I may have a chance to get a line off.  I am glad to say I shall be home by June next for the summer, or we shall know the reason why.  For God’s sake be well and jolly for the meeting.  I shall be, I believe, a different character from what you have seen this long while.  This cruise is up to now a huge success, being interesting, pleasant, and profitable.  The beachcomber is perhaps the most interesting character here; the natives are very different, on the whole, from Polynesians:  they are moral, stand-offish (for good reasons), and protected by a dark tongue.  It is delightful to meet the few Hawaiians (mostly missionaries) that are dotted about, with their Italian brio and their ready friendliness.  The whites are a strange lot, many of them good, kind, pleasant fellows; others quite the lowest I have ever seen even in the slums of cities.  I wish I had time to narrate to you the doings and character of three white murderers (more or less proven) I have met.  One, the only undoubted assassin of the lot, quite gained my affection in his big home out of a wreck, with his New Hebrides wife in her savage turban of hair and yet a perfect lady, and his three adorable little girls in Rob Roy Macgregor dresses, dancing to the hand organ, performing circus on the floor with startling effects of nudity, and curling up together on a mat to sleep, three sizes, three attitudes, three Rob Roy dresses, and six little clenched fists:  the murderer meanwhile brooding and gloating over his chicks, till your whole heart went out to him; and yet his crime on the face of it was dark:  disembowelling, in his own house, an old man of seventy, and him drunk.

It is lunch-time, I see, and I must close up with my warmest love to you.  I wish you were here to sit upon me when required.  Ah! if you were but a good sailor!  I will never leave the sea, I think; it is only there that a Briton lives:  my poor grandfather, it is from him I inherit the taste, I fancy, and he was round many islands in his day; but I, please God, shall beat him at that before the recall is sounded.  Would you be surprised to learn that I contemplate becoming a shipowner?  I do, but it is a secret.  Life is far better fun than people dream who fall asleep among the chimney stacks and telegraph wires.

Love to Henry James and others near. ­Ever yours, my dear fellow,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

     Equator Town, Apemama, October 1889.

No Morning Star came, however; and so now I try to send this to you by the schooner J.  L. Tiernan.  We have been about a month ashore, camping out in a kind of town the king set up for us:  on the idea that I was really a “big chief” in England.  He dines with us sometimes, and sends up a cook for a share of our meals when he does not come himself.  This sounds like high living! alas, undeceive yourself.  Salt junk is the mainstay; a low island, except for cocoanuts, is just the same as a ship at sea:  brackish water, no supplies, and very little shelter.  The king is a great character ­a thorough tyrant, very much of a gentleman, a poet, a musician, a historian, or perhaps rather more a genealogist ­it is strange to see him lying in his house among a lot of wives (nominal wives) writing the History of Apemama in an account-book; his description of one of his own songs, which he sang to me himself, as “about sweethearts, and trees, and the sea ­and no true, all-the-same lie,” seems about as compendious a definition of lyric poetry as a man could ask.  Tembinoka is here the great attraction:  all the rest is heat and tedium and villainous dazzle, and yet more villainous mosquitoes.  We are like to be here, however, many a long week before we get away, and then whither?  A strange trade this voyaging:  so vague, so bound-down, so helpless.  Fanny has been planting some vegetables, and we have actually onions and radishes coming up:  ah, onion-despiser, were you but a while in a low island, how your heart would leap at sight of a coster’s barrow!  I think I could shed tears over a dish of turnips.  No doubt we shall all be glad to say farewell to low islands ­I had near said for ever.  They are very tame; and I begin to read up the directory, and pine for an island with a profile, a running brook, or were it only a well among the rocks.  The thought of a mango came to me early this morning and set my greed on edge; but you do not know what a mango is, so .

I have been thinking a great deal of you and the Monument of late, and even tried to get my thoughts into a poem, hitherto without success.  God knows how you are:  I begin to weary dreadfully to see you ­well, in nine months, I hope; but that seems a long time.  I wonder what has befallen me too, that flimsy part of me that lives (or dwindles) in the public mind; and what has befallen The Master, and what kind of a Box the Merry Box has been found.  It is odd to know nothing of all this.  We had an old woman to do devil-work for you about a month ago, in a Chinaman’s house on Apaiang (August 23rd or 24th), You should have seen the crone with a noble masculine face, like that of an old crone [sic], a body like a man’s (naked all but the feathery female girdle), knotting cocoanut leaves and muttering spells:  Fanny and I, and the good captain of the Equator, and the Chinaman and his native wife and sister-in-law, all squatting on the floor about the sibyl; and a crowd of dark faces watching from behind her shoulder (she sat right in the doorway) and tittering aloud with strange, appalled, embarrassed laughter at each fresh adjuration.  She informed us you were in England, not travelling and now no longer sick; she promised us a fair wind the next day, and we had it, so I cherish the hope she was as right about Sidney Colvin.  The shipownering has rather petered out since I last wrote, and a good many other plans beside.

Health?  Fanny very so-so; I pretty right upon the whole, and getting through plenty work:  I know not quite how, but it seems to me not bad and in places funny.

South Sea Yarns: 

The Pearl Fisher, part done, lies in Sydney.  It is The Wrecker we are now engaged upon:  strange ways of life, I think, they set forth:  things that I can scarce touch upon, or even not at all, in my travel book; and the yarns are good, I do believe. The Pearl Fisher is for the New York Ledger:  the yarn is a kind of Monte Cristo one. The Wrecker is the least good as a story, I think; but the characters seem to me good. The Beachcombers is more sentimental.  These three scarce touch the out-skirts of the life we have been viewing; a hot-bed of strange characters and incidents:  Lord, how different from Europe or the Pallid States!  Farewell.  Heaven knows when this will get to you.  I burn to be in Sydney and have news.

     R. L. S.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN LETTER II

The following, written in the last days of the sail southwards from the Gilberts to Samoa, contains the full plan of the South Sea book as it had now been conceived.  In the issue, Part I. (so far as I know) was never written; Parts II. and III. appeared serially in the New York Sun, and were reprinted with corrections in the volume called In the South Seas; Part IV. was never written; Part V. was written but has not been printed, at least in this country; Part VI. (and far the most successful) closes the volume In the South Seas; Part VII. developed itself into A Footnote to History.  The verses at the end of this letter have already been printed (Songs of Travel, vol. xiv., ; but I give them here with the context, as in similar instances above.  The allusion is to the two colossal images from Easter Island which used to stand under the portico to the right hand of the visitor entering the Museum, were for some years removed, and are now restored to their old place.

     Schooner Equator, at se miles off Samoa. 
        Monday, December 2nd, 1889.

MY DEAR COLVIN, ­We are just nearing the end of our long cruise.  Rain, calms, squalls, bang ­there’s the foretopmast gone; rain, calm, squalls, away with the stay-sail; more rain, more calm, more squalls; a prodigious heavy sea all the time, and the Equator staggering and hovering like a swallow in a storm; and the cabin, a great square, crowded with wet human beings, and the rain avalanching on the deck, and the leaks dripping everywhere:  Fanny, in the midst of fifteen males, bearing up wonderfully.  But such voyages are at the best a trial.  We had one particularity:  coming down on Winslow Reef, p. d. (position doubtful):  two positions in the directory, a third (if you cared to count that) on the chart; heavy sea running, and the night due.  The boats were cleared, bread put on board, and we made up our packets for a boat voyage of four or five hundred miles, and turned in, expectant of a crash.  Needless to say it did not come, and no doubt we were far to leeward.  If we only had twopenceworth of wind, we might be at dinner in Apia to-morrow evening; but no such luck:  here we roll, dead before a light air ­and that is no point of sailing at all for a fore and aft schooner ­the sun blazing overhead, thermometer 88°, four degrees above what I have learned to call South Sea temperature; but for all that, land so near, and so much grief being happily astern, we are all pretty gay on board, and have been photographing and draught-playing and sky-larking like anything.  I am minded to stay not very long in Samoa and confine my studies there (as far as any one can forecast) to the history of the late war.  My book is now practically modelled:  if I can execute what is designed, there are few better books now extant on this globe, bar the epics, and the big tragedies, and histories, and the choice lyric poetics, and a novel or so ­none.  But it is not executed yet; and let not him that putteth on his armour, vaunt himself.  At least, nobody has had such stuff; such wild stories, such beautiful scenes, such singular intimacies, such manners and traditions, so incredible a mixture of the beautiful and horrible, the savage and civilised.  I will give you here some idea of the table of contents, which ought to make your mouth water.  I propose to call the book The South Seas:  it is rather a large title, but not many people have seen more of them than I, perhaps no one ­certainly no one capable of using the material.

Part I. General.  “Of schooners, islands, and maroons"

  CHAPTER I. Marine.

    " II.  Contraband (smuggling, barratry, labour traffic).

    " III.  The Beachcomber.

    " IV.  Beachcomber stories, i.  The Murder of the Chinaman, ii. 
               Death of a Beachcomber. iii.  A Character, iv.  The Apia
               Blacksmith.

Part II.  The Marquesas

    " V. Anaho. i.  Arrival, ii.  Death, iii.  The Tapu. iv.  Morals, v. 
               Hoka.

    " VI.  Tai-o-hae. i.  Arrival. ii.  The French. iii.  The Royal Family.
               iv.  Chiefless Folk. v.  The Catholics. vi.  Hawaiian
               Missionaries

    " VII.  Observations of a Long Pig. i.  Cannibalism, ii.  Hatiheu. iii. 
               Frère Michel, iv.  Taa-hauku and Atuona. v.  The Vale of
               Atuona. vi.  Moipu. vii.  Captain Hati.

Part III.  The Dangerous Archipelago

    " VIII.  The Group.

    " IX.  A House to let in a Low Island.

    " X. A Paumotuan Funeral, i.  The Funeral, ii.  Tales of the Dead.

Part IV.  Tahiti

    " XI.  Tautira.

    " XII.  Village Government in Tahiti.

    " XIII.  A Journey in Quest of Legends.

    " XIV.  Legends and Songs.

    " XV.  Life in Eden.

    " XVI.  Note on the French Regimen.

Part V. The Eight Islands

    " XVII.  A Note on Missions.

    " XVIII.  The Kona Coast of Hawaii. i.  Hookena. ii.  A Ride in the
               Forest. iii.  A Law Case. iv.  The City of Refuge. v.  The
               Lepers.

    " XIX.  Molokai. i.  A Week in the Precinct. ii.  History of the Leper
               Settlement, iii.  The Mokolii. iv.  The Free Island.

Part VI.  The Gilberts

    " XX.  The Group, ii.  Position of Woman, iii.  The Missions. iv. 
               Devilwork. v.  Republics.

    " XXI.  Rule and Misrule on Makin. i.  Butaritari, its King and Court.
               ii.  History of Three Kings. iii.  The Drink Question.

    " XXII.  A Butaritarian Festival.

    " XXIII.  The King of Apemama. i.  First Impressions. ii.  Equator Town
               and the Palace. iii.  The Three Corselets.

Part VII.  Samoa

     which I have not yet reached.

Even as so sketched it makes sixty chapters, not less than 300 Cornhill pages; and I suspect not much under 500.  Samoa has yet to be accounted for:  I think it will be all history, and I shall work in observations on Samoan manners, under the similar heads in other Polynesian islands.  It is still possible, though unlikely, that I may add a passing visit to Fiji or Tonga, or even both; but I am growing impatient to see yourself, and I do not want to be later than June of coming to England.  Anyway, you see it will be a large work, and as it will be copiously illustrated, the Lord knows what it will cost.  We shall return, God willing, by Sydney, Ceylon, Suez and, I guess, Marseilles the many-masted (copyright epithet).  I shall likely pause a day or two in Paris, but all that is too far ahead ­although now it begins to look near ­so near, and I can hear the rattle of the hansom up Endell Street, and see the gates swing back, and feel myself jump out upon the Monument steps ­Hosanna! ­home again.  My dear fellow, now that my father is done with his troubles, and 17 Heriot Row no more than a mere shell, you and that gaunt old Monument in Bloomsbury are all that I have in view when I use the word home; some passing thoughts there may be of the rooms at Skerryvore, and the blackbirds in the chine on a May morning; but the essence is S.C. and the Museum.  Suppose, by some damned accident, you were no more; well, I should return just the same, because of my mother and Lloyd, whom I now think to send to Cambridge; but all the spring would have gone out of me, and ninety per cent. of the attraction lost.  I will copy for you here a copy of verses made in Apemama.

  I heard the pulse of the besieging sea
  Throb far away all night.  I heard the wind
  Fly crying, and convulse tumultuous palms. 
  I rose and strolled.  The isle was all bright sand,
  And flailing fans and shadows of the palm: 
  The heaven all moon, and wind, and the blind vault ­
  The keenest planet slain, for Venus slept. 
  The King, my neighbour, with his host of wives,
  Slept in the precinct of the palisade: 
  Where single, in the wind, under the moon,
  Among the slumbering cabins, blazed a fire,
  Sole street-lamp and the only sentinel. 
    To other lands and nights my fancy turned. 
  To London first, and chiefly to your house,
  The many-pillared and the well-beloved. 
  There yearning fancy lighted; there again
  In the upper room I lay and heard far off
  The unsleeping city murmur like a shell;
  The muffled tramp of the Museum guard
  Once more went by me; I beheld again
  Lamps vainly brighten the dispeopled street;
  Again I longed for the returning morn,
  The awaking traffic, the bestirring birds,
  The consentancous trill of tiny song
  That weaves round monumental cornices
  A passing charm of beauty:  most of all,
  For your light foot I wearied, and your knock
  That was the glad réveillé of my day. 
    Lo, now, when to your task in the great house
  At morning through the portico you pass,
  One moment glance where, by the pillared wall,
  Far-voyaging island gods, begrimed with smoke,
  Sit now unworshipped, the rude monument
  Of faiths forgot and races undivined;
  Sit now disconsolate, remembering well
  The priest, the victim, and the songful crowd,
  The blaze of the blue noon, and that huge voice
  Incessant, of the breakers on the shore. 
  As far as these from their ancestral shrine,
  So far, so foreign, your divided friends
  Wander, estranged in body, not in mind.

     R. L. S.

TO E. L. BURLINGAME

  Schooner Equator, at sea, Wednesday, 4th December 1889.

MY DEAR BURLINGAME, ­We are now about to rise, like whales, from this long dive, and I make ready a communication which is to go to you by the first mail from Samoa.  How long we shall stay in that group I cannot forecast; but it will be best still to address at Sydney, where I trust, when I shall arrive, perhaps in one month from now, more probably in two or three, to find all news.

Business. ­Will you be likely to have a space in the Magazine for a serial story, which should be ready, I believe, by April, at latest by autumn?  It is called The Wrecker; and in book form will appear as number 1 of South Sea Yarns by R. L. S. and Lloyd Osbourne.  Here is the table as far as fully conceived, and indeed executed....

The story is founded on fact, the mystery I really believe to be insoluble; the purchase of a wreck has never been handled before, no more has San Francisco.  These seem all elements of success.  There is, besides, a character, Jim Pinkerton, of the advertising American, on whom we build a good deal; and some sketches of the American merchant marine, opium smuggling in Honolulu, etc.  It should run to (about) three hundred pages of my MS. I would like to know if this tale smiles upon you, if you will have a vacancy, and what you will be willing to pay.  It will of course be copyright in both the States and England.  I am a little anxious to have it tried serially, as it tests the interest of the mystery.

Pleasure. ­We have had a fine time in the Gilbert group, though four months on low islands, which involves low diet, is a largeish order; and my wife is rather down.  I am myself, up to now, a pillar of health, though our long and vile voyage of calms, squalls, cataracts of rain, sails carried away, foretopmast lost, boats cleared and packets made on the approach of a p. d. reef, etc., has cured me of salt brine, and filled me with a longing for beef steak and mangoes not to be depicted.  The interest has been immense.  Old King Tembinoka of Apemama, the Napoleon of the group, poet, tyrant, altogether a man of mark, gave me the woven corselets of his grandfather, his father and his uncle, and, what pleased me more, told me their singular story, then all manner of strange tales, facts, and experiences for my South Sea book, which should be a Tearer, Mr. Burlingame:  no one at least has had such stuff.

We are now engaged in the hell of a dead calm, the heat is cruel ­it is the only time when I suffer from heat:  I have nothing on but a pair of serge trousers, and a singlet without sleeves of Oxford gauze ­O, yes, and a red sash about my waist; and yet as I sit here in the cabin, sweat streams from me.  The rest are on deck under a bit of awning; we are not much above a hundred miles from port, and we might as well be in Kamschatka.  However, I should be honest:  this is the first calm I have endured without the added bane of a heavy swell, and the intoxicated blue-bottle wallowings and knockings of the helpless ship.

I wonder how you liked the end of The Master; that was the hardest job I ever had to do; did I do it?

My wife begs to be remembered to yourself and Mrs. Burlingame.  Remember all of us to all friends, particularly Low, in case I don’t get a word through for him. ­I am, yours very sincerely,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

The following was written soon after the termination of the voyage of the Equator and Stevenson’s first landing in Samoa, where he was engaged in collecting materials for the account (then intended to be the concluding part of his great projected South Sea book) of the war and hurricane of the previous year.

     Samoa [December 1889].

MY DEAR BAXTER, ­ ...  I cannot return until I have seen either Tonga or Fiji or both:  and I must not leave here till I have finished my collections on the war ­a very interesting bit of history, the truth often very hard to come at, and the search (for me) much complicated by the German tongue, from the use of which I have desisted (I suppose) these fifteen years.  The last two days I have been mugging with a dictionary from five to six hours a day; besides this, I have to call upon, keep sweet, and judiciously interview all sorts of persons ­English, American, German, and Samoan.  It makes a hard life; above all, as after every interview I have to come and get my notes straight on the nail.  I believe I should have got my facts before the end of January, when I shall make for Tonga or Fiji.  I am down right in the hurricane season; but they had so bad a one last year, I don’t imagine there will be much of an edition this.  Say that I get to Sydney some time in April, and I shall have done well, and be in a position to write a very singular and interesting book, or rather two; for I shall begin, I think, with a separate opuscule on the Samoan Trouble, about as long as Kidnapped, not very interesting, but valuable ­and a thing proper to be done.  And then, hey! for the big South Sea Book:  a devil of a big one, and full of the finest sport.

This morning as I was going along to my breakfast a little before seven, reading a number of Blackwood’s Magazine, I was startled by a soft talofa, alii (note for my mother:  they are quite courteous here in the European style, quite unlike Tahiti), right in my ear:  it was Mataafa coming from early mass in his white coat and white linen kilt, with three fellows behind him.  Mataafa is the nearest thing to a hero in my history, and really a fine fellow; plenty sense, and the most dignified, quiet, gentle manners.  Talking of Blackwood ­a file of which I was lucky enough to find here in the lawyer’s ­Mrs. Oliphant seems in a staggering state:  from the Wrong Box to The Master I scarce recognise either my critic or myself.  I gather that The Master should do well, and at least that notice is agreeable reading.  I expect to be home in June:  you will have gathered that I am pretty well.  In addition to my labours, I suppose I walk five or six miles a day, and almost every day I ride up and see Fanny and Lloyd, who are in a house in the bush with Ah Fu.  I live in Apia for history’s sake with Moors, an American trader.  Day before yesterday I was arrested and fined for riding fast in the street, which made my blood bitter, as the wife of the manager of the German Firm has twice almost ridden me down, and there seems none to say her nay.  The Germans have behaved pretty badly here, but not in all ways so ill as you may have gathered:  they were doubtless much provoked; and if the insane Knappe had not appeared upon the scene, might have got out of the muddle with dignity.  I write along without rhyme or reason, as things occur to me.

I hope from my outcries about printing you do not think I want you to keep my news or letters in a Blue Beard closet.  I like all friends to hear of me; they all should if I had ninety hours in the day, and strength for all of them; but you must have gathered how hard worked I am, and you will understand I go to bed a pretty tired man.

     29th December .

To-morrow (Monday, I won’t swear to my day of the month; this is the Sunday between Christmas and New Year) I go up the coast with Mr. Clarke, one of the London Society missionaries, in a boat to examine schools, see Tamasese, etc.  Lloyd comes to photograph.  Pray Heaven we have good weather; this is the rainy season; we shall be gone four or five days; and if the rain keep off, I shall be glad of the change; if it rain, it will be beastly.  This explains still further how hard pressed I am, as the mail will be gone ere I return, and I have thus lost the days I meant to write in.  I have a boy, Henry, who interprets and copies for me, and is a great nuisance.  He said he wished to come to me in order to learn “long explessions.”  Henry goes up along with us; and as I am not fond of him, he may before the trip is over hear some “stlong explessions.”  I am writing this on the back balcony at Moors’, palms and a hill like the hill of Kinnoull looking in at me; myself lying on the floor, and (like the parties in Handel’s song) “clad in robes of virgin white”; the ink is dreadful, the heat delicious, a fine going breeze in the palms, and from the other side of the house the sudden angry splash and roar of the Pacific on the reef, where the warships are still piled from last year’s hurricane, some under water, one high and dry upon her side, the strangest figure of a ship was ever witnessed; the narrow bay there is full of ships; the men-of-war covered with sail after the rains, and (especially the German ship, which is fearfully and awfully top heavy) rolling almost yards in, in what appears to be calm water.

Samoa, Apia at least, is far less beautiful than the Marquesas or Tahiti:  a more gentle scene, gentler acclivities, a tamer face of nature; and this much aided, for the wanderer, by the great German plantations with their countless regular avenues of palms.  The island has beautiful rivers, of about the bigness of our waters in the Lothians, with pleasant pools and waterfalls and overhanging verdure, and often a great volume of sound, so that once I thought I was passing near a mill, and it was only the voice of the river.  I am not specially attracted by the people; but they are courteous; the women very attractive, and dress lovely; the men purposelike, well set up, tall, lean, and dignified.  As I write, the breeze is brisking up, doors are beginning to slam, and shutters; a strong draught sweeps round the balcony; it looks doubtful for to-morrow.  Here I shut up. ­Ever your affectionate

     R. L. STEVENSON.

TO LADY TAYLOR

   This letter contains the first announcement of the purchase of the
   Vailima estate (not yet so named).  Sir Percy Shelley had died in the
   previous December.

     Apia, Samoa, Jath, 1890.

MY DEAR LADY TAYLOR, ­I shall hope to see you in some months from now, when I come home ­to break up my establishment ­I know no diminutive of the word.  Your daughters cast a spell upon me; they were always declaring I was a winged creature and would vanish into the uttermost isle; and they were right, and I have made my preparations.  I am now the owner of an estate upon Upolu, some two or three miles behind and above Apia; three streams, two waterfalls, a great cliff, an ancient native fort, a view of the sea and lowlands, or (to be more precise) several views of them in various directions, are now mine.  It would be affectation to omit a good many head of cattle; above all as it required much diplomacy to have them thrown in, for the gentleman who sold to me was staunch.  Besides all this, there is a great deal more forest than I have any need for; or to be plain the whole estate is one impassable jungle, which must be cut down and through at considerable expense.  Then the house has to be built; and then (as a climax) we may have to stand a siege in it in the next native war.

I do feel as if I was a coward and a traitor to desert my friends; only, my dear lady, you know what a miserable corrhyzal (is that how it is spelt?) creature I was at home:  and here I have some real health, I can walk, I can ride, I can stand some exposure, I am up with the sun, I have a real enjoyment of the world and of myself; it would be hard to go back again to England and to bed; and I think it would be very silly.  I am sure it would; and yet I feel shame, and I know I am not writing like myself.  I wish you knew how much I admired you, and when I think of those I must leave, how early a place your name occupies.  I have not had the pleasure to know you very long; and yet I feel as if my leaving England were a special treachery to you, and my leaving you a treachery to myself.  I will only ask you to try to forgive me:  for I am sure I will never quite forgive myself.  Somebody might write to me in the care of R. Towns & Co., Sydney, New South Wales, to tell me if you can forgive.  But you will do quite right if you cannot.  Only let me come and see you when we do return, or it will be a lame home-coming.

My wife suffered a good deal in our last, somewhat arduous voyage; all our party indeed suffered except myself.  Fanny is now better but she is still no very famous success in the way of health.

All the while I have been writing, I have had another matter in my eye; of which I scarce like to speak:  You know of course that I am thinking of Sir Percy and his widow.  The news has reached me in the shape of a newspaper cutting, I have no particulars.  He had a sweet, original nature; I think I liked him better than ever I should have liked his father; I am sorry he was always a little afraid of me; if I had had more chance, he would have liked me too, we had so much in common, and I valued so much his fine soul, as honest as a dog’s, and the romance of him, which was like a dog’s too, and like a poet’s at the same time.  If he had not been Shelley’s son, people would have thought more of him; and yet he was the better of the two, bar verses.

Please tell my dear Ida and Una that we think much of them, as well as of your dear self, and believe me, in words which you once allowed me to use (and I was very much affected when you did so), your affectionate friend,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO DR. SCOTT

   This gentleman is the physician to whose assiduous care and kindness,
   as recorded in the dedication to Underwoods, Stevenson owed so much
   during his invalid years at Bournemouth.

     Apia, Samoa, January 20th, 1890.

MY DEAR SCOTT, ­Shameful indeed that you should not have heard of me before!  I have now been some twenty months in the South Seas, and am (up to date) a person whom you would scarce know.  I think nothing of long walks and rides:  I was four hours and a half gone the other day, partly riding, partly climbing up a steep ravine.  I have stood a six months’ voyage on a copra schooner with about three months ashore on coral atolls, which means (except for cocoanuts to drink) no change whatever from ship’s food.  My wife suffered badly ­it was too rough a business altogether ­Lloyd suffered ­and, in short, I was the only one of the party who “kept my end up.”

I am so pleased with this climate that I have decided to settle; have even purchased a piece of land from three to four hundred acres, I know not which till the survey is completed, and shall only return next summer to wind up my affairs in England; thenceforth I mean to be a subject of the High Commissioner.

Now you would have gone longer yet without news of your truant patient, but that I have a medical discovery to communicate.  I find I can (almost immediately) fight off a cold with liquid extract of coca; two or (if obstinate) three teaspoonfuls in the day for a variable period of from one to five days sees the cold generally to the door.  I find it at once produces a glow, stops rigour, and though it makes one very uncomfortable, prevents the advance of the disease.  Hearing of this influenza, it occurred to me that this might prove remedial; and perhaps a stronger exhibition ­injections of cocaine, for instance ­still better.

If on my return I find myself let in for this epidemic, which seems highly calculated to nip me in the bud, I shall feel very much inclined to make the experiment.  See what a gulf you may save me from if you shall have previously made it on anima vili, on some less important sufferer, and shall have found it worse than useless.

How is Miss Boodle and her family?  Greeting to your brother and all friends in Bournemouth. ­Yours very sincerely,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

After a stay of four or five weeks at Apia, during which he had fallen more and more in love with Samoa and the Samoans, Stevenson took steamer again, this time for Sydney, where he had ordered his letters to await him.  This and the two following letters were written during the passage.  I again print in their original place a set of verses separately published in Songs of Travel.

     Februar den 3en
        Dampfer Lübeck, zwischen Apia und Sydney.

MY DEAR CHARLES, ­I have got one delightful letter from you, and heard from my mother of your kindness in going to see her.  Thank you for that:  you can in no way more touch and serve me....  Ay, ay, it is sad to sell 17; sad and fine were the old days:  when I was away in Apemama, I wrote two copies of verse about Edinburgh and the past, so ink black, so golden bright.  I will send them, if I can find them, for they will say something to you, and indeed one is more than half addressed to you.  This is it ­

  TO MY OLD COMRADES

  Do you remember ­can we e’er forget? ­
  How, in the coiled perplexities of youth,
  In our wild climate, in our scowling town,
  We gloomed and shivered, sorrowed, sobbed, and feared? 
  The belching winter wind, the missile rain,
  The rare and welcome silence of the snows,
  The laggard morn, the haggard day, the night,
  The grimy spell of the nocturnal town,
  Do you remember? ­Ah, could one forget! 
  As when the fevered sick that all night long
  Listed the wind intone, and hear at last
  The ever-welcome voice of the chanticleer
  Sing in the bitter hour before the dawn, ­
  With sudden ardour, these desire the day: 

(Here a squall sends all flying.)

  So sang in the gloom of youth the bird of hope;
  So we, exulting, hearkened and desired. 
  For lo! as in the palace porch of life
  We huddled with chimeras, from within ­
  How sweet to hear! ­the music swelled and fell,
  And through the breach of the revolving doors
  What dreams of splendour blinded us and fled! 
  I have since then contended and rejoiced;
  Amid the glories of the house of life
  Profoundly entered, and the shrine beheld: 
  Yet when the lamp from my expiring eyes
  Shall dwindle and recede, the voice of love
  Fall insignificant on my closing ears,
  What sound shall come but the old cry of the wind
  In our inclement city? what return
  But the image of the emptiness of youth,
  Filled with the sound of footsteps and that voice
  Of discontent and rapture and despair? 
  So, as in darkness, from the magic lamp,
  The momentary pictures gleam and fade
  And perish, and the night resurges ­these
  Shall I remember, and then all forget.

They’re pretty second-rate, but felt.  I can’t be bothered to copy the other.

I have bought 314-1/2 acres of beautiful land in the bush behind Apia; when we get the house built, the garden laid, and cattle in the place, it will be something to fall back on for shelter and food; and if the island could stumble into political quiet, it is conceivable it might even bring a little income....  We range from 600 to 1500 feet, have five streams, waterfalls, precipices, profound ravines, rich tablelands, fifty head of cattle on the ground (if any one could catch them), a great view of forest, sea, mountains, the warships in the haven:  really a noble place.  Some day you are to take a long holiday and come and see us:  it has been all planned.

With all these irons in the fire, and cloudy prospects, you may be sure I was pleased to hear a good account of business.  I believed The Master was a sure card:  I wonder why Henley thinks it grimy; grim it is, God knows, but sure not grimy, else I am the more deceived.  I am sorry he did not care for it; I place it on the line with Kidnapped myself.  We’ll see as time goes on whether it goes above or falls below.

     R. L. S.

TO E. L. BURLINGAME

The Editor of Scribner’s Magazine had written asking him for fresh contributions, and he sends the set of verses addressed to Tembinoka, the king at Butaritari, and afterwards reprinted in Songs of Travel, beginning “Let us who part like brothers part like bards.”

     S.S. Lübeck_ [between Apia and Sydney, February] 1890_

MY DEAR BURLINGAME, ­I desire nothing better than to continue my relation with the Magazine, to which it pleases me to hear I have been useful.  The only thing I have ready is the enclosed barbaric piece.  As soon as I have arrived in Sydney I shall send you some photographs, a portrait of Tembinoka, perhaps a view of the palace or of the “matted men” at their singing; also T.’s flag, which my wife designed for him:  in a word, what I can do best for you.  It will be thus a foretaste of my book of travels.  I shall ask you to let me have, if I wish it, the use of the plates made, and to make up a little tract of the verses and illustrations, of which you might send six copies to H.M.  Tembinoka, King of Apemama, via Butaritari, Gilbert Islands.  It might be best to send it by Crawford & Co., S.F.  There is no postal service; and schooners must take it, how they may and when.  Perhaps some such note as this might be prefixed: 

At my departure from the island of Apemama, for which you will look in vain in most atlases, the king and I agreed, since we both set up to be in the poetical way, that we should celebrate our separation in verse.  Whether or not his majesty has been true to his bargain, the laggard posts of the Pacific may perhaps inform me in six months, perhaps not before a year.  The following lines represent my part of the contract, and it is hoped, by their pictures of strange manners, they may entertain a civilised audience.  Nothing throughout has been invented or exaggerated; the lady herein referred to as the author’s Muse, has confined herself to stringing into rhyme facts and legends that I saw or heard during two months’ residence upon the island.

     R. L. S.

You will have received from me a letter about The Wrecker.  No doubt it is a new experiment for me, being disguised so much as a study of manners, and the interest turning on a mystery of the detective sort.  I think there need be no hesitation about beginning it in the fall of the year.  Lloyd has nearly finished his part, and I shall hope to send you very soon the MS. of about the first four-sevenths.  At the same time, I have been employing myself in Samoa, collecting facts about the recent war; and I propose to write almost at once and to publish shortly a small volume, called I know not what ­the War in Samoa, the Samoa Trouble, an Island War, the War of the Three Consuls, I know not ­perhaps you can suggest.  It was meant to be a part of my travel book; but material has accumulated on my hands until I see myself forced into volume form, and I hope it may be of use, if it come soon.  I have a few photographs of the war, which will do for illustrations.  It is conceivable you might wish to handle this in the Magazine, although I am inclined to think you won’t, and to agree with you.  But if you think otherwise, there it is.  The travel letters (fifty of them) are already contracted for in papers; these I was quite bound to let M’Clure handle, as the idea was of his suggestion, and I always felt a little sore as to one trick I played him in the matter of the end-papers.  The war-volume will contain some very interesting and picturesque details:  more I can’t promise for it.  Of course the fifty newspaper letters will be simply patches chosen from the travel volume (or volumes) as it gets written, But you see I have in hand: ­

Say half done. 1. The Wrecker.

Lloyd’s copy half done, mine 2. The Pearl Fisher (a novel promised
not touched. to the Ledger, and which will form,
when it comes in book form, N
of our South Sea Yarns).

Not begun, but all material 3.  The War volume.
ready.

Ditto. 4.  The Big Travel Book, which includes
the letters.

You know how they stand. 5.  The Ballads.

Excusez du peu! And you see what madness it would be to make any fresh engagements.  At the same time, you have The Wrecker and the War volume, if you like either ­or both ­to keep my name in the Magazine.

It begins to look as if I should not be able to get any more ballads done this somewhile.  I know the book would sell better if it were all ballads; and yet I am growing half tempted to fill up with some other verses.  A good few are connected with my voyage, such as the “Home of Tembinoka” sent herewith, and would have a sort of slight affinity to the South Sea Ballads.  You might tell me how that strikes a stranger.

In all this, my real interest is with the travel volume, which ought to be of a really extraordinary interest.

I am sending you “Tembinoka” as he stands; but there are parts of him that I hope to better, particularly in stanzas III. and II.  I scarce feel intelligent enough to try just now; and I thought at any rate you had better see it, set it up if you think well, and let me have a proof; so, at least, we shall get the bulk of it straight.  I have spared you Teñkoruti, Tembaitake, Tembinatake, and other barbarous names, because I thought the dentists in the States had work enough without my assistance; but my chief’s name is TEMBINOKA, pronounced, according to the present quite modern habit in the Gilberts, Tembinok’.  Compare in the margin Tengkorootch; a singular new trick, setting at defiance all South Sea analogy, for nowhere else do they show even the ability, far less the will, to end a word upon a consonant.  Loia is Lloyd’s name, ship becomes shipé, teapot tipoté, etc.  Our admirable friend Herman Melville, of whom, since I could judge, I have thought more than ever, had no ear for languages whatever:  his Hapar tribe should be Hapaa, etc.

But this is of no interest to you:  suffice it, you see how I am as usual up to the neck in projects, and really all likely bairns this time.  When will this activity cease?  Too soon for me, I dare to say.

     R. L. S.

TO JAMES PAYN

     February 4th, 1890, S.S.  Lübeck.

MY DEAR JAMES PAYN, ­In virtue of confessions in your last, you would at the present moment, if you were along of me, be sick; and I will ask you to receive that as an excuse for my hand of write.  Excuse a plain seaman if he regards with scorn the likes of you pore land-lubbers ashore now.  (Reference to nautical ditty.) Which I may however be allowed to add that when eight months’ mail was laid by my side one evening in Apia, and my wife and I sat up the most of the night to peruse the same ­(precious indisposed we were next day in consequence) ­no letter, out of so many, more appealed to our hearts than one from the pore, stick-in-the-mud, land-lubbering, common (or garden) Londoner, James Payn.  Thank you for it; my wife says, “Can’t I see him when we get back to London?” I have told her the thing appeared to me within the spear of practical politix. (Why can’t I spell and write like an honest, sober, god-fearing litry gent?  I think it’s the motion of the ship.) Here I was interrupted to play chess with the chief engineer; as I grow old, I prefer the “athletic sport of cribbage,” of which (I am sure I misquote) I have just been reading in your delightful Literary Recollections.  How you skim along, you and Andrew Lang (different as you are), and yet the only two who can keep a fellow smiling every page, and ever and again laughing out loud.  I joke wi’ deeficulty, I believe; I am not funny; and when I am, Mrs. Oliphant says I’m vulgar, and somebody else says (in Latin) that I’m a whore, which seems harsh and even uncalled for:  I shall stick to weepers; a 5s. weeper, 2d. laugher, 1s. shocker.

My dear sir, I grow more and more idiotic; I cannot even feign sanity.  Some time in the month of June a stalwart weather-beaten man, evidently of seafaring antecedents, shall be observed wending his way between the Athenæum Club and Waterloo Place.  Arrived off N, he shall be observed to bring his head sharply to the wind, and tack into the outer haven.  “Captain Payn in the harbour?” ­“Ay, ay, sir.  What ship?” ­“Barquentin R. L. S., nine hundred and odd days out from the port of Bournemouth, homeward bound, with yarns and curiosities.”

Who was it said, “For God’s sake, don’t speak of it!” about Scott and his tears?  He knew what he was saying.  The fear of that hour is the skeleton in all our cupboards; that hour when the pastime and the livelihood go together; and ­I am getting hard of hearing myself; a pore young child of forty, but new come frae my Mammy, O!

Excuse these follies, and accept the expression of all my regards. ­Yours affectionately,

     R. L. STEVENSON.

TO HENRY JAMES

   The Solution is a short story of Mr. Henry James, first published
   in a periodical and reprinted in the collection called The Lesson of
   the Master (Macmillans).

     Union Club, Sydney, February 19, 1890.

HERE ­in this excellent civilised, antipodal club smoking-room, I have just read the first part of your Solution.  Dear Henry James, it is an exquisite art; do not be troubled by the shadows of your French competitors:  not one, not de Maupassant, could have done a thing more clean and fine; dry in touch, but the atmosphere (as in a fine summer sunset) rich with colour and with perfume.  I shall say no more; this note is De Solutione; except that I ­that we ­are all your sincere friends and hope to shake you by the hand in June.

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

                signed, sealed and
               delivered as his act
                    and deed
        and very thought of very thought,
  this nineteenth of February in the year of our
    Lord one thousand eight hundred ninety and
                    nothing.

TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

Written while he was still in a white heat of indignation on behalf of Father Damien.  He was not aware that Dr. Hyde’s letter had been a private one not meant for publicity, and later came to think he might have struck as effectively on behalf of Damien without striking so fiercely against Dr. Hyde (see below, .  “Damon” is the Rev. F. Damon, a missionary in Hawaii.

     Union Club, Sydney, March 5, 1890.

MY DEAR MOTHER, ­I understand the family keeps you somewhat informed.  For myself I am in such a whirl of work and society, I can ill spare a moment.  My health is excellent and has been here tried by abominable wet weather, and (what’s waur) dinners and lunches.  As this is like to be our metropolis, I have tried to lay myself out to be sociable with an eye to yoursel’.  Several niceish people have turned up:  Fanny has an evening, but she is about at the end of the virtuous effort, and shrinks from the approach of any fellow creature.

Have you seen Hyde’s (Dr. not Mr.) letter about Damien?  That has been one of my concerns; I have an answer in the press; and have just written a difficult letter to Damon trying to prepare him for what (I fear) must be to him extremely painful.  The answer is to come out as a pamphlet; of which I make of course a present to the publisher.  I am not a cannibal, I would not eat the flesh of Dr. Hyde, ­and it is conceivable it will make a noise in Honolulu.  I have struck as hard as I knew how; nor do I think my answer can fail to do away (in the minds of all who see it) with the effect of Hyde’s incredible and really villainous production.  What a mercy I wasn’t this man’s guest in the Morning Star!  I think it would have broke my heart.

Time for me to go! ­I remain, with love,

     R. L. S.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

Stevenson had not been long at Sydney ­just long enough to write and print the famous Letter to Dr. Hyde in defence of Father Damien ­when, to his heavy disappointment, he fell ill again with one of his old bad attacks of fever and hemorrhage from the lungs.  It was this experience which finally determined him to settle for good on his new island property in Samoa, which at first he had thought of rather as an occasional refuge and resting-place in the intervals between future projected yachting voyages.

     Union Club, Sydney, March 7th, 1890.

MY DEAR CHARLES, ­I did not send off the enclosed before from laziness; having gone quite sick, and being a blooming prisoner here in the club, and indeed in my bedroom.  I was in receipt of your letters and your ornamental photo, and was delighted to see how well you looked, and how reasonably well I stood....  I am sure I shall never come back home except to die; I may do it, but shall always think of the move as suicidal, unless a great change comes over me, of which as yet I see no symptom.  This visit to Sydney has smashed me handsomely; and yet I made myself a prisoner here in the club upon my first arrival.  This is not encouraging for further ventures; Sydney winter ­or, I might almost say, Sydney spring, for I came when the worst was over ­is so small an affair, comparable to our June depression at home in Scotland....  The pipe is right again; it was the springs that had rusted, and ought to have been oiled.  Its voice is now that of an angel; but, Lord! here in the club I dare not wake it!  Conceive my impatience to be in my own backwoods and raise the sound of minstrelsy.  What pleasures are to be compared with those of the Unvirtuous Virtuoso. ­Yours ever affectionately, the Unvirtuous Virtuoso,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

To try and recover from the effects of his illness at Sydney, Stevenson determined to take another voyage; and started accordingly in April with his party on a trading steamer, the Janet Nicoll, which took him by a long and devious course among many groups of islands that he had not yet visited, returning to Sydney in August by way of New Caledonia.  On the first night out of Auckland harbour the voyage nearly came to a premature end through the blowing up of some trade fireworks, or materials for fireworks, which had been packed in the stateroom.

     S.S.  Janet Nicoll, off Upolu [Spring 1890].

MY DEAREST COLVIN, ­I was sharply ill at Sydney, cut off, right out of bed, in this steamer on a fresh island cruise, and have already reaped the benefit.  We are excellently found this time, on a spacious vessel, with an excellent table; the captain, supercargo, our one fellow-passenger, etc., very nice; and the charterer, Mr. Henderson, the very man I could have chosen.  The truth is, I fear, this life is the only one that suits me; so long as I cruise in the South Seas, I shall be well and happy ­alas, no, I do not mean that, and absit omen! ­I mean that, so soon as I cease from cruising, the nerves are strained, the decline commences, and I steer slowly but surely back to bedward.  We left Sydney, had a cruel rough passage to Auckland, for the Janet is the worst roller I was ever aboard of.  I was confined to my cabin, ports closed, self shied out of the berth, stomach (pampered till the day I left on a diet of perpetual egg-nogg) revolted at ship’s food and ship eating, in a frowsy bunk, clinging with one hand to the plate, with the other to the glass, and using the knife and fork (except at intervals) with the eyelid.  No matter:  I picked up hand over hand.  After a day in Auckland, we set sail again; were blown up in the main cabin with calcium fires, as we left the bay.  Let no man say I am unscientific:  when I ran, on the alert, out of my stateroom, and found the main cabin incarnadined with the glow of the last scene of a pantomime, I stopped dead:  “What is this?” said I.  “This ship is on fire, I see that; but why a pantomime?” And I stood and reasoned the point, until my head was so muddled with the fumes that I could not find the companion.  A few seconds later, the captain had to enter crawling on his belly, and took days to recover (if he has recovered) from the fumes.  By singular good fortune, we got the hose down in time and saved the ship, but Lloyd lost most of his clothes and a great part of our photographs was destroyed.  Fanny saw the native sailors tossing overboard a blazing trunk; she stopped them in time, and behold, it contained my manuscripts.  Thereafter we had three (or two) days fine weather:  then got into a gale of wind, with rain and a vexatious sea.  As we drew into our anchorage in a bight of Savage Island, a man ashore told me afterwards the sight of the Janet Nicoll made him sick; and indeed it was rough play, though nothing to the night before.  All through this gale I worked four to six hours per diem spearing the ink-bottle like a flying fish, and holding my papers together as I might.  For, of all things, what I was at was history ­the Samoan business ­and I had to turn from one to another of these piles of manuscript notes, and from one page to another in each, until I should have found employment for the hands of Briareus.  All the same, this history is a godsend for a voyage; I can put in time, getting events co-ordinated and the narrative distributed, when my much-heaving numskull would be incapable of finish or fine style.  At Savage we met the missionary barque John Williams.  I tell you it was a great day for Savage Island:  the path up the cliffs was crowded with gay islandresses (I like that feminine plural) who wrapped me in their embraces, and picked my pockets of all my tobacco, with a manner which a touch would have made revolting, but as it was, was simply charming, like the Golden Age.  One pretty, little, stalwart minx, with a red flower behind her ear, had searched me with extraordinary zeal; and when, soon after, I missed my matches, I accused her (she still following us) of being the thief.  After some delay, and with a subtle smile, she produced the box, gave me one match, and put the rest away again.  Too tired to add more. ­Your most affectionate

     R. L. S.

TO E. L. BURLINGAME

   The idea here discussed of a further series of essays to be
   contributed to Scribner’s Magazine was never carried out.

     S.S.  Janet Nicoll, off Peru Island, Kingsmills
        Group, July 13th, ’90.

MY DEAR BURLINGAME, ­I am moved to write to you in the matter of the end papers.  I am somewhat tempted to begin them again.  Follow the reasons pro and con: ­

1st.  I must say I feel as if something in the nature of the end paper were a desirable finish to the number, and that the substitutes of occasional essays by occasional contributors somehow fail to fill the bill.  Should you differ with me on this point, no more is to be said.  And what follows must be regarded as lost words.

2nd.  I am rather taken with the idea of continuing the work.  For instance, should you have no distaste for papers of the class called Random Memories, I should enjoy continuing them (of course at intervals), and when they were done I have an idea they might make a readable book.  On the other hand, I believe a greater freedom of choice might be taken, the subjects more varied and more briefly treated, in somewhat approaching the manner of Andrew Lang in the Sign of the Ship; it being well understood that the broken sticks method is one not very suitable (as Colonel Burke would say) to my genius, and not very likely to be pushed far in my practice.  Upon this point I wish you to condense your massive brain.  In the last lot I was promised, and I fondly expected to receive, a vast amount of assistance from intelligent and genial correspondents.  I assure you, I never had a scratch of a pen from any one above the level of a village idiot, except once, when a lady sowed my head full of grey hairs by announcing that she was going to direct her life in future by my counsels.  Will the correspondents be more copious and less irrelevant in the future?  Suppose that to be the case, will they be of any use to me in my place of exile?  Is it possible for a man in Samoa to be in touch with the great heart of the People?  And is it not perhaps a mere folly to attempt, from so hopeless a distance, anything so delicate as a series of papers?  Upon these points, perpend, and give me the results of your perpensions.

3rd.  The emolument would be agreeable to your humble servant.

I have now stated all the pros, and the most of the cons are come in by the way.  There follows, however, one immense Con (with a capital “C"), which I beg you to consider particularly.  I fear that, to be of any use for your magazine, these papers should begin with the beginning of a volume.  Even supposing my hands were free, this would be now impossible for next year.  You have to consider whether, supposing you have no other objection, it would be worth while to begin the series in the middle of a volume, or desirable to delay the whole matter until the beginning of another year.

Now supposing that the cons have it, and you refuse my offer, let me make another proposal, which you will be very inclined to refuse at the first off-go, but which I really believe might in time come to something.  You know how the penny papers have their answers to correspondents.  Why not do something of the same kind for the “culchawed”?  Why not get men like Stimson, Brownell, Professor James, Goldwin Smith, and others who will occur to you more readily than to me, to put and to answer a series of questions of intellectual and general interest, until at last you should have established a certain standard of matter to be discussed in this part of the Magazine?

I want you to get me bound volumes of the Magazine from its start.  The Lord knows I have had enough copies; where they are I know not.  A wandering author gathers no magazines.

The Wrecker is in no forrader state than in last reports.  I have indeed got to a period when I cannot well go on until I can refresh myself on the proofs of the beginning.  My respected collaborator, who handles the machine which is now addressing you, has indeed carried his labours farther, but not, I am led to understand, with what we used to call a blessing; at least, I have been refused a sight of his latest labours.  However, there is plenty of time ahead, and I feel no anxiety about the tale, except that it may meet with your approval.

All this voyage I have been busy over my Travels, which, given a very high temperature and the saloon of a steamer usually going before the wind, and with the cabins in front of the engines, has come very near to prostrating me altogether.  You will therefore understand that there are no more poems.  I wonder whether there are already enough, and whether you think that such a volume would be worth the publishing?  I shall hope to find in Sydney some expression of your opinion on this point.  Living as I do among ­not the most cultured of mankind ("splendidly educated and perfect gentlemen when sober") ­I attach a growing importance to friendly criticisms from yourself.

I believe that this is the most of our business.  As for my health, I got over my cold in a fine style, but have not been very well of late.  To my unaffected annoyance, the blood-spitting has started again.  I find the heat of a steamer decidedly wearing and trying in these latitudes, and I am inclined to think the superior expedition rather dearly paid for.  Still, the fact that one does not even remark the coming of a squall, nor feel relief on its departure, is a mercy not to be acknowledged without gratitude.  The rest of the family seem to be doing fairly well; both seem less run down than they were on the Equator, and Mrs. Stevenson very much less so.  We have now been three months away, have visited about thirty-five islands, many of which were novel to us, and some extremely entertaining; some also were old acquaintances, and pleasant to revisit.  In the meantime, we have really a capital time aboard ship, in the most pleasant and interesting society, and with (considering the length and nature of the voyage) an excellent table.  Please remember us all to Mr. Scribner, the young chieftain of the house, and the lady, whose health I trust is better.  To Mrs. Burlingame we all desire to be remembered, and I hope you will give our news to Low, St. Gaudens, Faxon, and others of the faithful in the city.  I shall probably return to Samoa direct, having given up all idea of returning to civilisation in the meanwhile.  There, on my ancestral acres, which I purchased six months ago from a blind Scots blacksmith, you will please address me until further notice.  The name of the ancestral acres is going to be Vailima; but as at the present moment nobody else knows the name, except myself and the co-patentees, it will be safer, if less ambitious, to address R. L. S., Apia, Samoa.  The ancestral acres run to upwards of three hundred; they enjoy the ministrations of five streams, whence the name.  They are all at the present moment under a trackless covering of magnificent forest, which would be worth a great deal if it grew beside a railway terminus.  To me, as it stands, it represents a handsome deficit.  Obliging natives from the Cannibal Islands are now cutting it down at my expense.  You would be able to run your magazine to much greater advantage if the terms of authors were on the same scale with those of my cannibals.  We have also a house about the size of a manufacturer’s lodge.  ’Tis but the egg of the future palace, over the details of which on paper Mrs. Stevenson and I have already shed real tears; what it will be when it comes to paying for it, I leave you to imagine.  But if it can only be built as now intended, it will be with genuine satisfaction and a growunded pride that I shall welcome you at the steps of my Old Colonial Home, when you land from the steamer on a long-merited holiday.  I speak much at my ease; yet I do not know, I may be now an outlaw, a bankrupt, the abhorred of all good men.  I do not know, you probably do.  Has Hyde turned upon me?  Have I fallen, like Danvers Carew?

It is suggested to me that you might like to know what will be my future society.  Three consuls, all at loggerheads with one another, or at the best in a clique of two against one; three different sects of missionaries, not upon the best of terms; and the Catholics and Protestants in a condition of unhealable ill-feeling as to whether a wooden drum ought or ought not to be beaten to announce the time of school.  The native population, very genteel, very songful, very agreeable, very good-looking, chronically spoiling for a fight (a circumstance not to be entirely neglected in the design of the palace).  As for the white population of (technically, “The Beach"), I don’t suppose it is possible for any person not thoroughly conversant with the South Seas to form the smallest conception of such a society, with its grog-shops, its apparently unemployed hangers-on, its merchants of all degrees of respectability and the reverse.  The paper, of which I must really send you a copy ­if yours were really a live magazine, you would have an exchange with the editor:  I assure you, it has of late contained a great deal of matter about one of your contributors ­rejoices in the name of Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser.  The advertisements in the Advertiser are permanent, being simply subsidies for its existence.  A dashing warfare of newspaper correspondence goes on between the various residents, who are rather fond of recurring to one another’s antecedents.  But when all is said, there are a lot of very nice, pleasant people, and I don’t know that Apia is very much worse than half a hundred towns that I could name.

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

   As above indicated, on the way between Samoa and Sydney Stevenson
   left the Janet Nicoll for a week’s stay in New Caledonia, during
   which he was hospitably received by the French officials.

     Hotel Sebastopol, Nouméa, August 1890.

MY DEAR CHARLES, ­I have stayed here a week while Lloyd and my wife continue to voyage in the Janet Nicoll; this I did, partly to see the convict system, partly to shorten my stay in the extreme cold ­hear me with my extreme! moi qui suis originaire d’Edimbourg ­of Sydney at this season.  I am feeling very seedy, utterly fatigued and overborne with sleep.  I have a fine old gentleman of a doctor, who attends and cheers and entertains, if he does not cure me; but even with his ministrations I am almost incapable of the exertion sufficient for this letter; and I am really, as I write, falling down with sleep.  What is necessary to say, I must try to say shortly.  Lloyd goes to clear out our establishments:  pray keep him in funds, if I have any; if I have not, pray try to raise them.  Here is the idea:  to install ourselves, at the risk of bankruptcy, in Samoa.  It is not the least likely it will pay (although it may); but it is almost certain it will support life, with very few external expenses.  If I die, it will be an endowment for the survivors, at least for my wife and Lloyd; and my mother, who might prefer to go home, has her own.  Hence I believe I shall do well to hurry my installation.  The letters are already in part done; in part done is a novel for Scribner; in the course of the next twelve months I should receive a considerable amount of money.  I am aware I had intended to pay back to my capital some of this.  I am now of opinion I should act foolishly.  Better to build the house and have a roof and farm of my own; and thereafter, with a livelihood assured, save and repay....  There is my livelihood, all but books and wine, ready in a nutshell; and it ought to be more easy to save and to repay afterwards.  Excellent, say you, but will you save and will you repay?  I do not know, said the Bell of Old Bow....  It seems clear to me....  The deuce of the affair is that I do not know when I shall see you and Colvin.  I guess you will have to come and see me:  many a time already we have arranged the details of your visit in the yet unbuilt house on the mountain.  I shall be able to get decent wine from Nouméa.  We shall be able to give you a decent welcome, and talk of old days. Apropos of old days, do you remember still the phrase we heard in Waterloo Place?  I believe you made a piece for the piano on that phrase.  Pray, if you remember it, send it me in your next.  If you find it impossible to write correctly, send it me à la récitative, and indicate the accents.  Do you feel (you must) how strangely heavy and stupid I am?  I must at last give up and go sleep; I am simply a rag.

The morrow. ­I feel better, but still dim and groggy.  To-night I go to the governor’s; such a lark ­no dress clothes ­twenty-four hours’ notice ­able-bodied Polish tailor ­suit made for a man with the figure of a puncheon ­same hastily altered for self with the figure of a bodkin ­sight inconceivable.  Never mind; dress clothes, “which nobody can deny”; and the officials have been all so civil that I liked neither to refuse nor to appear in mufti.  Bad dress clothes only prove you are a grisly ass; no dress clothes, even when explained, indicate a want of respect.  I wish you were here with me to help me dress in this wild raiment, and to accompany me to M. Noel-Pardon’s.  I cannot say what I would give if there came a knock now at the door and you came in.  I guess Noel-Pardon would go begging, and we might burn the f dress clothes in the back garden for a bonfire; or what would be yet more expensive and more humorous, get them once more expanded to fit you, and when that was done, a second time cut down for my gossamer dimensions.

I hope you never forget to remember me to your father, who has always a place in my heart, as I hope I have a little in his.  His kindness helped me infinitely when you and I were young; I recall it with gratitude and affection in this town of convicts at the world’s end.  There are very few things, my dear Charles, worth mention:  on a retrospect of life, the day’s flash and colour, one day with another, flames, dazzles, and puts to sleep; and when the days are gone, like a fast-flying thaumatrope, they make but a single pattern.  Only a few things stand out; and among these ­most plainly to me ­Rutland Square. ­Ever, my dear Charles, your affectionate friend,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

P.S. ­Just returned from trying on the dress clo’.  Lord, you should see the coat!  It stands out at the waist like a bustle, the flaps cross in front, the sleeves are like bags.

TO E. L. BURLINGAME

Proceeding from New Caledonia to Sydney, Stevenson again made a stay there of about a month, before going to settle in his new island home and superintend the operations of planting and building.  The next letter is in acknowledgment of proofs received from Messrs. Scribner of a proposed volume of verse to contain, besides Ticonderoga and the two ballads on Marquesan and Tahitian legends, a number of the other miscellaneous verses which he had written in the course of his travels.  In the end, the ballads only stood for publication at this time; the other verses were reserved, and have been posthumously published under the title Songs of Travel.

     Union Club, Sydney [August 1890].

MY DEAR BURLINGAME, ­

  Ballads.

The deuce is in this volume.  It has cost me more botheration and dubiety than any other I ever took in hand.  On one thing my mind is made up:  the verses at the end have no business there, and throw them down.  Many of them are bad, many of the rest want nine years’ keeping, and the remainder are not relevant ­throw them down; some I never want to hear of more, others will grow in time towards decent items in a second Underwoods ­and in the meanwhile, down with them!  At the same time, I have a sneaking idea the ballads are not altogether without merit ­I don’t know if they’re poetry, but they’re good narrative, or I’m deceived. (You’ve never said one word about them, from which I astutely gather you are dead set against:  “he was a diplomatic man” ­extract from epitaph of E. L. B. ­“and remained on good terms with Minor Poets.”) You will have to judge:  one of the Gladstonian trinity of paths must be chosen. (1st) Either publish the five ballads, such as they are, in a volume called Ballads; in which case pray send sheets at once to Chatto and Windus.  Or (2nd) write and tell me you think the book too small, and I’ll try and get into the mood to do some more.  Or (3rd) write and tell me the whole thing is a blooming illusion; in which case draw off some twenty copies for my private entertainment, and charge me with the expense of the whole dream.

In the matter of rhyme no man can judge himself; I am at the world’s end, have no one to consult, and my publisher holds his tongue.  I call it unfair and almost unmanly.  I do indeed begin to be filled with animosity; Lord, wait till you see the continuation of The Wrecker, when I introduce some New York publishers....  It’s a good scene; the quantities you drink and the really hideous language you are represented as employing may perhaps cause you one tithe of the pain you have inflicted by your silence on, sir, The Poetaster,

     R. L. S.

Lloyd is off home; my wife and I dwell sundered:  she in lodgings, preparing for the move; I here in the club, and at my old trade ­bedridden.  Naturally, the visit home is given up; we only wait our opportunity to get to Samoa, where, please, address me.

Have I yet asked you to despatch the books and papers left in your care to me at Apia, Samoa?  I wish you would, quam primum.

     R. L. S.

TO HENRY JAMES

     Union Club, Sydney, August 1890.

MY DEAR HENRY JAMES, ­Kipling is too clever to live.  The Bête Humaine I had already perused in Nouméa, listening the while to the strains of the convict band.  He is a Beast; but not human, and, to be frank, not very interesting.  “Nervous maladies:  the homicidal ward,” would be the better name:  O, this game gets very tedious.

Your two long and kind letters have helped to entertain the old familiar sickbed.  So has a book called The Bondman, by Hall Caine; I wish you would look at it.  I am not half-way through yet.  Read the book, and communicate your views.  Hall Caine, by the way, appears to take Hugo’s view of History and Chronology (Later; the book doesn’t keep up; it gets very wild.)

I must tell you plainly ­I can’t tell Colvin ­I do not think I shall come to England more than once, and then it’ll be to die.  Health I enjoy in the tropics; even here, which they call sub- or semi-tropical, I come only to catch cold.  I have not been out since my arrival; live here in a nice bedroom by the fireside, and read books and letters from Henry James, and send out to get his Tragic Muse, only to be told they can’t be had as yet in Sydney, and have altogether a placid time.  But I can’t go out!  The thermometer was nearly down to 50° the other day ­no temperature for me, Mr. James:  how should I do in England?  I fear not at all.  Am I very sorry?  I am sorry about seven or eight people in England, and one or two in the States.  And outside of that, I simply prefer Samoa.  These are the words of honesty and soberness. (I am fasting from all but sin, coughing, The Bondman, a couple of eggs and a cup of tea.) I was never fond of towns, houses, society, or (it seems) civilisation.  Nor yet it seems was I ever very fond of (what is technically called) God’s green earth.  The sea, islands, the islanders, the island life and climate, make and keep me truly happier.  These last two years I have been much at sea, and I have never wearied; sometimes I have indeed grown impatient for some destination; more often I was sorry that the voyage drew so early to an end; and never once did I lose my fidelity to blue water and a ship.  It is plain, then, that for me my exile to the place of schooners and islands can be in no sense regarded as a calamity.

Good-bye just now:  I must take a turn at my proofs.

N.B. ­Even my wife has weakened about the sea.  She wearied, the last time we were ashore, to get afloat again. ­Yours ever,

     R. L. S.

TO MARCEL SCHWOB

     Union Club, Sydney, August 19th, 1890.

MY DEAR MR. SCHWOB, ­Mais, alors, vous avez tous les bonheurs, vous! More about Villon; it seems incredible:  when it is put in order, pray send it me.

You wish to translate the Black Arrow:  dear sir, you are hereby authorised; but I warn you, I do not like the work.  Ah, if you, who know so well both tongues, and have taste and instruction ­if you would but take a fancy to translate a book of mine that I myself admired ­for we sometimes admire our own ­or I do ­with what satisfaction would the authority be granted!  But these things are too much to expect. Vous ne détestez pas alors mes bonnes femmes? moi, je les déteste. I have never pleased myself with any women of mine save two character parts, one of only a few lines ­the Countess of Rosen, and Madame Desprez in the Treasure of Franchard.

I had indeed one moment of pride about my poor Black Arrow:  Dickon Crookback I did, and I do, think is a spirited and possible figure.  Shakespeare’s ­O, if we can call that cocoon Shakespeare! ­Shakespeare’s is spirited ­one likes to see the untaught athlete butting against the adamantine ramparts of human nature, head down, breech up; it reminds us how trivial we are to-day, and what safety resides in our triviality.  For spirited it may be, but O, sure not possible!  I love Dumas and I love Shakespeare:  you will not mistake me when I say that the Richard of the one reminds me of the Porthos of the other; and if by any sacrifice of my own literary baggage I could clear the Vicomte de Bragelonne of Porthos, Jekyll might go, and the Master, and the Black Arrow, you may be sure, and I should think my life not lost for mankind if half a dozen more of my volumes must be thrown in.

The tone of your pleasant letters makes me egotistical; you make me take myself too gravely.  Comprehend how I have lived much of my time in France, and loved your country, and many of its people, and all the time was learning that which your country has to teach ­breathing in rather that atmosphere of art which can only there be breathed; and all the time knew ­and raged to know ­that I might write with the pen of angels or of heroes, and no Frenchman be the least the wiser!  And now steps in M. Marcel Schwob, writes me the most kind encouragement, and reads and understands, and is kind enough to like my work.

I am just now overloaded with work.  I have two huge novels on hand ­The Wrecker and the Pearl Fisher, in collaboration with my stepson:  the latter, the Pearl Fisher, I think highly of, for a black, ugly, trampling, violent story, full of strange scenes and striking characters.  And then I am about waist-deep in my big book on the South Seas:  the big book on the South Seas it ought to be, and shall.  And besides, I have some verses in the press, which, however, I hesitate to publish.  For I am no judge of my own verse; self-deception is there so facile.  All this and the cares of an impending settlement in Samoa keep me very busy, and a cold (as usual) keeps me in bed.

Alas, I shall not have the pleasure to see you yet awhile, if ever.  You must be content to take me as a wandering voice, and in the form of occasional letters from recondite islands; and address me, if you will be good enough to write, to Apia, Samoa.  My stepson, Mr. Osbourne, goes home meanwhile to arrange some affairs; it is not unlikely he may go to Paris to arrange about the illustrations to my South Seas; in which case I shall ask him to call upon you, and give you some word of our outlandish destinies.  You will find him intelligent, I think; and I am sure, if (par hasard) you should take any interest in the islands, he will have much to tell you. ­Herewith I conclude, and am your obliged and interested correspondent,

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

P.S. ­The story you refer to has got lost in the post.

TO ANDREW LANG

     Union Club, Sydney [August 1890].

MY DEAR LANG, ­I observed with a great deal of surprise and interest that a controversy in which you have been taking sides at home, in yellow London, hinges in part at least on the Gilbert Islanders and their customs in burial.  Nearly six months of my life has been passed in the group:  I have revisited it but the other day; and I make haste to tell you what I know.  The upright stones ­I enclose you a photograph of one on Apemama ­are certainly connected with religion; I do not think they are adored.  They stand usually on the windward shore of the islands, that is to say, apart from habitation (on enclosed islands, where the people live on the sea side, I do not know how it is, never having lived on one).  I gathered from Tembinoka, Rex Apemamae, that the pillars were supposed to fortify the island from invasion:  spiritual martellos.  I think he indicated they were connected with the cult of Tenti ­pronounce almost as chintz in English, the t being explosive; but you must take this with a grain of salt, for I knew no word of Gilbert Island; and the King’s English, although creditable, is rather vigorous than exact.  Now, here follows the point of interest to you:  such pillars, or standing stones, have no connection with graves.  The most elaborate grave that I have ever seen in the group ­to be certain ­is in the form of a raised border of gravel, usually strewn with broken glass.  One, of which I cannot be sure that it was a grave, for I was told by one that it was, and by another that it was not ­consisted of a mound about breast high in an excavated taro swamp, on the top of which was a child’s house, or rather maniapa ­that is to say, shed, or open house, such as is used in the group for social or political gatherings ­so small that only a child could creep under its eaves.  I have heard of another great tomb on Apemama, which I did not see; but here again, by all accounts, no sign of a standing stone.  My report would be ­no connection between standing stones and sepulture.  I shall, however, send on the terms of the problem to a highly intelligent resident trader, who knows more than perhaps any one living, white or native, of the Gilbert group; and you shall have the result.  In Samoa, whither I return for good, I shall myself make inquiries; up to now, I have neither seen nor heard of any standing stones in that group. ­Yours,

     R. L. STEVENSON.

TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE

Exactly what tale of doings in the garret at Skerryvore had been related to Stevenson (in the character of Robin Lewison) by his correspondent (in the character of Miss Green) cannot well be gathered from this reply.  But the letter is interesting as containing the only mention of certain schemes of romance afterwards abandoned.

     Union Club, Sydney, 1st September 1890.

MY DEAR MISS BOODLE, ­I find you have been behaving very ill:  been very ill, in fact.  I find this hard to forgive; probably should not forgive it at all if Robin Lewison had not been sick himself and a wretched sick-room prisoner in this club for near a month.  Well, the best and bravest sometimes fail.  But who is Miss Green?  Don’t know her!  I knew a lady of an exceedingly generous and perfervid nature ­worthy to be suspected of Scotch blood for the pertervidness ­equipped with a couple ­perhaps a brace sounds better English ­of perfervid eyes ­with a certain graceful gaucherie of manner, almost like a child’s, and that is at once the highest point of gaucherie and grace ­a friend everybody I ever saw was delighted to see come and sorry to see go.  Yes, I knew that lady, and can see her now.  But who was Miss Green?  There is something amiss here.  Either the Robin Lewisons have been very shabbily treated, or ­and this is the serious part of the affair ­somebody unknown to me has been entrusted with the key of the Skerryvore garret.  This may go as far as the Old Bailey, ma’am.

But why should I gird at you or anybody, when the truth is we are the most miserable sinners in the world?  For we are not coming home, I dare not.  Even coming to Sydney has made me quite ill, and back I go to Samoa, whither please address ­Apia, Samoa ­(and remember it is Sámó-a, a spondee to begin with, or Sahmoa, if you prefer that writing) ­back I and my wife go to Samoa to live on our landed estate with four black labour boys in a kind of a sort of house, which Lloyd will describe to you.  For he has gone to England:  receive him like a favour and a piece of cake; he is our greeting to friends.

I paused here to put in the date on the first page.  I am precious nearly through my fortieth year, thinks I to myself.  Must be nearly as old as Miss Green, thinks I. O, come!  I exclaimed, not as bad as that!  Some lees of youth about the old remnant yet.

My amiable Miss Green, I beg you to give me news of your health, and if it may be good news.  And when you shall have seen Lloyd, to tell me how his reports of the South Seas and our new circumstances strike such an awfully old person as yourself, and to tell me if you ever received a letter I sent you from Hawaii.  I remember thinking ­or remember remembering rather ­it was (for me) quite a long respectable communication.  Also, you might tell me if you got my war-whoop and scalping-knife assault on lé nommé Hyde.

I ought not to forget to say your tale fetched me (Miss Green) by its really vile probability.  If we had met that man in Honolulu he would have done it, and Miss Green would have done it.  Only, alas! there is no completed novel lying in the garret:  would there were!  It should be out to-morrow with the name to it, and relieve a kind of tightness in the money market much deplored in our immediate circle.  To be sure (now I come to think of it) there are some seven chapters of The Great North Road; three, I think, of Robin Run the Hedge, given up when some nefarious person pre-empted the name; and either there ­or somewhere else ­likely New York ­one chapter of David Balfour, and five or six of the Memoirs of Henry Shovel.  That’s all.  But Lloyd and I have one-half of The Wrecker in type, and a good part of The Pearl Fisher (O, a great and grisly tale that!) in MS. And I have a projected, entirely planned love-story ­everybody will think it dreadfully improper, I’m afraid ­called Cannonmills.  And I’ve a vague, rosy haze before me ­a love-story too, but not improper ­called The Rising Sun.  (It’s the name of the wayside inn where the story, or much of the story, runs; but it’s a kind of a pun:  it means the stirring up of a boy by falling in love, and how he rises in the estimation of a girl who despised him, though she liked him, and had befriended him; I really scarce see beyond their childhood yet, but I want to go beyond, and make each out-top the other by successions:  it should be pretty and true if I could do it.) Also I have my big book, The South Seas, always with me, and a sair handfu’ ­if I may be allowed to speak Scotch to Miss Green ­a sair handfu’ it is likely to be.  All this literary gossip I bestow upon you entre confrères, Miss Green, which is little more than fair, Miss Green.

Allow me to remark that it is now half-past twelve o’clock of the living night; I should certainly be ashamed of myself, and you also; for this is no time of the night for Miss Green to be colloguing with a comparatively young gentleman of forty.  So with all the kindest wishes to yourself, and all at Lostock, and all friends in Hants, or over the borders in Dorset, I bring my folly to an end.  Please believe, even when I am silent, in my real affection; I need not say the same for Fanny, more obdurately silent, not less affectionate than I. ­Your friend,

     ROBERT ­ROBIN LEWISON.

(Nearly had it wrong ­force of habit.)

TO MRS. CHARLES FAIRCHILD

     Union Club, Sydney [September 1890].

MY DEAR MRS. FAIRCHILD, ­I began a letter to you on board the Janet Nicoll on my last cruise, wrote, I believe, two sheets, and ruthlessly destroyed the flippant trash.  Your last has given me great pleasure and some pain, for it increased the consciousness of my neglect.  Now, this must go to you, whatever it is like.

...  It is always harshness that one regrets....  I regret also my letter to Dr. Hyde.  Yes, I do; I think it was barbarously harsh; if I did it now, I would defend Damien no less well, and give less pain to those who are alive.  These promptings of good-humour are not all sound; the three times three, cheer boys cheer, and general amiability business rests on a sneaking love of popularity, the most insidious enemy of virtue.  On the whole, it was virtuous to defend Damien; but it was harsh to strike so hard at Dr. Hyde.  When I wrote the letter, I believed he would bring an action, in which case I knew I could be beggared.  And as yet there has come no action; the injured Doctor has contented himself up to now with the (truly innocuous) vengeance of calling me a “Bohemian Crank,” and I have deeply wounded one of his colleagues whom I esteemed and liked.

Well, such is life.  You are quite right; our civilisation is a hollow fraud, all the fun of life is lost by it; all it gains is that a larger number of persons can continue to be contemporaneously unhappy on the surface of the globe.  O, unhappy! ­there is a big word and a false ­continue to be not nearly ­by about twenty per cent. ­so happy as they might be:  that would be nearer the mark.

When ­observe that word, which I will write again and larger ­WHEN you come to see us in Samoa, you will see for yourself a healthy and happy people.

You see, you are one of the very few of our friends rich enough to come and see us; and when my house is built, and the road is made, and we have enough fruit planted and poultry and pigs raised, it is undeniable that you must come ­must is the word; that is the way in which I speak to ladies.  You and Fairchild, anyway ­perhaps my friend Blair ­we’ll arrange details in good time.  It will be the salvation of your souls, and make you willing to die.

Let me tell you this:  In ’74 or 5 there came to stay with my father and mother a certain Mr. Seed, a prime minister or something of New Zealand.  He spotted what my complaint was; told me that I had no business to stay in Europe; that I should find all I cared for, and all that was good for me, in the Navigator Islands; sat up till four in the morning persuading me, demolishing my scruples.  And I resisted:  I refused to go so far from my father and mother.  O, it was virtuous, and O, wasn’t it silly!  But my father, who was always my dearest, got to his grave without that pang; and now in 1890, I (or what is left of me) go at last to the Navigator Islands.  God go with us!  It is but a Pisgah sight when all is said; I go there only to grow old and die; but when you come, you will see it is a fair place for the purpose.

Flaubert has not turned up; I hope he will soon; I knew of him only through Maxime Descamps. ­With kindest messages to yourself and all of yours, I remain

     ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.