driven to abandon Carlyle. Mr. Gosse has recorded that Walter Pater in turn refused to read Stevenson lest the individuality of his own style might be affected, but it is more curious to find Stevenson himself at so late a stage fearing the influences of a Latin author.

As to his classics, he was ignorant of Greek, and preferred the baldest of Bohn's translations to more literary versions that might come between him and the originals. His whole relation to Latin, however, was very curious and interesting. He had never mastered the grammar of the language, and to the end made the most elementary mistakes. Nevertheless, he had a keen appreciation of the best authors, and, indeed, I am not sure that Virgil was not more to him than any other poet, ancient or modern. From all the qualities of the pedant he was, of course, entirely free. Just as he wrote Scots as well as he was able, "not caring if it hailed from Lauderdale or Angus, from the Mearns or Galloway," but if he had ever heard a good word, he "used it without shame," so it was with his Latin. Technicalities of law and the vocabulary of Ducange were admitted to equal rights with authors of the Golden Age.

Latin no doubt told for much in the dignity and compression of his style, and in itself it was to himas we see in his diary—always a living language. But as an influence, Rome counted to him as something very much more than a literature-a whole system of law and empire.

From this expedition he returned to Apia in an open boat, a twenty-eight hours' voyage of sixty-five

miles, on which schooners have before now been lost. But for the journey and the exposure Stevenson was none the worse. "It is like a fairy-story that I should have recovered liberty and strength, and should go round again among my fellow-men, boating, riding, bathing, toiling hard with a wood-knife in the forest."

Before the end of April the family were installed in the new house, and in May they were reinforced not only by the elder Mrs. Stevenson, but also by Mrs. Strong and her boy from Sydney, who thenceforward remained under Stevenson's protecting care.

His wanderings were now at an end, and he was to enter upon a period of settled residence. Stevenson has been generally regarded as a tourist and an outside observer in Samoa, especially by those who least knew the Pacific themselves. It must always be borne in mind that before Stevenson settled down for the last three and a half years of his life in his house of Vailima, he had spent an almost equal length of time in visiting other islands in the Pacific. On his travels he enjoyed exceptional opportunities of gathering information, and in general knowledge of the South Seas, and of Samoa in particular, he was probably at the time of his death rivalled by no more than two or three persons of anything like his education or intelligence.

CHAPTER XV

VAILIMA-1891-94

"We thank Thee for this place in which we dwell; for the love that unites us; for the peace accorded to us this day, for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food, and the bright skies that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of the earth and our friendly helpers in this foreign isle. . . . Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not, give us strength to encounter that which is to come, that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another."-R. L. S., Vailima Prayers.

T

HE new house and the augmentation of his household marked the definite change in Stevenson's life, which now assumed the character that it preserved until the end. In private his material comfort was increased, and he was delivered from most of the interruptions to which his work had lately been subject; in public it now became manifest that he was to be a permanent resident in Samoa, enjoying all the advantages of wealth and fame, and the consideration conferred by numerous retainers.

To the world of his readers, and to many who never read his books, his position became one of extreme interest. He was now living, as the legend went, among the wildest of savages, who were clearly either always at war or circulating reports of wars immedi

ately to come; settled in a house, the splendour and luxury of which were much exaggerated by rumour; dwelling in a climate which was associated with all the glories of tropic scenery and vegetation, and also, in the minds of his countrymen at all events, with a tremendous cataclysm of the elements, from which the British navy had emerged with triumph. It was little wonder that, as Mr. Gosse wrote to him, "Since Byron was in Greece, nothing has appealed to the ordinary literary man so much as that you should be living in the South Seas.'

The island of Upolu on which Stevenson lived was the central and most important of the three principal islands composing the group to which the collective name of Samoa is applied. It is some five-and-forty miles in length and about eleven in average breadth. The interior is densely wooded, and a central range of hills runs from east to west. Apia, the chief town, is situated about the centre of the north coast, and it was on the hills about three miles inland that Stevenson made his home.

The house and clearing lay on the western edge of a tongue of land several hundred yards in width, situated between two streams, from the westernmost of which the steep side of Vaea Mountain, covered with forest, rises to a height of thirteen hundred feet above the sea. On the east, beyond Stevenson's boundary, the ground fell away rapidly into the deep valley of the Vaisigano, the principal river of the island. On the other hand, the western stream, formed by the junction of several smaller water-courses above, ran within Stevenson's own ground, and, not far below

the house, plunged over a barrier of rock with a fall of about twelve feet into a delightful pool, just deep enough for bathing and arched over with orangetrees. A few hundred yards lower down it crossed his line with an abrupt descent of forty or fifty feet. It was from this stream and its four chief tributaries that Stevenson gave to the property the Samoan name of Vailima, or Five Waters.

The place itself lay, as has been said, some three miles from the coast, and nearly six hundred feet above sea-level. From the town a good carriageroad, a mile in length, led to the native village of Tanugamanono, where the Stevensons had lodged upon their first arrival. Beyond that point a road was afterwards made, but for a time there was nothing but the roughest of footpaths, which led across the hills to the other side of the island through a forest region wholly uninhabited, all the native villages being either by the sea, or within a short distance of the coast.

East and west and south of the clearing the land was covered with thick bush, containing many scattered lofty forest trees, like those judiciously spared by the axemen where they did not endanger the new house. Here and there in the forest was a great banyan with branching roots, covering many square yards of surface, and affording a resting-place for the flying-foxes, the great fruit-eating bats, which sally forth at dusk with slow, heavy flight, like a straggling company of rooks, making for the coast. Even to the north, most of the ground between Vailima and Apia had to some extent been cultivated, yet along