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a half years took him to most of the principal islands of the Eastern and Central Pacific, and finally to Samoa, where he bought a large tract of land two miles behind the town of Apia, and six hundred feet above it, and built him a home there. And how he here employed his "inch of life "— rejoicing in labor, taking the keenest pleasure in possession, gathering about him a family, and planning for the future - is chronicled in the Vailima Letters. It was a time of political disturbance and of grave disquietude in the island. But when he saw the natives lying helpless, despoiled of their rights, and misjudged and misgoverned by a selfish foreign officialdom, the invalid in quest of life, unmindful of his own dangers, even threatened with deportation, flung himself, with a courage that was ever the charm of his personality into international politics; and like a splendid prodigal, he spent without stint of his husbanded store of strength in the interests of justice and humanity.1 And it was out of this enriched experience that he was giving us Weir of Hermiston, which promised to be his masterpiece, when the end came that December evening in 1894. The next day, he was buried above his Vailima home on the summit of the Vaea mountain, far away from the graves of his fathers. There they erected to him a rude monument, and engraved on it his own "Requiem":

"Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie,
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

"This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”

1 See "Letters to The Times"; A Footnote to History; also the Letters of this period.

SUBJECTS FOR STUDY AND COMPOSITION

1. Why I like (or dislike) Treasure Island.

2. What piece of description do you like best, and why?

3. Give your appreciation of Jim Hawkins; also of Dick Johnson. 4. Make an analysis of the character of John Silver.

5. "Nobody minds Ben Gunn; dead or alive, nobody minds him." Do you, and why?

B. The parrot in Treasure Island and in Robinson Crusoe. 1. What uses have the snatches of song in this tale? Compare their effect with the effect produced by song in other books of your reading. See note on page 221.

8. Do the buccaneers all act consistently with Israel Hands's dictum, "I never seen good come o' goodness yet"? Make your point clear by an analysis of their conduct. 9. Compare Billy Bones's conduct in the inn with that of the buccaneer's in Irving's "Wolfert Webber" (Tales of a Traveller).

10. Compare

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Flint's pointer

and the treasure hunt with the experience of the treasure hunters in Poe's The Gold-Bug.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, published in twenty-five volumes by Charles Scribner's Sons, contain, besides the books issued during the author's lifetime, the posthumous St. Ives and Weir of Hermiston. "The Thistle Edition" (subscription edition) by the same publishers contains, besides all of the author's collected writings, The Vailima Letters two volumes) and The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (two volumes), both edited by Sidney Colvin, and The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson by Graham Balfour; although the Letters and the Life may be had separately.

Other biographies that may be found helpful are: Robert Louis Stevenson by T. Cope Cornford (Dodd, Mead and Company); Robert Louis Stevenson (Famous Scots Series) by Margaret M. Black (Charles Scribner's Sons); Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life in Criticism by H. Bellyse Baildon (A. Wessels & Co.); and Sidney Colvin's outline in The Dictionary of National Biography.

Studies on. Stevenson that are to be commended are: Robert Louis Stevenson by Walter Raleigh (Edward Arnold); Stevenson's Attitude to Life by John Franklin Genung (Thomas Y. Crowell and Company); and "Stevenson's Philosophy of Life" in Philosophy and Life by J. H. Muirhead (Macmillan and Company). In this connection may be studied with profit The Art of Fiction by Walter Besant and Henry James (Cupples, Upham and Company): the two papers that called from Stevenson "A Humble Remonstrance (Memories and Portraits), which, together with "A Gossip on Romance" (same volume), contains his theory of

this art.

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Reference is given below to a few of the more helpful and acces sible of the many magazine articles on Stevenson: "Personal Recollections" by Edmund Gosse (Century Magazine, 50: 447); "Recollections" by Andrew Lang (North American Review, 160: 185); "The Art of Stevenson" by G. W. T. Omond (North American Review, 171: 348); "Characteristics" by J. A. McCulloch (Westminster Review, 149:631); "Portraits," etc. (McClure's Magazine, 4: 274); Memorial Addresses" (The Critic, 26: 29); "Stevenson at Play" by Lloyd Osbourne (Scribner's Magazine, 24: 709); and critiques by Stephen Gwynn (Fortnightly Review, 56:776, also 63:561), by Leslie Stephen (National Review for 1902), by Henry James (Century Magazine, 35: 869, also North American Review, 170:61), by C. T. Copeland (Atlantic Monthly, 75: 537), and by unknown authors (Edinburgh Review, 182: 106, and Quarterly Review, 180:324).

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