Their discussions over the work were sometimes hot and protracted, for neither was disposed to yield without a struggle. Speaking of this in a letter to his mother, she says: "If I die before Louis, my last earnest request is that he shall publish nothing without his father's approval. I know that means little short of destruction to both of them, but there will be no one else. The field is always covered with my dead and wounded, and often I am forced to a compromise, but still I make a very good fight." In this battle of wits they found intense enjoyment, and it was, in fact, an intellectual comradeship that few writers have been fortunate enough to enjoy in their own households.

While at Bournemouth an occasional respite from illness enabled them to enjoy the society of friends in a limited way—among them their neighbours, Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, Sir Henry Taylor and his daughters, and many people of note who came down from London to see them. The incidents of these friendships have been fully dealt with in Balfour's Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, and need not be treated extensively here. One of their neighbours, Miss Adelaide Boodle, who was given the jocose title of "gamekeeper" when she assumed charge of Skerryvore after their departure from England, writes thus of her attachment to Mrs. Stevenson: "Among all her friends here there was never one who loved her more whole-heartedly than her 'gamekeeper,' to whom in after years she gave the sweet pet name of the 'little brown deer.' From the first day that we met at Skerryvore she took entire possession of my heart, and there she will forever bear sway. There is an old gardener here, too, who was her devoted slave at Skerryvore. Of course she never trusted him the length of her little finger, but she used him as extra hands and feet. Her parting charge to me—given in his presence—has never been forgotten by either of us: 'Remember, child, if you ever see Philips approach my creepers with a pruning knife you are to snatch it from his hand and plunge it into his heart!"

Among the visitors was John Sargent, the American painter, who came to paint Mr. Stevenson's portrait—a picture which was regarded as too peculiar to be satisfactory. When Sargent painted it he put Mrs. Stevenson, dressed in an East Indian costume, in the background, intending it, not for a portrait, but merely as a bit of colour to balance the picture. It was a part of the costume that her feet should be bare, and this fact gave rise to a fantastic story that has often gone the rounds in print, and will probably continue to do so till the end of time, that when she first came to London she was such a savage that she went to dinners and evening entertainments barefoot. This was but one of the many strange tales that appeared from time to time concerning her, all of which she refused to contradict, no matter how false or malicious they might be, for she felt that the name she bore was not to be lowered by appearing in stupid or ridiculous controversy; for that reason she would never see newspaper reporters, and though many so-called "interviews" with her have been printed, none of them are genuine. She was misrepresented by the press in many ways, and even wantonly attacked, but refused to break her rule under any circumstances. During the last days of Jules Simoneau, of Monterey, a statement appeared in the papers to the effect that he was being permitted to suffer and die in want, and although it was perfectly well known to her friends and many other persons that she had supported him in comfort for years, she would not make any contradiction in the public press.

One of the interesting people she met while in England was Prince Kropotkin, the noted Russian revolutionist. Mrs. Stevenson, believing that Kropotkin was concerned in the blowing up of a French village while a country fair was in progress, resulting in the killing of a number of innocent people, prevented her husband from signing a petition that was instituted for his release from the French prison where he was confined. When he was finally freed and went to England, at the urgent request of Henry James she consented to meet him, and found him to be a most charming person. He assured her that, judging from the expression of her eyes, she was born to be a nihilist, and when she indignantly denied this, still insisted that she should learn to play the game of solitaire, for if she should ever have to go to prison it might save her life and reason, as it had his. She consented, not with the anticipation of spending any portion of her life behind prison-bars, but in order to use the game to amuse her husband during his long periods of forced and speechless seclusion. She would sit by his bedside and play her game, and he took great pleasure in watching it and pointing at the cards that he thought she ought to play. In later years, when he had gone to the other world, and the days grew long and lonely, this game of solitaire, so strangely acquired from the bearded Russian, became a solace.

But of all the guests that came to Skerryvore, the best loved and most welcome was Mrs. Stevenson's fellow countryman, Henry James, who often ran down to see them. In the house there was a certain large blue chair in which he liked to sit. It was called the "Henry James" chair, and no one else was allowed to use it. It was to him that Louis Stevenson wrote the poem called "Who Comes To-Night?" Speaking of their first meeting, Mrs. Stevenson wrote to her mother-in-law: "We have had a very pleasant visitor. One evening a card was handed in with 'Henry James' upon it. He spent that evening, asked to come again the next night, arriving almost before we had got done with dinner, and staying as late as he thought he might, and asking to come the next evening, which is to-night. I call that very flattering. I had always been told that he was the type of an Englishman, but, except that he looks like the Prince of Wales, I call him the type of an American. He is gentle, amiable, and soothing."

A wedding anniversary came around, and it was resolved to celebrate it by a dinner. Henry James was the only guest, and he took a naive delight in the American dishes which his hostess had prepared to remind him of his native land. She writes: "Our dinner was most successful, our guest continually asking for double helpings and breaking out into heartfelt praises of the food. It was a sort of lady's and literary man's dinner; everything was just as good as could be, and under each napkin was a paper with verses for each person written by Louis."

Long afterwards, when Mr. James was in America for his first visit in many years, he went to see Mrs. Stevenson in her San Francisco house. He had come up from the southern part of the State, and was so enchanted with the sights along the way—the flowery hill-slopes and green ferny canyons—that for the first time he was almost persuaded to abandon his adopted home and come to live among the orange-groves of California. "When I come to dinner," said he, "please have a large dish of California oranges on the table if you have nothing else." Despite a certain stiffness of manner and speech, he was a man of kindly heart and simple, unworldly nature. After the first ice was broken, the most unintellectual person might prattle away to him at ease, for his sympathies were of the broadest. Both Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson had a deep affection for him, and "no matter who else was there, the evenings seemed empty without him."

In the meantime Mr. Stevenson's health went but badly, and his wife gave up practically all her time and strength to his care.

In May, 1887, the elder Stevenson died, breaking the last tie that held them to England, and three months later Louis Stevenson, with his mother, wife, and stepson, set sail for America.



CHAPTER VII

AWAY TO SUNNIER LANDS.

After boarding the Ludgate Hill, the tramp steamship on which they had taken passage for New York, chiefly on account of her unusually spacious cabins, they discovered, somewhat to their discomfiture, that the cargo, listed by the agent as "notions," really consisted largely of live stock—horses to be taken on at Havre, and a consignment of monkeys. All their party were of the sort, however, who have a "heart for any fate," so they agreed to regard this as only an added adventure. As it turned out, they were not disappointed, for, as the elder Mrs. Stevenson writes, "It was very amusing and like a circus to see the horses come on board," while Jocko, a large ape, which soon struck up a warm friendship with Mr. Stevenson, furnished them with a vast amount of entertainment. The exceptional freedom which they enjoyed on board, too, more than counterbalanced any lack of elegance. In a vein of exuberant joy at this escape from the narrow confines of the sick-room, Louis writes to his Cousin Bob:

"I was so happy on board that ship I could not have believed it possible. We had the beastliest weather and many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp ship gave us many comforts; we could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at sea. And truly there is nothing else. I had literally forgotten what happiness was, and the full mind—full of external and physical things, not full of cares and labors and rot about a fellow's behavior. My heart literally sang; I truly care for nothing so much as that."

The two ladies took up knitting to while away the long hours at sea, and so the days slipped peacefully by, with the invalid steadily gaining in health until they struck a heavy fog on the Newfoundland banks, where he caught a cold.

They reached New York on September 7, 1887, at the time when Stevenson's fame was in its flood-tide. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had just made a tremendous impression on the reading public; the idea of dual personality was being discussed on all sides; ministers preached sermons about it. Stevenson was amazed and bewildered, though immensely pleased, at the sudden turn of fortune's wheel. Here, indeed, was success at last in full measure.

Their original plan had been to try the climate of Colorado, but the long overland journey seemed too great an ordeal in his condition, and, hearing of Saranac in the Adirondacks, then just coming into prominence as a resort for consumptives, they decided to make a trial of it. While Louis and his mother paid a visit to the Fairchilds at Newport, his wife and stepson went on to the mountain place to make arrangements.

This sanatorium was established by Doctor Edward Livingstone Trudeau, a New York physician who had nursed his brother through tuberculosis and later developed the disease himself. He had tried going South and taking daily exercise, but as these attempts at a cure only made matters worse, in a sort of desperation he went to the Adirondacks, not so much for health as for love of the great forest and the wild life. It was then a rough, inaccessible region, visited only by hunters and fishermen, and was considered to have a most inclement and trying climate. Trudeau was carried to the place of Paul Smith, a guide and hotel-keeper, on a mattress, but it was not long before he was able to move about and to get some enjoyment out of life. When he first spent a winter there it was thought to mean his death-warrant, but, to his own surprise, he soon began to eat and sleep, and lost his fever. In 1876 he moved his family to Saranac and lived there always after that. Physicians in New York, hearing of the case of Trudeau, began to send patients now and then to try the climate at Saranac, and in that small way the health resort, now so extensive, had its beginning. Stevenson went there in the early days of the sanatorium, when the place was a mere little logging village, where logs were cut and floated down the river.

There were two churches in the place, called by the appropriate names of St. Luke the Beloved Physician and St. John in the Wilderness, the latter a picturesque structure of logs. These churches, both of the Episcopal denomination, were built and furnished as a testimonial of gratitude by persons who had recovered health or had friends under treatment there.

As soon as Mrs. Stevenson had her people settled at Saranac she left them and went to Indiana to visit her mother and sister, stopping on the way for a few days with the Bellamy Storers at Cincinnati. "The Storers live in a sort of enchanted palace," she writes, "and are very simple and gentle and kind, and altogether lovely. Mrs. Storer has a pottery, where poor ladies with artistic tastes get work and encouragement. She also has a large hospital for children, and a little girl of her own with a genius for drawing. Mr. Storer is six feet three and a half inches in height and has a Greek profile and soft large brown eyes."

The Stevensons reached Saranac when the woods were all aflame with autumn glory, and to Mr. Stevenson's mother it all seemed unreal and "more like a painted scene in a theatre" than actuality.

The house in which they lived, a white frame cottage with green shutters and a veranda around it, belonged to a guide named Andrew Baker, who took parties into the woods for hunting and fishing excursions. Baker was a typical frontiersman—brave, obstinate, independent, and fearless—who might have stepped out of Leather Stocking, and he had a kind, sweet wife. The cottage stood on high ground, so that its occupants could look down on the river, and the view, except for the brilliant hues of the frost-tinted leaves, was enough like the Highlands to make Louis and his mother feel quite at home.

Life in the cottage was frontier-like in its simplicity, and the Scotch lady, for whom this was the first experience in "roughing it," asked for many things that caused great surprise to the village storekeeper, including such unheard-of luxuries as coffee-pots, teapots, and egg-cups. Writing to her friend Miss Boodle, the "gamekeeper" of Skerryvore, Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson describes their life at Saranac:

"We are high up in the Adirondack Mountains, living in a guide's cottage in the most primitive fashion. The maid does the cooking (we have little beyond venison and bread to cook) and the boy comes every morning to carry water from a distant spring for drinking purposes. It is already very cold, but we have calked the doors and windows as one calks a boat, and have laid in a store of extraordinary garments made by the Canadian Indians. I went to Montreal to buy these and came back laden with buffalo skins, snow shoes, and fur caps. Louis wants to have his photograph taken in his, hoping to pass for a mighty hunter or sly trapper. He is now more like the hardy mountaineer, taking long walks on hill-tops in all seasons and weathers. It is something like Davos here, all the invalids looking stronger and ruddier than we who are supposed to be in good health.... Every afternoon a vehicle called a 'buckboard' is brought to our door, sometimes with one large horse attached, and sometimes we have a pair of lovely spirited ponies. The buckboard is so light that when we meet a stage-coach on the narrow road we simply drive our horse up the hillside and lift the buckboard out of the way. Very soon, however, we shall exchange it for a sleigh."

It was a long, bitter winter spent amid the ice and snow, the thermometer at one time showing 48 degrees below zero. By November 19 it was fiercely cold, and water and ink froze in the rooms with fires going all day and night. When the kitchen floor was washed with warm water, even with a hot fire burning in the room, the floor became a sheet of ice. All food had to be thawed out before it could be eaten, and the thawing-out process sometimes presented great difficulties, a haunch of venison remaining full of ice after being in a hot oven for an hour. Sometimes a lump of ice was left unmelted in the centre of the soup-pot even when the water boiled all around it. The cold was most intense at night, when the rivets could be heard starting from the boards like pistol-shots, but during the day the temperature was often quite mild. The snow was so deep that it reached the second-story windows, and paths had to be shovelled out and kept clear around the house. In the streets a snow-plough was used. By March the Hunter's Home was nearly buried in the drifts, and in spite of a huge open fireplace, in which great log fires were kept constantly burning, and a stove in every room, it was impossible to do much more than barely keep from freezing to death. When they went out, muffled up to the ears in furs, they carried little slabs of hot soapstone in their pockets, for it was a great comfort to thrust a frozen hand into a toasting-hot pocket.

Added to the bitterness of the cold was the depression of grey, sunless days, only too like their memories of Scotland, and while they sat and shivered around their immense fireplace their thoughts turned insistently towards sunnier lands. Many years before, when Mr. Stevenson was a mere lad, it had been suggested that the South Seas was the very place for him, and the plan for a voyage there some time in the future had always lain dormant in his thoughts, waiting for the opportunity. This old dream now came to mind again, and every glance from their frost-covered windows at the bleak dreariness without made their vision of tropical forests and coral strands seem the more alluring. The project now began to take on definite shape, and days were spent in poring over Findlay's directories of the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the South Seas.

In the meantime much work was accomplished, the most important being a series of twelve articles written by Mr. Stevenson for Scribner's Magazine, including some of his best-known essays—The Lantern Bearers, A Chapter on Dreams, etc. In the short hours of daylight and the long, dark evenings he worked with his stepson on the novel called The Wrong Box. It was here, too, that the story of the two brothers, The Master of Ballantrae, was thought out, and The Black Arrow, a book which failed to meet with Mrs. Stevenson's approval, was revised. In the dedication to this last he says:

"No one but myself knows what I have suffered, nor what my books have gained, by your unsleeping watchfulness and admirable pertinacity. And now here is a volume that goes into the world and lacks your imprimatur; a strange thing in our joint lives; and the reason of it stranger still! I have watched with interest, with pain, and at length with amusement, your unavailing attempts to peruse The Black Arrow; I think I should lack humor indeed if I let the occasion slip and did not place your name in the fly-leaf of the only book of mine that you have never read—and never will read."

By the time spring had melted the deep snow around their mountain home they had come to the definite decision to undertake the cruise in the event that a suitable vessel could be secured for the purpose. Leaving the other members of the family about to start for Manasquan in New Jersey, Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson went to San Francisco, where she found and chartered the yacht Casco, belonging to Doctor Merritt of Oakland, for a six months' cruise.

While in California she came to visit me at Monterey, where years before we had all been so happy together. During the week she spent there we did the things that she liked best—spending long delightful days gathering shells on the beach at Point Cypress, where the great seas roared in from across the wide Pacific and broke thunderously at our feet. When noon came, bringing us appetites sharpened by the sparkling air, we built a fire under the old twisted trees and barbecued the meat we had brought with us. She seemed to be welling over with happiness—partly because of her great pride and joy in her husband's success, and partly because, after years spent in Alpine snows, Scotch mists, London fogs, and fierce Adirondack cold, she had come again into the sunlight of her beloved California.

While there she had a pleasant meeting with Louis's old friend Jules Simoneau, of which she writes to her husband:

"At last your dear old Simoneau came to see me. He was laden with flowers, and was dressed in a flannel shirt thrown open at the neck and his trousers thrust in his boots. I saw him from the window and ran out and kissed him. He was greatly pleased and talked a long time about you. I told him you were going to send him the books, and he almost cried at that. The following day he and his wife spent the whole time in the woods searching for roots and leaves that are, according to the Indians, a certain cure for lung disease where there is hemorrhage. I have a great packet of them; one dose is divided off, and I am to divide the rest in the same way. A dose means enough to make a gallon of tea, of which you are to drink when so inclined. Simoneau said: 'I thought you might be ashamed of a rough old eccentric fellow like me.' I expressed my feeling in regard to him, to which he replied: 'And yet I am rough and eccentric; you say I was kind; I fear that to be kind is to be eccentric.'"

Having secured the Casco, she telegraphed to her anxiously waiting husband for a positive decision, to which he sent back an instant and joyous "Yes."

It is now thirty years since Robert Louis Stevenson passed that winter in the snows of the Adirondacks, and the little logging-camp, as he knew it, has grown into a great sanatorium, but his spirit still seems to hover over the place, and those who seek the healing of its crystal air have set up a shrine and made of him a sort of patron saint. The Baker Cottage has been converted by the Stevenson Society into a memorial museum, where many objects commemorative of him have been collected. Among these are the woodcuts with which he amused himself at Davos, and which were given to them by Lloyd Osbourne. Here Mr. and Mrs. Baker, whose hair has been whitened by the snows of many winters since the Stevenson days, receive the visitors who come to reverently examine the relics left by the man who fought so bravely and so successfully against the same insidious enemy with whom they themselves are struggling. On the veranda, where, in that time so long past, his slender figure might often have been seen walking up and down, a beautiful bas-relief by Gutzon Borglum, representing him in the fur cap and coat and the boots that he was so boyishly proud of, has been set up. Just as the mantle of Stevenson fell upon Cummy[26] and Simoneau, so now it has fallen upon this most amiable and delightful old couple, the Bakers, making them in a way celebrities; and to the patients his memory is like that of a dear departed elder brother, to whom they are linked by the strong bond of a common suffering and a common hope.

[Footnote 26: Alison Cunningham, Stevenson's old nurse.]

As soon as they could make ready the family set out, and by June 7 their train was rolling down the western slope of the Sierras into California. At Sacramento they were met by their "advance agent," who, as her mother-in-law remarks, "was looking so pretty in a new hat that we were grieved to hear that it belonged to her daughter."

Immediately on reaching San Francisco they were plunged into a bustle of preparation for the long cruise. While he rested from the fatigue of the long overland trip Mrs. Stevenson went on with the work, including, among other things, vaccination for all hands except the sick man. Lymph was taken with them so that his wife could vaccinate him if it should become necessary. The burden of these preparations, including the winning over of Doctor Merritt, who was not inclined to rent his yacht at first, fell upon the shoulders of Mrs. Stevenson. Sending the others here and there on errands, getting the burgee to fly at the masthead, purchasing all the multitudinous list of supplies necessary for the long voyage, making sure that nothing that might be needed by the invalid should be forgotten, with flying runs between times to report to him at the hotel—these were busy days for her.

While they were in San Francisco Mrs. Stevenson had a strange and dramatic meeting with Samuel Osbourne's second wife, a quiet, gentle little woman whom he married soon after his divorce from Fanny Van de Grift. Within a year or two after the marriage Osbourne mysteriously disappeared, never to be heard of again, and his wife dragged out a pitiful existence at their vineyard at Glen Ellen, in Sonoma County, hoping against hope for his return. Finally her faith failed, and when she met Mrs. Stevenson in San Francisco she fell on her knees before her and burst into bitter weeping, saying: "You were right about that man and I was wrong!" She was then taken in to see Louis, and the two women sat hand in hand by his bedside and talked of the trouble that had darkened both their lives. Both Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson felt great compassion for the unhappy woman and did what they could to relieve her financial needs.

The Casco was a beautiful racing yacht, with cabin fittings of silk and velvet, and was kept so shiningly clean by her crew that in the islands she came to be known as the Silver Ship. At last all was ready, and, with a cabin packed with flowers and fruit sent by admiring friends, early in the morning of June 28, 1888, as the first rays of the sun glinted back from the dancing water, the Casco was towed across the bay, amid salutes from the ferry-boats and the trains on shore, and out through the narrow passage of the Golden Gate. Then the Silver Ship, shaking out her snowy sails, turned her prow across the glittering expanse straight towards the enchanted isles of which Louis Stevenson had dreamed since he was a boy of twenty.

The women had already provided themselves with their old solace of knitting for the slow-passing days at sea, and all settled down for the long voyage. All through the story of their three years of wandering among the islands of the South Seas runs the thread of the wife's devotion; of how she took upon herself the fatiguing details of preparations for the voyages, searching for ships and arranging for supplies; of how she walked across an island to get horses and wagon to move the sick man to a more comfortable place; of how she saved his trunk of manuscripts from destruction by fire on shipboard, of how she cheerfully endured a thousand discomforts, hardships, and even dangers for the sake of the slight increase of health and happiness the life brought to the loved one. She was not a good sailor and suffered much from seasickness on these voyages. Some of the trials of life on the ocean wave under rough conditions are described in a letter to her friend Mrs. Sitwell:

"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), but I love the tropic weather and the wild people, and to see my two boys so happy.... To keep house on a yacht is no easy matter. When I was deathly sick 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? And 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, etc.' In the midst of heavy dangerous weather, when I was lying on the floor in utter misery, down comes the mate with a cracked head, and I must needs cut off the blood-clotted hair, wash and dress the wound, and administer restoratives. I do not like being the 'lady of the yacht,' but ashore—oh, then I feel I am repaid for all!"

Even Louis himself, lover of the sea though he was, was forced to acknowledge that under some circumstances his capricious mistress had her unpleasant moods. "The sea," he writes to Sidney Colvin, "is a terrible place, stupefying to the mind and poisonous to the temper—the motion, the lack of space, the cruel publicity, the villainous tinned foods, the sailors, the passengers." Again he remarks concerning the food: "Our diet had been from the pickle tub or out of tins; I had learned to welcome shark's flesh for a variety; and an onion, an Irish potato, or a beefsteak had been long lost to sense and dear to aspiration."

But the glamour of romance and the joy of seeing her husband gaining strength hour by hour made all these annoyances seem things of small account, and, just as the time spent at Hyeres was the happiest in Louis's life, so these South Sea days were the best of all for her.

It had been decided that their first landfall should be at the Marquesas, a group which lay quite out of the beaten track of travel, three thousand miles from the American coast. Peacefully the days slipped by, with no event to record, until, on July 28, 1888, their first tropic island rose out of the sea and sent them in greeting a breeze laden with the perfume of a thousand strange flowers. They first dropped anchor in Anaho Bay, Nukahiva Island, which, except for one white trader, was occupied solely by natives, but lately converted from cannibalism. As both Stevenson and his wife were citizens of the world in their sympathies, it was not long before they were on terms of perfect friendliness with the inhabitants. Soon after landing, Mrs. Stevenson's housekeeping instincts came to the front, and she set to work to learn something about the native cookery. Her mother-in-law writes:

"Fanny was determined to get lessons in the proper making of 'kaku,' so went ashore armed with a bowl and beater. Kaku is baked breadfruit, with a sauce of cocoanut cream, which is made by beating up the soft pulp of the green nut with the juice, and is delicious."[27]

[Footnote 27: The Letters of Mrs. M. I. Stevenson, Saranac to Marquesas.]

Although the Casco had been originally built solely for coast sailing, and was scarcely fit for battling with wind and wave on the open sea, it was decided to take the risk and lay their course for Tahiti through the Dangerous Archipelago. After taking on a mate who was thoroughly acquainted with those waters, and a Chinese named Ah Fu to serve them as cook, they sailed away from the Marquesas. Ah Fu had been brought to the islands when a child, a forlorn little slave among a band of labourers sent by a contractor to work on the plantations, although, as the contract called for grown men, it was fraudulent to send a child. On the islands the boy grew up tall and robust, abandoned the queue, and no longer looked in the least like a Chinese. He became one of the most important members of the Stevenson family, remaining with them for two years. He was intensely attached to Mrs. Stevenson, carrying his devotion so far that once during a storm, when the ship was apparently about to go to the bottom, he appropriated the signal halyards, for which she had expressed an admiration, to give her as a present, explaining that "if the ship went down they wouldn't want them, and if it were saved they would all be too grateful to miss them." When the time came for him to leave the Stevensons and return to his family in China, it nearly broke his heart to go. Mrs. Stevenson writes of him:

"Ah Fu had as strong a sense of romance as Louis himself. He returned to China with a belt of gold around his waist, a ninety dollar breech loader given him by Louis, and a boxful of belongings. His intention was to leave these great riches with a member of his family who lived outside the village, dress himself in beggar's rags, and then go to his mother's house to solicit alms. He would draw from her the account of the son who had been lost when he was a little child, and, at the psychological moment, when the poor lady was weeping, Ah Fu would cry out: 'Behold your son returned to you, not a beggar, as I appear, but a man of wealth!"

On September 8 they ran into the lagoon of Fakarava, a typical low island forming a great ring some eighty miles in circumference by only a couple of hundred yards in width, and lying not more than twenty feet above the sea. Their experiences during a fortnight's stay on this bird's roost in the Pacific are thus described by Mrs. Stevenson:

"Leaving the yacht Casco in the lagoon, we hired a cottage on the beach where we lived for several weeks. Fakarava is an atoll of the usual horseshoe shape, so narrow that one can walk across it in ten minutes, but of great circumference; it lay so little above the sea level that one had a sense of insecurity, justified by the terrible disasters following the last hurricane in the group. Not far from where we lived the waves had recently swept over the narrow strip of coral during a storm. Our life passed in a gentle monotony of peace. At sunrise we walked from our front door into the warm, shallow waters of the lagoon for our bath; we cooked our breakfast on the remains of an old American cooking stove I discovered on the beach, and spent the rest of the morning sorting over the shells we had found the previous day. After lunch and a siesta we crossed the island to the windward side and gathered more shells. Sometimes we would find the strangest fish stranded in pools between the rocks by the outgoing tide, many of them curiously shaped and brilliantly colored. Some of the most gorgeous were poisonous to eat, and capable of inflicting very unpleasant wounds with their fins. The captain suffered for a long time with a sort of paralysis in a finger he had scratched when handling a fish with a beak like a parrot....

"The close of the placid day marked the beginning of the most agreeable part of the twenty-four hours; it was the time of the moon, and the shadows that fell from the cocoanut leaves were so sharply defined that one involuntarily stepped over them. After a simple dinner and a dip in the soft sea, we awaited our invariable visitor, M. Donat Rimareau, the half-caste vice-president. As it was not the season for pearl fishing, there were no white men on the island, though now and again a schooner with a French captain would appear and disappear like a phantom ship. The days were almost intolerably hot, but with the setting of the sun a gentle breeze sprang up. We spent the evenings in the moonlight, sitting on mattresses spread on the veranda, our only chair being reserved for our guest. The conversation with M. Rimareau, who was half Tahitian, was delightful. Night after night we sat entranced at his feet, thrilled by stories of Tahiti and the Paumotus, always of a supernatural character. There was a strange sect in Fakarava called the 'Whistlers,' resembling the spiritualists of our country, but greater adepts. When M. Rimareau spoke of these people and their superstitions his voice sank almost to a whisper, and he cast fearful glances over his shoulder at the black shadows of the palms. I remember one of the stories was of the return of the soul of a dead child, the soul being wrapped in a leaf and dropped in at the door of the sorrowing parents. I am sure that when my husband came to write The Isle of Voices he had our evenings in Fakarava and the stories of M. Rimareau in mind. I know that I never read The Isle of Voices without a mental picture rising before me of the lagoon and the cocoa palms and the wonderful moonlight of Fakarava."[28]

[Footnote 28: Preface by Mrs. Stevenson to Island Nights Entertainments.]

It was the Fakaravans who gave the name of Pahi Muni, the shining or silver ship, to the Casco.

Here the two ladies of the Stevenson party took lessons from the niece of a chief in plaiting hats of bamboo shavings and pandanus, and Mrs. Louis learned how to make them beautifully. This hat-making is the constant "fancy-work" of all Tahitian women, and serves in lieu of the tatting and embroidery of civilized lands. The best hats are made of the stalks of the arrowroot plant.

In the last week of September, bidding a regretful farewell to M. Rimareau and his delightful moonlight talks, they set sail for Papeete, the capital and port of entry of the Society Group—most beautiful of all the islands of the Pacific. But, though they were entranced with the grandeur and charm of its scenery—its towering cliffs, leaping cascades, and green, palm-fringed flat land of the coast—Papeete did not treat them well, and their old enemy, which had forgotten them for some happy months, again found them out there and Louis had a severe relapse, with a return of the hemorrhages. It was clear that Papeete did not agree with him, and it was decided to remove him to a more suitable place. After a perilous trip around the island in the Casco, during which the ship was twice nearly lost on the reefs, they reached Taravao, but found it hot and full of mosquitoes. Mr. Stevenson was now very ill, and it was imperatively necessary, not only to find a more salubrious spot, but also some means of transporting him to it. His wife, equal to the occasion, as always, set out on foot across the island, following a trail until she reached the shanty of a Chinese who had a wagon and a pair of horses. "These she hired to take them to Tautira, the nearest village of any size, a distance of sixteen miles over a road crossed by one-and-twenty streams. Stevenson was placed in the cart, and, sustained by small doses of coca, managed, with the help of his wife and their servant, to reach his destination before he collapsed altogether."[29]

[Footnote 29: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Graham Balfour.]

They found a house and made him as comfortable as possible. It was not long before Princess Moe, ex-queen of Raiatea, and a most charming person, heard of their arrival and came to see them. "I feel," writes Mrs. Stevenson, "that she saved Louis's life. He was lying in a deep stupor when she first saw him, suffering from congestion of the lungs and a burning fever. She made him a dish of raw fish salad, the first thing he had eaten for days; he liked it and began to pick up from that day. As soon as he was well enough she invited us to live with her in the house of Ori, the sub-chief of the village, and we gladly accepted her invitation." There they lived as "in fairyland, the guests of a beautiful brown princess."

When the Casco had been brought around to Tautira it was discovered in a peculiar way that their danger in the recent trip from Papeete had been greater than they had realized. The elder Mrs. Stevenson gave a feast on board to a number of native women, and during its progress one of the women offered a prayer for their deliverance from the perils of the sea, praying especially that if anything were wrong with the ship it might be discovered in time. The elder Mrs. Stevenson had tried in vain to persuade Captain Otis to go to church at the places where they stopped. This time the church came to him and he couldn't escape, but stood leaning disgustedly against the mast while the prayer was said. After the visitors left he made some impatient exclamation against "psalm-singing natives," and struck the mast a hard blow with his fist. It went through into decayed wood, and the captain was aghast. Mrs. Stevenson, on her part, was triumphant, and she always loved to tell that story and dwell on the expression of the scoffing captain's face as he saw a prayer answered. Both masts were found to be almost entirely eaten out with dry-rot, and if either had gone by the board off the reefs of any of the islands nothing could have saved the Casco from going to the bottom. The ship was at once sent to Papeete for repairs, but as it was impossible to obtain new masts of a proper size there, they were obliged to be content with patching up the old ones. This let the party in for a long stay at Tautira, at which none repined, for the scenery and climate were delightful, and their new friends hospitable and interesting.

Following island custom, Mrs. Louis Stevenson and the Princess Moe exchanged names—each taking the name of the other's mother—that of Mrs. Stevenson being Terii-Tauma-Terai, part of which meant heaven and part gave her a claim to some land in the neighbourhood.

Chief Ori a Ori (Ori of Ori, a clan name) was a magnificent figure of a man, standing six feet three and broad and strong in proportion. "He looked like nothing so much as a Roman emperor in bronze," says Mrs. Stevenson, and when he appeared at a feast with a wreath of golden yellow leaves on his head, all the company cried out in admiration. As he spoke very good French, communication with him was easy, and many a pleasant evening was spent in his house at Tautira, exchanging strange tales of old, wild, bloody days in the Scottish Highlands and in the Southern Seas. Both the Stevensons conceived a warm friendship for Ori, which endured as long as they lived.

As they used to do in Barbizon, in the old French days, Mrs. Louis Stevenson set herself to making silhouettes of the different members of the strangely assorted company, gathered from the four quarters of the globe. First she did the portrait of Ori by throwing the shadow of his head on the wall with the help of a lamp, then drawing the outline and filling it in with India ink. It turned out so good that Ori demanded likenesses of all the rest, and soon the house was turned into a veritable picture-gallery.

A feast was given by the chief for the captain of the Casco, and, says the elder Mrs. Stevenson, "Ori had such respect for Fanny's cooking powers that he insisted she should prepare the feast; so she stuffed and cooked a pair of fowls, two roast pigs, and made a pudding."

These days of pleasant intimacy with the Stevensons were doubtless the brightest in the whole life of the island chief, and he kept them always in affectionate remembrance. Years afterwards, when Mrs. Stevenson was living in San Francisco after the death of her husband, two of her friends, Doctor and Mrs. Russell Cool, went to Tahiti, and were commissioned by her to visit Chief Ori a Ori. The Cools took with them a phonograph and themselves made records of a speech by Ori to Mrs. Stevenson, which, with its translation, was afterwards reproduced for her in San Francisco. But let us hear Mrs. Cool's own story of this visit:

"Ori had never seen a phonograph in his life, but his interest was that of a clever and civilized person—with none of the ignorance and terror and superstition of a savage. He was more than interested in everything relating to Louis and Tamaitai,[30] asking all sorts of questions, intelligent ones, too, about their life in Samoa; then in San Francisco; about Tamaitai's personal appearance—if her hair was gray; whether she had a town house and country house, and whether they were near the ocean and the mountains. He had a perfect picture when we had answered them all, and he was so pleased and grateful to us—bearers of interesting news. All this time we sat out on the veranda of his cottage, on a moonlight night almost too heavenly to be real—a tropical night filled with beauty and romance. Then there was a lull in the conversation, and Ori said: 'And now tell me about John L. Sullivan!' We fell down from romantic heights with a thud! Then we reflected that as Louis was the greatest man intellectually that Ori had ever met, so John L. Sullivan, the famous fighter, was the greatest man in that line of his time. The islanders, in common with other primitive peoples, admire physical perfection tremendously, and feats of strength are celebrated in fable, song, and story. To Ori there was nothing incongruous in placing John L. Sullivan, the famous prizefighter, and Robert Louis Stevenson, the noted writer—two great men—side by side.

[Footnote 30: Tamaitai was the Samoan name of Mrs. Stevenson.]

"We stayed all night out at Ori's place, and as a mark of honor my husband was given Louis's bed and I was given Tamaitai's. Ori's wife, a little dear, kissed our hands all round because we came from Tamaitai. Their love and admiration for her was so sincere and touching—it is the sweetest memory I have of Tahiti. We went to see Ori especially for Tamaitai, for she wished to know the condition of his eyes, and whether he needed glasses. His eyes were all right then, but later on developed some trouble, but he was so very old at that time that he was not willing to make the trip around the island for examination."

In 1906 the Society Islands were devastated by a terrific hurricane, and, hearing that Ori had suffered great loss, Mrs. Stevenson sent him a sum of money to help tide him over the crisis. He was very grateful for this assistance and wrote her a letter of heartfelt thanks, saying the money would be used to build a new house for himself and family to take the place of the houses that had been swept away.

Two dream-like months were spent on this lovely island of Tautira, while day after day, like shipwrecked mariners, they scanned the sea in vain for some signs of the long-delayed Casco. At last provisions fell so low that there seemed no prospect ahead of them but to live on the charity of their kind friend Ori. Thinking of this one day Mrs. Stevenson could not restrain her tears, and the chief, divining the cause of her distress, said to Louis: "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!" They were deeply moved by this generous offer from a man to whose island they had come as utter strangers, and to celebrate the occasion Louis opened a bottle of champagne, which, curiously enough, was all that was left in their provision-chest. From this time they lived almost entirely on native food—raw fish with sauce made of cocoanut milk mixed with sea-water and lime-juice, bananas roasted in a little pit in the ground, with cocoanut cream to eat with them, etc. All this sounds luxurious, but after some time on this diet the white man begins to feel a consuming longing for beefsteak and bread and coffee.

At last the repaired Casco hove in sight, and, after a heart-breaking farewell from their now beloved friend, Ori a Ori, and his family, they set sail for Honolulu. The voyage of thirty days was a wild and stormy one, and they were obliged to beat about the Hawaiian Islands for some days before they could enter, eating up the last of their food twenty-four hours before arrival, but finally the Silver Ship, flying like a bird before a spanking trade-wind, ran into port around the bold point of Diamond Head. The deep translucent blue of the water was broken by ruffles of dazzling foam where treacherous reefs lay hidden, and on the horizon lay piles of those fat feather-bed clouds that are never seen so intensely white in any other place. Their arrival was the cause of great rejoicing to Mrs. Stevenson's daughter, who was then living in Honolulu, for the Casco, long overdue, had been given up as lost.

They found Honolulu very beautiful. Taking a house at Waikiki, a short distance from town, they settled down to finish The Master of Ballantrae. In these surroundings, which seemed to them ultra-civilized after their experiences in the Marquesas and the Societies, they were able to enjoy a little family life. Under a great hau-tree that stood in the garden a birthday-party was given to Austin Strong, the little son of Mrs. Stevenson's daughter. Just as though it had been prearranged, in the midst of the party who should come along but an Italian with a performing bear, the first that any of the children had ever seen! The silent witness to these festivities of years ago, the great hau-tree, still stands.

It was at this time that Stevenson began work on the scheme of his book on the South Seas. This was one of the rare occasions when he and his wife reached a deadlock in their opinions, and, unfortunately for the success of the book, he refused to accept her advice. Writing to Sir Sidney Colvin, she says:

"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.... 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! Louis says it is a stern sense of duty that is at the bottom of it, which is more alarming than anything else ... What a thing it is to have a man of genius to deal with! It is like managing an over-bred horse!"

"This letter," justly comments Sir Sidney, "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."

It had been their intention to return to England by way of America in the following summer, but the state of Mr. Stevenson's health was still not good enough to warrant this venture, and, besides, the short cruise among the islands in the Casco had but whetted their appetites for more. It was finally decided that while the elder Mrs. Stevenson went on a visit to Scotland the rest of the party should sail again for the South Seas, and they began at once to make preparations. The charter of the Casco having come to an end, it was necessary to find another vessel. All these details were taken in hand by Mrs. Stevenson and her son, while Louis went to Molokai to visit the leper colony, in which he had become intensely interested after discovering that every island visited in the Casco was afflicted with the curse of leprosy. They saw many distressing cases, and their admiration for Father Damien and his unexampled heroism rose higher and higher. It was while they were in Honolulu that Mr. Stevenson read the letter written by the Reverend Mr. Hyde, and printed in a missionary paper, which inspired his eloquent defence of Father Damien, afterwards written and published in Sydney, Australia.

In the meantime Mrs. Stevenson made arrangements to charter the Equator, a trading schooner of only sixty-four tons register, but stanchly built and seaworthy, and having the added advantage of being commanded by a skilful mariner, Captain Denny Reid. On June 24, 1889, taking the faithful Ah Fu as cook, and this time accompanied by Mrs. Stevenson's son-in-law, Joseph Strong, they sailed away for the Gilbert Islands. During their stay in Honolulu they had struck up a great friendship with the interesting and genial King Kalakaua, and on the day of their departure he appeared at the wharf with the royal band of musicians to see them off in proper style.

As Mrs. Strong, Mrs. Stevenson's daughter, did not wish to leave her son Austin and the voyage was considered too hazardous for so young a child, she went to Sydney to await the arrival of the Equator.

Through lovely days and glorious nights they sailed along, the little schooner lying so low in the water that they were brought close to the sea, "with a sort of intimacy that those on large ships, especially steamers, can never know."

Captain Reid is described by Mrs. Stevenson as "a small fiery Scotch-Irishman, full of amusing eccentricities, and always a most gay and charming companion." Beneath this jolly sea-dog exterior, however, some eccentricities lay hidden that the crew did not always find amusing. Hearing a noise of splashing in the water by the ship's side, Mrs. Stevenson found on inquiry that it was the captain taking his regular morning bath while surrounded by a circle of sailors to keep off the sharks. When she asked him if he did not think it selfish to expose the sailors to the danger in order to protect himself, he answered: "No, for if the captain should be lost think how much worse it would be for all on board than if it were a mere sailor!"

Their first stop in the Gilberts was at the port of Butaritari in the island of Great Makin, their arrival being unfortunately timed to strike the town just when the taboo against strong drink had been temporarily lifted by the king, and the whole population was engaged in a wild carouse. For a few days their situation seemed precarious, but the king at length restored the taboo, and after that peace settled again over the island.

After a stay of about a month at Butaritari they moved to Apemama, ruled over by the strong and despotic king Tembinoka, who, although usually unfavourable to whites, admitted the Stevensons to his closest friendship. He said he was able to judge all people by their eyes and mouths, and, they having passed his examination successfully, he proceeded at once to do all in his power to make them comfortable. They were provided with four houses, "charming little basket-work affairs, something like bird-cages, standing on stilts about four feet above the ground, with hanging lids for doors and windows," and a retinue of several more or less useless servants, who spent most of their time in frolicking.

When they chartered the Equator it had been in the agreement that the ship should be permitted to engage in her legitimate occupation of trading in the islands when opportunity offered. She now went off on a cruise for copra, while the Stevensons stayed on shore at Apemama, where they spent six peaceful weeks. As they were again marooned longer than they expected, provisions began to run short, and it became necessary to live on the products of the island. Wild chickens were plentiful, and the handy Ah Fu found no difficulty in shooting them with a gun borrowed from the king, but a constant diet of these birds finally palled on them, and they were overjoyed when some of the king's fishermen caught several large turtles. "Never," says Mrs. Stevenson, "was anything more welcome than these turtle steaks!" The long deprivation of green vegetables caused a great desire for them, and Louis said: "I think I could shed tears over a dish of turnips!" As Mrs. Stevenson always carried garden-seeds with her, she took advantage of their extended stay here to plant onions and radishes, which soon came up and were received with intense appreciation.

The shrewd Tembinoka, judge and critic of his fellow men, whom they found to be the most interesting of all their South Sea acquaintances, did not fail to perceive unusual qualities in the wife of his guest. He remarked: "She good; look pretty; plenty chench (sense)."

The king desired a new design for a flag, and all set to work to produce a suitable one. Mrs. Stevenson's drawing, which consisted of three vertical stripes of green, red, and yellow, with a horizontal shark of black showing white teeth and a white eye, pleased him best and was adopted. The design was afterwards sent to Sydney and Tembinoka's flag manufactured from it. The shark was a neat reference to the king's supposed descent, of which he was very proud, from a fish of that species.

Finding that the whole island was rapidly falling away from Christianity, the king the worst of all, the Stevensons felt it to be their duty to go to church every Sunday, to set an example, although they understood nothing of the services, which were conducted in the native language. During the latter part of their stay they gave an exhibition of magic-lantern pictures—wretched daubs, it is true—of the life of Christ. That their efforts to do good were not all in vain was proved by the gratifying news received some time afterwards that all the natives, including the despot king, were returning to their Christian duties and the big church was full again.

The absence of the Equator was so prolonged that they were in great alarm lest she might be lost, but at last she hove in sight.

After much discussion during the long days aboard ship and ashore, their plans had been definitely formed to make Apia, Samoa, their next port of call, and bidding farewell, with many regrets, to the island king, the little schooner once more raised her sails to the breeze. Stern old savage as Tembinoka was, he could not restrain his tears when he saw these delightful visitors from across the seas sail away forever, leaving him to the dull society of his many wives, whom he described as "good woman, but not very smart." Later, while living in Samoa, they were pained to hear of the death of their dear old friend Tembinoka, king of the island where they had spent so many happy days. It seemed that he had an abscess on his leg, and one of the native doctors lanced it with an unclean fish-bone, which caused blood-poisoning and the death of the king in great agony. For the better protection of his heir he left directions that his body should be buried in the centre of the royal residence, no doubt with the idea of frightening away evil-doers through their superstitious fears.

This time they took with them a passenger, a German trader named Hoeflich, of whom Lloyd Osbourne writes:

"When Paul Hoeflich, then trading in Butaritari, learned that Louis had chartered the Equator for Samoa, he packed up his merchandise and with this and twenty tons of copra engaged passage for the neighboring island of Maraki, distant about sixty miles. For this passage he paid sixty dollars. In spite of all efforts, however, the Equator failed to reach Maraki, being foiled by light airs and violent currents; so there was nothing left to do but to carry Paul on with us to Samoa, and though the captain tried to make him pay an increased passage he smilingly but firmly refused. We always thought that the twenty tons of copra saved our lives, for it stiffened the ship in the dreadful little hurricane that almost capsized us."

I shall let Paul Hoeflich tell his own story of the days when he cruised with the Stevensons, in the letters he was kind enough to write me:

"My dear Mrs. Sanchez:

"In reply to your letter to pen any little happenings concerning Mr. R. L. Stevenson while I was with the Stevenson party on board the old Equator, I may say that I am very pleased to do so, but I am afraid the results will be meagre, for the length of time I had the pleasure of being with them did not exceed ten weeks. Besides, it is now just twenty-seven years ago. I boarded the Equator while she was among the islands cruising for copra, and in due time we reached Apemama and dropped anchor in the lagoon near the king's boat fleet. Going on shore we found the party hale and much pleased with the ship's arrival. In the evening the king, a fat and clever native, paid a visit and entertained us by telling about his ancestors. On the mother's side they came from a shark, and the father resigned in his favor, as he was not so high a chief as his son, the descendant of the shark.

"Mrs. Stevenson told us she had a garden planted with all kinds of things, but the soil was stubborn and would not yield anything good but cocoanuts; in fact, all the plants seemed to be growing into cocoanut trees. She also told us about her first experience as a medicine man. One day a man came along, sat down, and complained of a severe headache, asking for 'binika,' by which he meant painkiller. The lady thought he meant vinegar, and told him it was useless against a headache, but he persisted. So a generous portion was poured out and handed to him, to be used externally. He received it, smelled it, and suspicion was visible on his countenance, but, being too polite to return it, he swallowed the whole and returned the glass, profusely thanking Mrs. Stevenson. He then rose and left, more sick than when he came.

"The king offered Mrs. Stevenson a sewing-machine, saying he had a houseful of them, and as his arsenal was short of boat anchors he used the sewing-machines as such for his fleet.

"In a few days everything was snug, and we left the moorings to beat through the passage, and from there pointed her head for Maraki. A nice breeze favored us, but gradually it moderated, and as the weary days dragged on a rumor started that there was a Jonah on board. At first we eyed each other with distrust, then it was whispered and at last openly declared that I must be the Jonah. I mildly protested, saying that Mrs. Stevenson was most likely to blame. I told them all sorts of stories to prove that sailors believed that a woman on board would bring bad luck to a ship, but all to no avail. Their idea that the passenger for Maraki was a Jonah had taken firm hold. Worse still, I began to believe it myself, and made up my mind to jump the ship as soon as I had a chance.

"In the meantime we were creeping slowly along until one morning, lo and behold, my island hove in sight. As the sun rose the breeze freshened and I got hilarious. We were drawing nearer our anchorage in good style and could see my station now plainly, and the natives gathering on the beach. I pictured myself already landing amidst their shouts of welcome, when, to my horror—I shudder even now as I pen these lines—the wind died out. I whistled for wind until my lips blistered, but all in vain, for the breeze kept straight up and down. Jonah was at work again. I demanded loudly of the captain to be put on shore, but he only shrugged his shoulders. The argument brought up Mr. Stevenson, who said 'What about that for a boat?' nodding at a certain small deck house. 'It resembles a skiff, and I dare say the trade-room will spare a pair of paddles.' 'The very thing,' said I, and began sharpening my sheath knife to cut the lashings. While I got busy Mrs. Stevenson came to me and I told her what way I was going on shore. 'Why,' she said, 'if you make your appearance in a miserable craft of that kind your reputation on Maraki will be gone forever. Besides they might take you for a Jonah fresh from a whale and turn you right back to sea again. It would be safer to stay on board and make another attempt to reach Maraki, this time via Samoa.' I did not think I was getting quite a square deal, but I stayed. The current had taken us out of sight of land when a strong and fair breeze sprang up and carried us by noon next day to our anchorage in Butaritari lagoon.

"Here the party went ashore, biding the vessel getting ready for sea. In a week we lifted anchor and made for the passage, but the Equator was unwilling to leave. She hung on to a reef, and not until she had parted with her false keel would she push on and gain the open. During the first few weeks we had to beat to the eastward, which brought much calm and rainy weather. Mrs. Stevenson soon found that her berth was not the driest place in the ship. The tropical sun had warped the decks so that the rain found its way into the cabins. So Mrs. Stevenson would emigrate to the galley-way with her couch, and, with the help of an umbrella ingeniously handled, manage to do fairly well for a night's rest.

"One calm morning she called to tell us that sharks were around, and that one of them was wearing the glasses Mr. Osbourne had lost out of a boat at Maraki. Sure enough there were lots of them, and we soon had shark and chain hooks over the side, pulling them in and despatching them quickly and painlessly, but we never caught the one with the glasses on. Mrs. Stevenson said he could probably see a little better than the others. Now it seems that all these sharks stirred the appetite of Mr. Stevenson for shark steak—at least he advocated making a meal of them. Mrs. Stevenson mildly remonstrated, pointing out that it would be gruesome to eat the ancestors of Tembinoka, the man who had sheltered them for weeks. Mr. Stevenson could not see so far back, so the shark steak came on the table, but his wife managed to evade it. At last a breeze sprang up and the sharks took their leave.

"One night it blew stiff and we shortened sail, but with little advantage. The ship capered about till she had her topmast overboard with the jib attached to it. This episode occasioned the composition of the song 'On board the old Equator,' by Mrs. Stevenson and Mr. Osbourne, I believe for Mr. Stevenson's birthday. I sang it on that occasion for the first time, and later at Apia at a dinner given for the ship. This was before Mr. Stevenson had given away his birthday,[31] so he was allowed to enjoy it, as did we all. Speeches were made and we drank his health, severally and all together. We felt as happy as any crew on board of a 20,000 tonner."

[Footnote 31: See The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, page 279.]

* * * * *

Of this jolly party, gathered together by the camaraderie of the sea, Lloyd Osbourne writes:

"The rousing chorus was sung in unison: 'Captain darling, where has your topmast gone, I pray? Captain darling, where has your topmast gone?' Such things sound foolish years afterwards, but at the time are gay and funny. Now, looking back, it seems as though the incongruity of the party was the funniest thing about it—Louis, my mother, myself, the boyish young Scotch captain, the big Norwegian mate, the Finnish second mate, Rick, a Russian ex-sea-captain, Paul Hoeflich, Joe Strong the artist, all the very best of friends, who had lived a month together crowded to suffocation, and yet were better friends than ever when they left the ship."

* * * * *

To continue the story of Paul Hoeflich:

"On the twenty-sixth morning out Mrs. Stevenson called from the deck: 'Come up and see Samoa!' Proudly the vessel cut her way towards the mountainous island covered with dark green forest from peak to beach. We were all struck with its beauty and elated with expectations as to its hidden shadowy secrets. Inside of an hour we dropped anchor in the port of Apia, and a friend came off and took the party on shore. The vessel's stay was five days, and then we up sails and pointed her head for Maraki, to get rid of the last passenger, the Jonah of the voyage. Before our departure Mr. Stevenson gave a dinner, where we gathered for the last time around the hospitable board. Needless to say, I was in love with the island and acquired a piece of land to bring me back for sure.[32]

[Footnote 32: Mr. Hoeflich returned to Samoa a year or two later to remain, and was always a valued friend of the Stevensons.]

"As I look back now I cannot help admiring Mrs. Stevenson for her bravery and endurance in her resolution to remain with her husband. For us men this life was right enough, but for a refined woman it meant great hardship. When Mr. Stevenson, in his birthday speech on board, said with moist eyes that he had never enjoyed a voyage and company so well as ours, Mrs. Stevenson deserved the largest share of that praise. I remember how she took care of him. A doctor in Tahiti, who apprehended his early end, gave his wife a vial of medicine, which she carried sewn in her dress for three years to have it handy. I have a much-prized photograph of her on which she wrote 'Dear Paul. This is to remind you of the days when we were so happy on board of the old Equator.' This gives me a sad pleasure in recalling the old times when the South Seas seemed to us so much brighter than now. Civilization is coming to the natives at the rate of geometrical progression, and soon their good qualities will be swept away by greed and false education.

"I have the honor to remain,

Yours faithfully,

P. Hoeflich."

That the voyage was a rough one is clear from Mr. Stevenson's description in a letter to Sir Sidney Colvin:

"On board the Equator, 190 miles off Samoa. We are just nearing the end of our long cruise. Rain, calms, squalls, bang—there's the fore-topmast gone; rain, calms, squalls—away with the staysail; more rain, more calms, 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." She rejoiced, nevertheless, that her mother-in-law had not accompanied them on this voyage, with its extreme discomfort and hardship, but adds, "and yet I would do it all over again."

In the early part of December, 1889, they arrived at the Navigator Islands—so called by Bougainville because of the skill with which the natives managed their canoes and sailed them far out to sea—and, as related above by Paul Hoeflich, dropped anchor in the harbour of Apia. They were not especially attracted to this place at first, the scenery being of a softer and less striking character than that of Tahiti, but as time passed the charm of the place grew upon them more and more, and finally they decided to make it their permanent headquarters between cruises. To this end they bought four hundred acres in the "bush," as the great tropical forests are called, and after making arrangements for the erection of a temporary cabin during their absence, they sailed on the steamer Lubeck for Sydney, with the intention of going on from there for a visit to England.

It was during this stay in Sydney that Mr. Stevenson wrote his famous defense of Father Damien. When he realized that its publication might result in a suit for libel and the loss of all he had in the world, he thought it only right to ask for a vote of the family, for without their concurrence he would not take such a step. The vote was unanimously in favour of the publication. When the pamphlets were ready, his wife, with her son and daughter, set to work addressing them and sending them far and wide. It was certain that he would not appeal in vain in such a matter to his wife, for in their sympathies with the unfortunate and unjustly used they were as one.

Their hopes of going to England, based on the long respite of eighteen months during which Mr. Stevenson had been free from his old trouble, were dashed to the ground by a severe cold caught in Sydney and a return of the hemorrhages. His only chance seemed to lie on the sea—in fact, the doctor said nothing would save him but the South Seas—but when his wife went to the water-front to secure passage she found that, owing to a sailors' strike, only one ship, the Janet Nichol, an iron-screw steamer of about six hundred tons, was going out. She went to the owners and asked to be taken, but they refused, on the ground that they didn't want women on board. Nevertheless she went right on, with pitiful persistence, with her preparations, and finally had the sick man carried down to the landing-place and rowed out to the ship. She had won out, but they received her very reluctantly. And such a ship! It must have looked fine, however, to Mrs. Stevenson, after the Equator, for she writes: "Think of two bathrooms and only one other passenger besides ourselves, a nice long wide deck to walk on, steam to run away from squalls with, and no flopping about in calms." But when her daughter went on board to see them off she was horrified at the sight of it—black with coal dust, manned by Solomon Island "black boys," and just as they stepped on deck Tin Jack (Jack Buckland[33]) came up the gangway drunk and fell off into the water. It was pandemonium, but very exciting, and in the midst of it Mrs. Stevenson was calmly looking after her husband and keeping up a smiling, courageous face.

[Footnote 33: Tin is the equivalent in the islands for Mr. Jack Buckland was the living original of Tommy Haddon in The Wrecker.]

As soon as they were at sea Louis recovered, and after stopping off at Apia for a look at their new property, they went the rounds of the "low islands," visiting thirty-three in all. Although they confessed to a certain monotony in these islands, their adventures, of which Mrs. Stevenson kept a regular diary, were many and exciting. These notes were written for her husband's benefit, but as it happened that he made but slight use of them, she prepared them for publication herself in a volume called The Cruise of the Janet Nichol. "This diary," she says in her preface, "was written under the most adverse conditions—sometimes on the damp up-turned bottom of a canoe or whale-boat, sometimes when lying face downward on the burning sands of the tropic beach, often in copra sheds in the midst of a pandemonium of noise and confusion, but oftener on board the rolling Janet, whose pet name was the Jumping Jenny, but never in comfortable surroundings."

It was on this voyage, during which they were well tossed about by the frisky Janet, that the ship was set on fire by the spontaneous combustion of some fireworks in one of the cabins. In the midst of the excitement some native sailors were seen by Mrs. Stevenson about to toss overboard a blazing trunk. She stopped them in time and was thankful to discover that she had saved all her husband's manuscripts.

At the end of the cruise, from which his health did not benefit as much as had been hoped, they returned to Sydney, meeting there a reception which, while irritating enough at the time, afterwards afforded them much amusement. They went directly from the ship to the most fashionable hotel, but, not being known there, their queer appearance, with their Tokalu buckets, mats, shells, straw hats, etc., brought upon them a severe snubbing. Then they went to the Oxford, a little old inn on George Street, where they were courteously received and given the whole first floor, without being asked to show their credentials. The next morning every paper in Sydney had their names on the front page, and all the clubs, societies, churches, and schools sent cards to the fine hotel, whose proprietor had to send a messenger three times a day to the Oxford with a basketful of letters for the Stevensons. The proprietor, now aware of what he had done, came in great chagrin to beg them to come back, and offered them the rooms for half price—for nothing—but they refused; and, besides, they were too comfortable at the Oxford to be willing to leave. After that, whenever Mrs. Stevenson went to Sydney she always stayed at the Oxford, for she was always loyal to those who showed her consideration.

During their stay in Sydney at this time Mr. Stevenson was so ill that he was compelled to keep his room, and all thought of a return to England was now definitely abandoned. Plans were set on foot for establishing a permanent residence in Samoa, and while Lloyd Osbourne went to England to bring the furniture from Skerryvore, the Stevensons returned to Apia and camped in a gate lodge on their place until the new house should be built.



CHAPTER VIII

THE HAPPY YEARS IN SAMOA.

It was in Samoa that the word "home" first began to have a real meaning for these gypsy wanderers, lured on as they had been half round the world in their quest of the will-o'-the-wisp, health. Having bought the land, which lay on rising ground about three miles from the town of Apia, it was then necessary to find the money to build a house on it. After some thought, Mrs. Stevenson suggested that they might sell Skerryvore in England, and thus turn the one house directly into the other. As Skerryvore had been a gift to her from her father-in-law, Louis said, "But this money is yours," and he then said he would make it all right by leaving her the Samoan place in his will, which he did, "with all that it contained."

The next thing was to choose a name, and they finally decided upon the native word Vailima,[34] meaning "five waters," in reference to a stream fed by four tributaries that ran through the place.

[Footnote 34: Pronounced Vyleema.]

Without more ado they plunged eagerly into the business of clearing the forest and building their house—a task for which Fanny Stevenson, by taste and early training, was supremely fitted. She wrote at once to her mother-in-law in Scotland, saying: "Come when you like. Even if we make a temporary shelter you need not be so very uncomfortable. The only question is the food problem, and if in six months I cannot have a garden producing and fowls and pigs and cows it will be strange to me." In all this she took a high delight, for, like a true pioneer, she found more pleasure in the doing of a task than in the thing finished. When the house or garden or what-not was done, and there was nothing left but to admire, a great part of the interest in it was gone for her. At Vailima she had almost a virgin field for her gardening activities, and her "Dutch blood" rejoiced within her. In the old California days her husband, in his humorous way, had called her "the forty-niner," but now, as he watched her, flitting in her blue dress, like a witch, in all parts of the plantation, directing, expostulating, and working with her hands when words failed, he called her "my little blue bogie planter." Writing to Miss Taylor, he says: "Ill or well, rain or shine, a little blue indefatigable figure is to be observed howking about certain patches of garden. She comes in heated and bemired up to the eyebrows, late for every meal...."

The place they had bought was not precisely in the "bush," as the unbroken forest is called in those lands, for it had once been partly under cultivation; but it needs only a short season of neglect for the devouring jungle to sweep over and obliterate all traces of the handiwork of man. To all intents they began anew to clear out a place for their house and garden, in the midst of the great silent forest, "where one might hear the babbling of a burn close by, and the birds, and the sea breaking on the coast three miles away and six hundred feet below." The days were "fine like heaven; such a blue of the sea, such green of the trees, and such crimson of the hibiscus flowers were never dreamed of; and the air as mild and gentle as a baby's breath—and yet not hot."

"The scenery," writes Mrs. Stevenson to Miss Boodle, "is simply enchanting; here a cliff, there a dashing little river, yonder a waterfall, here a great gorge slashed through the hillside, and everywhere a vegetation that baffles description. Our only workmen are cannibals from other islands and so-called savages—though I have never yet met one man whom that word described accurately. I have with me [on the steamer Lubeck, on the way from Sydney to Samoa] a cageful of beautiful yellow fowls, a big black mother sow is to follow, and soon I mean to have some pretty Jersey cows and some gentle horses. I have packages of garden seeds to experiment with, and it is odd indeed if I am not able soon to provision a garrison. One of the first things I shall plunge into is an ice-house run by cascade power."

At first they lived in a two-room cottage, designed to serve later as a gate lodge, where comfort was at a minimum. The road to Apia was scarcely more than a footpath, and it was difficult to bring up supplies in any quantity. At times provisions ran low, and the story of the occasion when they were reduced to dining on a single avocado[35] pear was told so often, in print and otherwise, that during all the following time of plenty they had to keep explaining that they really had enough to eat. Of course the famine was more apparent than real, for there was enough food at the town only three miles away, and the occasional dearth in those first days was merely a matter of the inconvenience of bringing it up.

[Footnote 35: Commonly called "alligator" pear.]

It was in the hurricane season, too, and there were days when they sat in momentary fear lest their frail dwelling should be carried away by the fury of the storm or crushed beneath some falling giant of the forest.

From the day of their arrival at Vailima, in September, 1890, Mrs. Stevenson began to keep a diary—a record which has proved to be one of the most valuable sources of material in writing her biography, and which itself has a curious history. When, after her husband's death, she finally left Vailima, the diary was inadvertently left behind, eventually making its way to London and falling into the hands of an English lady, Miss Gladys Peacock, who, thinking it might be of some use to the family, sent it to Lloyd Osbourne, with a note saying that "of course she had not read it." It is to the courtesy of this Englishwoman that I am indebted for the extracts from the diary, of which I shall make free use.

In their temporary lodge in the wilderness, where they were encamped while the big house was building, furniture and other comforts of civilization were decidedly lacking, but they had brought beds with them, and Mrs. Stevenson at once set the carpenter to putting them up. For help about the house and premises they had to depend on Paul Einfuerer, the German pantryman from the Lubeck, who had come up and asked for work. He was good-natured but clumsy, and spoke so little English that it was difficult to communicate with him. The natives employed in clearing and planting knew only Samoan, and Mrs. Stevenson often found it necessary to instruct them by doing the work with her own hands. Writing humorously of her troubles to Sir Sidney Colvin, her husband says: "Fanny was to have rested; blessed Paul began making a duck house; she let him be; the duck house fell down, and she had to set her hand to it. He was then to make a drinking place for the pigs; she let be again, and he made a stair by which the pigs will probably escape this evening, and she was near weeping.... Then she had to cook the dinner; then, of course, like a fool and a woman, must wait dinner for me and make a flurry of herself. Her day so far." Again he writes: "The guid wife had bread to bake, and she baked it in a pan, O! But between whiles she was down with me weeding sensitive[36] in the paddock. Our dinner—the lowest we have ever been—consisted of an avocado pear between Fanny and me, a ship's biscuit for the guid man, white bread for the missis, and red wine for the twa; no salt horse, even, in all Vailima!"

[Footnote 36: They had a terrible time with the sensitive plant, which had become a pest there and grew almost faster than they could weed it out.]

On the last trip from Sydney Mrs. Stevenson had brought all sorts of seeds with her—tomatoes, beans, alfalfa, melons, and a dozen others—and she went about the place dropping them in wherever she thought they would grow. Some difficulties peculiar to the tropics had to be met and conquered. For instance, rats ate out the inside of the melons as soon as they were ripe, and it became necessary to put out poison. A beginning had been made in the way of live stock, of which she says: "We have three pigs—one fine imported boar and two slab-sided sows. They dwell in a large circular enclosure, which, with its stone walls, looks like an ancient fortification."

These same swine became the torment of their lives, for some of the devils said to haunt Vailima seemed to have entered into them, and no sty could be made strong enough to restrain them.

In clearing away the dense growth on the site of their projected house they were careful to preserve the best of the native plants. "The trees that have been left standing in the clearing," says the diary, "are of immense size, really majestic, with creepers winding about their trunks and orchids growing in the forks of their branches. These great trees are alive with birds, which chatter at certain hours of the night and morning with rich, throaty voices. Though they do not exactly sing, the sound they make is very musical and pretty. Yesterday Ben [the man of all work] took his gun and went into the bush to shoot. He returned with some small birds like parrots, which were almost bursting with fat. I felt some compunction about eating birds that suggested cages and swings and stands, but as we had nothing else to eat was fain to cook them, and a very excellent dish they made. I have read somewhere that the dodo and a relative of his called the 'tooth-billed pigeon' are still to be found on this island. It would be delightful to possess a pet dodo."[37]

[Footnote 37: "The one surviving species of dodo, the manume'a, a bird about the size of a small moor-hen, exists in Samoa. It has only recovered its present feeble powers of flight since cats were introduced in the island. Its dark flesh is extremely delicious."—From Balfour's Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.]

Although their stay in the little lodge was to be but temporary, it was like her to set to work to make it a pleasant abode even for the short time that they were to be there. "What we most dislike about our house," she says, "is the chilly, death-like aspect of the colors in which it is painted—black and white and lead-color. So we unearthed from our boxes some pieces of tapa[38] in rich shades of brown and nailed them on the walls, using pieces of another pattern for bordering, and at once the whole appearance of the room was changed. Over the door connecting the two rooms we fastened a large flat piece of pink coral, a present given me by Captain Reid when we were on the Equator. We have had the carpenter put up shelves in one corner of the room and on two sides of one of the windows. I also had him nail some boards together in the form of a couch, upon which I have laid a mattress covered by a shawl. On the table an old pink cloth is spread, and when we light the lamp and set the little Japanese burner to smoking buhach—for, alas, there are mosquitoes—we feel quite snug and homelike.

[Footnote 38: Tapa is a cloth made of vegetable fibre and stained in various striking patterns. It is used by the natives for clothing, curtains, beds, and many other purposes.]

"The pig house, a most unsightly thing, is finished, and a creeper or two will soon disguise its ugliness. There seem to be a great number of mummy apples[39] springing up through the clearing, of which I am glad for the sake of the prospective cow. Paul and I have planted out a lot of kidney potatoes, which is an experiment only, as they are not supposed to grow in Samoa. We have sowed tomato seeds, also artichokes and eggplants, in boxes. A few days ago Mr. Caruthers sent us half a dozen very fine pineapples, and as fast as we eat them we plant the tops.

[Footnote 39: The papaw.]

"October 6. I have been too busy to write before. Much has been accomplished. A good lot of sweet corn is planted, besides peas, onions, lettuce, and radishes. Lima beans are coming up, and some of the cantaloupes. Mr. Caruthers has brought a root of mint and some cuttings of granadilla,[40] which have been set out along the arbor. It seems absolutely impossible to get anything sent up to us from Apia. Lists and notes go flying, but, except from Krause the butcher, with no results. It seems an odd thing that there should not be a spade or a rake for sale in a town where there would be no difficulty in finding the best quality of champagne, to say nothing of all the materials for mixed drinks. We have almost starved for want of provisions until yesterday, when Ben killed a couple of fowls, a large piece of meat came from town, Paul shot two pigeons, and Mr. Blacklock came with fresh tomatoes. Afterwards Ben came with palusami,[41] and now to-day comes a young native girl from Mrs. Blacklock with enormous bananas, long green beans, a dozen eggs, and a bunch of flowers, and Ben has come in with eight little parrots. It seems either a feast or a famine with us.

[Footnote 40: A tropical fruit.]

[Footnote 41: A native dish of taro tops and cocoanut.]

"October 7. Last night it rained heavily, which was good for my plants, but, as our kitchen is some six or eight yards from the house, cooking became a series of adventures. I had set a sponge for bread last night, and was most anxious to bake the dough early in the day. A black boy was sent to the carpenter for a moulding board, and, placing it on a chair on the back veranda, I knelt on the floor with a shawl over my head to keep the rain off and made up the loaves. In making the dough I was successful, but the attempt to bake it almost sent me into hysterics. With an umbrella over my head I ran to the kitchen, but found, to my dismay, that all the wood was soaked, and the wind drove the smoke back into the stove, which thereupon belched forth acrid clouds from every opening. Paul ran down to where the carpenter had been working, and returned with a boxful of chips which we dried on top of the stove, swallowing volumes of smoke as we did so. Then I called Ben and showed him how to nail up the half of a tin kerosene can over the opening of the pipe to screen it from the wind. That helped a little, but the rain beat in on the stove, and, though we consumed immense quantities of chips, it still remained cold. Finally I made a barrier of boxes around the stove, and that brought a measure of success, so that in about a couple of hours I was able to half bake, half dry a fowl for luncheon. By that time the bread was done for, and I very nearly so. Paul and I held a council of war, and decided to send the boys down to the pavilion to live, while we took their room for a kitchen and dining-room, one end serving for the one and the other end for the other, somewhat after the fashion of Mr. and Mrs. Boffin's room in Our Mutual Friend.

"There were two mango trees among the plants sent up by Mr. Caruthers, and I was surprised to see among them also a shrub that is the pest of Tahiti and will become so here if it is planted. In the afternoon, the rain being then only a high mist, Simile and I began to set out the things. While busy at this I saw three or four beautiful young men, followed by a troop of dogs, pass along our road towards the bush. I have seldom seen more graceful, elegant creatures than these fellows. They carried large knives and axes, wore hats of fresh green banana leaves, and also carried large banana leaves as umbrellas to keep off the rain. With a friendly tofa [farewell] on either side, they went their way. After we had planted all the roots and taken a little rest, Simile and I took a hoe and pickaxe and finished the afternoon sowing Indian corn. I asked Simile while we were planting which was the best season for such work, meaning the wet, dry, or intermediate time. 'We Samoans,' he answered, 'always go by the moon. Unless we plant in the time of the big round moon we expect no fruit.'

"I thought one of my yellow hens wanted to sit, and that it would be the proper thing to provide her with eggs. To identify the eggs from fresh ones I made a black pencil mark around each one. After all was finished I retired from the henhouse and peeped through the palings. Madam hen clucked up to the nest, as I had always seen hens do, but at the sight of the marked eggs she started back in a sort of surprise and alarm. 'What's the matter?' cried the two cocks, stretching wide legs as they hastened to the spot. They, too, started back, just as the hen had done, held a hurried consultation and finally ventured to touch the eggs with their beaks. By this time all the five yellow hens had gathered round the nest, and pretty soon all the others were craning their necks to gaze at the marvel. After the cocks had poked the eggs about a little with their beaks the hens went nearer and tried to peck off the black marks. All the time there was a great hubbub of anxious conversation. The next morning more than half the eggs had been destroyed, and to save those that were left I had to remove them."

Exploring their new estate was one of their most exciting and at the same time laborious occupations, for most of the land was so densely overgrown that it was necessary to carry a bush knife with which to cut a path as they went, and, moreover, unexpected dangers lurked in the beautiful ferny depths. "Louis and I went up to see the banana patch," says the diary, "Louis carrying a knife to clear the road. For a little way we followed a fairly open path that had previously been cleared by Louis, but by and by it began to close up and become treacherously boggy underfoot. Several times we were ankle-deep in mud and water, and Louis had to slash down the tall vegetation that obstructed our way. Before long he cried out: 'Behold your banana patch!' And there it was, sure enough—a great number of sturdy, thickset young plants, many with bunches of fruit hanging above the strange purple flower of the plant, choked with a rank undergrowth and set with the roots in sluggishly running water. Here and there the gigantic leaves of the great taro[42] spread out—a dark, shining green. It was too much for Louis, who fell to clearing on the spot, while I went on to the end of the plantation. Once or twice I was nearly stuck in the bog, but managed to drag myself from the ooze by clinging to a strong plant. After a while Louis called out to me as though in answer, and I hurried back to him. When I came up he said he had mistaken the cry of a bird for my voice and supposed I had lost the path. I helped him a little while pulling up the smaller weeds, but was in mortal terror of touching a poisonous creeper whose acquaintance I had already made and whose marks I still bear. It went to my heart to dig up and destroy the most lovely specimens of ferns I have ever seen, but I did it bravely, though I determined to return some day and make a collection of them. Some of the more delicate climbing ferns were magnificent. Occasionally as I drew out a plant the air around me was filled with the perfume of its bruised leaves. It was entrancing work, though we were soaked with mud and water, but before very long my head began to swim, and I proposed to go back to the house and see about some sort of food. I just managed to get a meal prepared and then gave out utterly, for my beautiful banana swamp had given me a fever with a most alarming promptitude. I could not sleep all night, but kept waking with a start, my heart and pulses bounding, and my head aching miserably. This morning Louis gave me a dose of quinine, which soon helped me.