e
far more for health, mental and physical, to those whose constitutions
suited the climate, than the bustle and the clamour of cities. Visitors,
too, often came up the hill to Vailima, sometimes the residents in Apia,
sometimes home friends or distinguished strangers, who were glad to
visit the much-loved author in his distant retreat, and to all was
given the same cordial welcome, to all there remains the memory of
delightful hours in the company of those who knew so well how to make
time pass bewitchingly.

The household by this time consisted of Mr Stevenson, his wife, his
mother, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, his sister, Mrs Strong, who acted as her
stepfather's amanuensis, her little boy, Austin, who went to school in
California in 1892, and Mr Graham Balfour, a cousin of Mr Stevenson's.

Until he left for school, Mr Stevenson gave Austin his lessons, and, as
his uncle Lloyd had done, the boy considered the teacher only a larger
playfellow.

A very pretty picture of the home life is given in a note-book of Mrs
Thomas Stevenson's, in which she describes a birthday feast in her
honour, at which little Austin Strong recited some verses made for the
occasion by her son. Very amusing the verses are, and in them the small
scholar repeats with pride what strides in knowledge he had made under
the able tuition of his step-grandfather. It is not a little comic to
think that Mr Stevenson had at this time a well-grown step-grandchild,
and had, indeed, held the honourable and venerable position of a
step-grandparent shortly after he was thirty.

Very amusing features of the letters that Mrs Thomas Stevenson sent home
were the funny illustrations of daily life enclosed in them, and which
were drawn by a clever pencil in the household. Like the old plays in
the Leith Walk shop the youthful Louis once so frequently visited, they
were _A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured_. Sometimes they were mere
outlines of domestic processions, sometimes they were gay with paint in
shades of brown and green and blue. In them all the members of the
family were represented, and now and then there appeared the dusky
semblance of a Samoan domestic Faauma, 'the bronze candlestick,' or
Lafaele, the amiable and the willing. As one recalls them one sees again
a verandah, with long chairs and lazy loungers, Mr Stevenson pretending
to play his flageolet, but too comfortable actually to begin; the rest
in attitudes more or less suggestive of that warmth and sat