her now, to be sure. Well, well!
you say you are sure to catch fever in the bush; so we do continually;
but you are to conceive Samoa fever as the least formidable malady under
heaven: implying only a day or so of slight headache and languor and ill
humour, easily reduced by quinine or antipyrine. The hot fever I had was
from over-exertion and blood poisoning, no doubt, and irritation of the
bladder; it went of its own accord and with rest. I have had since a bad
quinsey which knocked me rather useless for about a week, but I stuck to
my work, with great difficulty and small success.

_Date unknown._--But it's fast day and July, and the rude inclement
depth of winter, and the thermometer was 68 this morning and a few days
ago it was 63, and we have all been perishing with cold. All still seems
quiet. Your counterfeit presentments are all round us: the pastel over
my bed, the Dew-Smith photograph over my door, and the "celebrity" on
Fanny's table. My room is now done, and looks very gay, and chromatic
with its blue walls and my coloured lines of books.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

This is the first letter in which Stevenson expresses the opinion
which had been forcing itself upon him, and which he felt it his duty
in the following year to express publicly in letters to the Times, of
the unwisdom of the government established under the treaty between
the Three Powers and the incompetence of the officials appointed to
carry it out.

_[Vailima] Sunday, Sept. 5(?), 1891._

MY DEAR COLVIN,--Yours from Lochinver has just come. You ask me if I am
ever homesick for the Highlands and the Isles. Conceive that for the
last month I have been living there between 1786 and 1850, in my
grandfather's diaries and letters. I _had_ to take a rest; no use
talking; so I put in a month over my _Lives of the Stevensons_ with
great pleasure and profit and some advance; one chapter and a part
drafted. The whole promises well. Chapter I. Domestic Annals. Chapter
II. The Northern Lights. Chapter III. The Bell Rock. Chapter IV. A
Family of Boys. Chap. V. The Grandfather. VI. Alan Stevenson. VII.
Thomas Stevenson. My materials for my great-grandfather are almost null;
for my grandfather copious and excellent. Name, a puzzle. _A Scottish
Family_, _A Family of Engineers_, _Northern Lights_, _The Engineers of
the Northern Lights: A Family History_. Advise; but it will take long.
Now, imagine if I have been homesick for Barrahe