of the Commissioners of Northern Lights, on
which he had been accustomed as a lad to accompany his father on the
official trips of inspection round the coast.

[24] Mr. Rudyard Kipling was at this time planning a trip to Samoa,
but the plan was unfortunately not carried out, and he and Stevenson
never met.

[25] Readers of _The Wrecker_ will not need to be reminded that this
is the name of the personage on whom the mystery in that story
hinges.

[26] See vol. xxiii. pp. 46, 48.

[27] _Across the Plains._ The papers specially referred to in the
next lines are those written at Saranac Lake in the winter of
1887-88, including _A Letter to a Young Gentleman_, _Pulvis et
Umbra_, _A Christmas Sermon_.

[28] For the volume _Across the Plains_.

[29] _i.e._ on the stage.

[30] As to this peculiar intermittency of the Samoan streams, full
in their upper course, but below in many places dry or lost, compare
the late Lord Pembroke's _South Sea Bubbles_, p. 212:--"One odd
thing connected with these ravines is the fact that the higher you
go the more water you find. Unlike the Thames, which begins, I
believe, in half a mile of dusty lane, and expands in its brimming
breadth as it approaches the sea, a Samoan stream begins in bubbling
plenty and ends in utter drought a mile or two from the salt water.
Gradually as you ascend you become more and more hopeful; moist
patches of sand appear here and there, then tiny pools that a fallen
leaf might cover, then larger ones with little thread-like runs of
water between them; larger and larger, till at last you reach some
hard ledge of trap, over which a glorious stream gurgles and
splashes into a pool ample enough for the bath of an elephant."

[31] In _The Wrecker_. As to the story thus suggested by Mr. Andrew
Lang, see below, pp. 171, 187, etc.

XII

LIFE IN SAMOA--_Continued_

SECOND YEAR AT VAILIMA

JANUARY-DECEMBER 1892

The New Year found Stevenson down with his first attack of the influenza
epidemic, then virulent all over the world. But the illness was not
sufficient to stop his work, and in the first two months of the year he
was busy continuing his conscientious labours on _The Footnote to
History_, seeing _The Wrecker_ and _The Beach of Falesa_ through the
press, planning the South Sea plantation novel _Sophia Scarlet_, which
never got beyond that