g and chasing in Vailele plantation,
And vastly we enjoyed it,
But, alas! for the state of my foundation,
For it wholly has destroyed it.

Come, my mind is looking up. The above is wholly impromptu.--On oath,

TUSITALA.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

The missionary view of the Sunday paper-chase, with an account of
Stevenson's apologies to the ladies and gentlemen of the mission,
have been printed by Mr. W. E. Clarke in the Chronicle of the London
Missionary Society for April and May 1908.

_[Vailima] Aug. 7th, 1894._

MY DEAR COLVIN,--This is to inform you, sir, that on Sunday last (and
this is Tuesday) I attained my ideal here, and we had a paper-chase in
Vailele Plantation, about 15 miles, I take it, from us; and it was all
that could be wished. It is really better fun than following the hounds,
since you have to be your own hound, and a precious bad hound I was,
following every false scent on the whole course to the bitter end; but I
came in 3rd at the last on my little Jack, who stuck to it gallantly,
and awoke the praises of some discriminating persons. (5 + 7 + 2-1/2 =
14-1/2 miles; yes, that is the count.) We had quite the old sensations
of exhilaration, discovery, an appeal to a savage instinct; and I felt
myself about 17 again, a pleasant experience. However, it was on the
Sabbath Day, and I am now a pariah among the English, as if I needed any
increment of unpopularity. I must not go again; it gives so much
unnecessary tribulation to poor people, and, sure, we don't want to make
tribulation. I have been forbidden to work, and have been instead doing
my two or three hours in the plantation every morning. I only wish
somebody would pay me L10 a day for taking care of cacao, and I could
leave literature to others. Certainly, if I have plenty of exercise, and
no work, I feel much better; but there is Biles the butcher! him we
have always with us.

I do not much like novels, I begin to think, but I am enjoying
exceedingly Orme's _History of Hindostan_, a lovely book in its way, in
large quarto, with a quantity of maps, and written in a very lively and
solid eighteenth century way, never picturesque except by accident and
from a kind of conviction, and a fine sense of order. No historian I
have ever read is so minute; yet he never gives you a word about the
people; his interest is entirely limited in the concatenation of events,
into which he goes with a lucid, almost superh