we
all have for our tongue and literature I am wounded. If I had this
man's fertility and courage, it seems to me I could heave a pyramid.

"Well, we begin to be the old fogies now, and it was high time
_something_ rose to take our places. Certainly Kipling has the gifts;
the fairy godmothers were all tipsy at his christening. What will he
do with them?"

Of the rest of Stevenson's career we cannot speak at length, nor is it
needful. How in steady succession came his triumphs: came, too, his
trials from ill-health--how he spent winters at Davos Platz, Bournemouth,
and tried other places in America; and how, at last, good fortune led him
to the South Pacific. After many voyagings and wanderings among the
islands, he settled near Apia, in Samoa, early in 1890, cleared some four
hundred acres, and built a house; where, while he wrote what delighted
the English-speaking race, he took on himself the defence of the natives
against foreign interlopers, writing under the title _A Footnote to
History_, the most powerful _expose_ of the mischief they had done and
were doing there. He was the beloved of the natives, as he made himself
the friend of all with whom he came in contact. There, as at home, he
worked--worked with the same determination and in the enjoyment of better
health. The obtaining idea with him, up to the end, as it had been from
early life, was a brave, resolute, cheerful endeavour to make the best of
it.

"I chose Samoa instead of Honolulu," he told Mr W. H. Trigg, who reports
the talk in _Cassells' Magazine_, "for the simple and eminently
satisfactory reason that it is less civilised. Can you not conceive that
it is awful fun?" His house was called "Vailima," which means Five
Waters in the Samoan, and indicates the number of streams that flow by
the spot.

CHAPTER VII--THE VAILIMA LETTERS

The Vailima Letters, written to Mr Sidney Colvin and other friends, are
in their way delightful if not inimitable: and this, in spite of the idea
having occurred to him, that some use might hereafter be made of these
letters for publication purposes. There is, indeed, as little trace of
any change in the style through this as well could be--the utterly
familiar, easy, almost child-like flow remains, unmarred by
self-consciousness or tendency "to put it on."

In June, 1892, Stevenson says:

"It came over me the other day suddenly that this diary of mine to you
would make goo