eunion House, where they will get decent
meal and find an honest and obliging landlord. I owed him this word of
thanks, before I enter fairly on the second chapter of my emigrant
experience.

PART II

ACROSS THE PLAINS

_TO PAUL BOURGET_

_Traveller and student and curious as you are, you will never have heard
the name of Vailima, most likely not even that of Upolu, and Samoa
itself may be strange to your ears. To these barbaric seats there came
the other day a yellow book with your name on the title, and filled in
every page with the exquisite gifts of your art. Let me take and change
your own words: "J'ai beau admirer les autres de toutes mes forces,
c'est avec vous que je me complais a vivre."_

_R. L. S_

_Vailima,_
_Upolu,_
_Samoa._

LETTER TO THE AUTHOR

MY DEAR STEVENSON,

You have trusted me with the choice and arrangement of these papers,
written before you departed to the South Seas, and have asked me to add
a preface to the volume. But it is your prose the public wish to read,
not mine; and I am sure they will willingly be spared the preface.
Acknowledgments are due in your name to the publishers of the several
magazines from which the papers are collected, viz. _Fraser's_,
_Longman's_, the _Magazine of Art_, and _Scribner's_. I will only add,
lest any reader should find the tone of the concluding pieces less
inspiriting than your wont, that they were written under circumstances
of especial gloom and sickness. "I agree with you the lights seem a
little turned down," so you write to me now: "the truth is I was far
through, and came none too soon to the South Seas, where I was to
recover peace of body and mind. And however low the lights, the stuff is
true...." Well, inasmuch as the South Sea sirens have breathed new life
into you, we are bound to be heartily grateful to them, though as they
keep you so far removed from us, it is difficult not to bear them a
grudge; and if they would reconcile us quite, they have but to do two
things more--to teach you new tales that shall charm us like your old,
and to spare you, at least once in a while in summer, to climates within
reach of us who are task-bound for ten months in the year beside the
Thames.