of the future palace, over the
details of which on paper Mrs. Stevenson and I have already shed real
tears; what it will be when it comes to paying for it, I leave you to
imagine. But if it can only be built as now intended, it will be with
genuine satisfaction and a growunded pride that I shall welcome you at
the steps of my Old Colonial Home, when you land from the steamer on a
long-merited holiday. I speak much at my ease; yet I do not know, I may
be now an outlaw, a bankrupt, the abhorred of all good men. I do not
know, you probably do. Has Hyde[35] turned upon me? Have I fallen, like
Danvers Carew?

It is suggested to me that you might like to know what will be my future
society. Three consuls, all at loggerheads with one another, or at the
best in a clique of two against one; three different sects of
missionaries, not upon the best of terms; and the Catholics and
Protestants in a condition of unhealable ill-feeling as to whether a
wooden drum ought or ought not to be beaten to announce the time of
school. The native population, very genteel, very songful, very
agreeable, very good-looking, chronically spoiling for a fight (a
circumstance not to be entirely neglected in the design of the palace).
As for the white population of (technically, "The Beach"), I don't
suppose it is possible for any person not thoroughly conversant with the
South Seas to form the smallest conception of such a society, with its
grog-shops, its apparently unemployed hangers-on, its merchants of all
degrees of respectability and the reverse. The paper, of which I must
really send you a copy--if yours were really a live magazine, you would
have an exchange with the editor: I assure you, it has of late contained
a great deal of matter about one of your contributors--rejoices in the
name of Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser. The advertisements in the
Advertiser are permanent, being simply subsidies for its existence. A
dashing warfare of newspaper correspondence goes on between the various
residents, who are rather fond of recurring to one another's
antecedents. But when all is said, there are a lot of very nice,
pleasant people, and I don't know that Apia is very much worse than half
a hundred towns that I could name.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO CHARLES BAXTER

As above indicated, on the way between Samoa and Sydney Stevenson
left the _Janet Nicoll_ for a week's stay in New Caledonia, during
which he was hospita