early training, was supremely fitted. She wrote at once
to her mother-in-law in Scotland, saying: "Come when you like. Even
if we make a temporary shelter you need not be so very uncomfortable.
The only question is the food problem, and if in six months I cannot
have a garden producing and fowls and pigs and cows it will be strange
to me." In all this she took a high delight, for, like a true pioneer,
she found more pleasure in the _doing_ of a task than in the thing
finished. When the house or garden or what-not was done, and there was
nothing left but to admire, a great part of the interest in it was
gone for her. At Vailima she had almost a virgin field for her
gardening activities, and her "Dutch blood" rejoiced within her. In
the old California days her husband, in his humorous way, had called
her "the forty-niner," but now, as he watched her, flitting in her
blue dress, like a witch, in all parts of the plantation, directing,
expostulating, and working with her hands when words failed, he called
her "my little blue bogie planter." Writing to Miss Taylor, he says:
"Ill or well, rain or shine, a little blue indefatigable figure is to
be observed howking about certain patches of garden. She comes in
heated and bemired up to the eyebrows, late for every meal...."

The place they had bought was not precisely in the "bush," as the
unbroken forest is called in those lands, for it had once been partly
under cultivation; but it needs only a short season of neglect for the
devouring jungle to sweep over and obliterate all traces of the
handiwork of man. To all intents they began anew to clear out a place
for their house and garden, in the midst of the great silent forest,
"where one might hear the babbling of a burn close by, and the
birds, and the sea breaking on the coast three miles away and six
hundred feet below." The days were "fine like heaven; such a blue of
the sea, such green of the trees, and such crimson of the hibiscus
flowers were never dreamed of; and the air as mild and gentle as a
baby's breath--and yet not hot."

"The scenery," writes Mrs. Stevenson to Miss Boodle, "is simply
enchanting; here a cliff, there a dashing little river, yonder a
waterfall, here a great gorge slashed through the hillside, and
everywhere a vegetation that baffles description. Our only workmen are
cannibals from other islands and so-called savages--though I have
never yet met one man whom that word described accurately. I have wi