on Paul
Einfuerer, the German pantryman from the _Lubeck_, who had come up and
asked for work. He was good-natured but clumsy, and spoke so little
English that it was difficult to communicate with him. The natives
employed in clearing and planting knew only Samoan, and Mrs. Stevenson
often found it necessary to instruct them by doing the work with her
own hands. Writing humorously of her troubles to Sir Sidney Colvin,
her husband says: "Fanny was to have rested; blessed Paul began making
a duck house; she let him be; the duck house fell down, and she had to
set her hand to it. He was then to make a drinking place for the pigs;
she let be again, and he made a stair by which the pigs will probably
escape this evening, and she was near weeping.... Then she had to cook
the dinner; then, of course, like a fool and a woman, must wait dinner
for me and make a flurry of herself. Her day so far." Again he writes:
"The guid wife had bread to bake, and she baked it in a pan, O! But
between whiles she was down with me weeding sensitive[36] in the
paddock. Our dinner--the lowest we have ever been--consisted of an
avocado pear between Fanny and me, a ship's biscuit for the guid man,
white bread for the missis, and red wine for the twa; no salt horse,
even, in all Vailima!"

[Footnote 36: They had a terrible time with the
sensitive plant, which had become a pest there and grew
almost faster than they could weed it out.]

On the last trip from Sydney Mrs. Stevenson had brought all sorts of
seeds with her--tomatoes, beans, alfalfa, melons, and a dozen
others--and she went about the place dropping them in wherever she
thought they would grow. Some difficulties peculiar to the tropics had
to be met and conquered. For instance, rats ate out the inside of the
melons as soon as they were ripe, and it became necessary to put out
poison. A beginning had been made in the way of live stock, of which
she says: "We have three pigs--one fine imported boar and two
slab-sided sows. They dwell in a large circular enclosure, which, with
its stone walls, looks like an ancient fortification."

These same swine became the torment of their lives, for some of the
devils said to haunt Vailima seemed to have entered into them, and no
sty could be made strong enough to restrain them.

In clearing away the dense growth on the site of their projected house
they were careful to preserve the best of the native plants.