ished to use it for a bathing pool. The hole must be pretty well
filled up by to-day, for last night the rain came down in awful
torrents. For the last two days the evening light has been very
strange and disquieting--a whitish glare in the sky, the trees and
bare ground a burnt-sienna red, and the vegetation a strong crude
green with a delicate white bloom. The rain is still pouring and the
whole world is damp and uncomfortable."

The hurricanes were varied now and then by earthquakes, of which they
felt two distinct shocks on January 13. To add to these discomforts,
tiny visitors from the jungle gave them many pin-pricks of annoyance.
"It is strange," says the diary, "that each night has its separate
plague of insects. The mosquitoes, of course, are always with us, and
Simile's hurricane cellar has become a fine breeding place for them.
But on one night moths are our torment, while perhaps the very next
night it will be myriads of small black beetles. At another time the
creatures may be of a large cockshafer sort, or a dreadful
square-tailed thing that is especially ominous. To-night I have had
for the first time two sets of tormentors, the first being small
burnished beetles of the most lovely colors imaginable. A
pinkish-bronze fellow lies on my paper as I write; he kept standing on
his head until he died in a fit. It seems a color night, for I now
have small silver moths, all of a size but with different beautiful
markings. There are also large salmon-colored moths that Louis cannot
bear the sight of because they are marked like a skeleton. Perhaps
they are a variety of the death's head moth. They are almost as large
as a humming-bird, and have beautiful eyes that glow in the dark like
fire."

Enough order had now come out of the first chaos to encourage them to
write for the elder Mrs. Stevenson. Her son went to Sydney to meet
her, but was there taken very ill and returned in that condition with
his mother as nurse. During his absence his wife remained in sole
charge, and, judging by the entries in her diary, she had her hands
full every moment of the time. Everybody--white, brown, or black--went
to her with apparently full confidence that she was able to cure any
wound or disease. "One day," she says, "I heard a loud weeping as of
some one in great pain; a man had just had two fingers dreadfully
crushed. I really didn't know what to do except to go to a doctor, but
as the wound was bleeding a good deal I mixed