o feel
abashed and asked them to desist. Nothing would do, however, but that
each of the twenty should empty out his basket, with much laughing and
joking, and thereby prove his innocence of having plundered the
plantation. As a peace offering, my mother directed me to give them
some twists of tobacco and tins of salmon and biscuit. Then they
explained that, owing to the breadfruit having been blown off the
trees while still green, by a hurricane, there had been a famine in
their village. Their Samoan pride made them ashamed for the other
villages to know that they were reduced to eating wild roots, and so
they had sneaked up in the night to the bush back of our plantation
and filled their baskets with the roots. We apologized again and went
back to bed. The twenty Samoans sat on our veranda for hours singing,
but, although our servants were gone for the night and we two white
women were entirely alone in the house, we felt no fear. Where else in
the world could this have happened?"

Secluded as Vailima was, the family could not even here escape the
curiosity of tourists, for on "steamer days" there was always a
procession of them going up the hill from Apia to see the home of
Stevenson. One day its mistress was directing some workmen on the roof
of the carriage house when a party of tourists came up and asked if
that was Vailima and where was Mrs. Stevenson. She replied, "No spik
English," and they went on to the house, sat on the veranda and had
tea, never dreaming that the odd little person in the blue gown,
directing the roofing of the carriage house, was Mrs. Stevenson
herself.

The variety of her experiences and the wide scope of her abilities may
be shown better than in any other way, perhaps, by quotations from a
small notebook which she had carried with her from one end of the
world to the other. These entries show that she did not simply "do the
best she could," but that she made a conscientious study of how to
take care of her invalid husband, what to do in emergencies, how to
feed him when they were on ships or desert islands, etc. In every
place that they went to she kept her eyes open and learned new
receipts for cooking, sickness, and all the other requirements of
life. The entries were jotted down so hastily and often under such
peculiar circumstances that in many cases they are written upside
down, so that you have to keep turning the book about to follow it. I
quote here a few of the most characteri