n Mrs. Stevenson came to
England in 1898, and we were living at Oxford. I was naturally a
little nervous as to my first introduction to her. My husband wanted
to take me up to London to see her, but I asked to go alone, feeling
somehow that it would be easier. To this day I remember the
trepidation with which I followed the parlor maid upstairs in Oxford
Terrace, and was ushered into the room where a lady of infinite
dignity was lying on a sofa. It seems to me now that after one steady
look from those searching 'eyes of gold and bramble dew' (which had
rather the effect of a sort of spiritual X-ray), I lost my feeling of
being on approval, and in ten minutes I was sitting on the floor
beside the sofa, pouring out my own past history in remarkable detail,
and feeling as if I had known Tamaitai for years.

"In the following summer, 1899, she came to stay with us at Oxford,
to give Palema all the help she could about the life of Robert Louis
Stevenson he had just undertaken at her urgent request. Incidentally,
she was to be introduced to her godson, our eldest boy Gilbert, who
was then about six months old. She gave him a christening present of a
silver bowl for his bread and milk, upon a silver saucer which could
be reversed and used also as a cover. On the covering side were the
words from the Child's Garden:

'It is very nice to think
The world is full of meat and drink
With little children saying grace
In every Christian kind of place.'

"When the cover was taken off and used as a saucer it had on its
concave side:

'A child should always say what's true
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table,
At least as far as he is able.'

"Tamaitai had had a very critical operation during the previous
autumn, and was still comparatively invalided with the effects of it.
She spoke enthusiastically of Sir Frederick Treves, who had performed
it and had refused any fee, saying he counted it a privilege to attend
her. I have a clear picture of her in my mind, lying on the sofa in
our drawing-room. The door opened and the nurse carried in the baby,
barefooted. 'Ah,' she said to him, 'who's this coming in hanging out
ten pink rosebuds at the tail of his frock?' And the little pink toes
justified a description that only she would have so worded.

"We drove her round to a few of the most beautiful and characteristic
of the Oxford colleges. She was easily fatigued,