Warlike outbreaks were not infrequent near Vailima. The woods were often
full of scouting parties and the roll of drums could be heard. One day
as Stevenson and Mrs. Strong were writing together they were interrupted
by a war party crossing the lawn. Mrs. Strong asked: "Louis, have we a
pistol or gun in the house that will shoot?" and he answered cheerfully
without stopping his work: "No, but we have friends on both sides."

With all their political differences he and the officials retained
friendly feeling. He paid calls on them at Apia and attended various
town gatherings, while they were often entertained at Vailima.

Always hospitable, it was a delight to him now to keep open house. Not
only the chief justice, the consuls, the doctor, the missionaries, and
the traders were in the habit of dropping in to Vailima, but from every
ship that docked at Apia came some visitor who was anxious to meet
Stevenson and his family; from the war-ships came the officers and
sailors.

The bluejackets were always particularly welcome. Mrs. Strong tells of a
party who came from H.M.S. _Wallaroo_ on one Thanksgiving Day, when "the
kitchen department was in great excitement over that foreign bird the
turkey" and all was confusion. "But Louis kept his sailors on all the
afternoon. He took them over the house and showed them ... the
curiosities from the islands, the big picture of Skerryvore
lighthouse,... the treasured bit of Gordon's handwriting from Khartoum,
in Arabic letters on a cigarette paper,... and the library, where the
Scotchmen gathered about an old edition of Burns, with a portrait. Louis
gave a volume of Underwoods (Stevenson's poems) with an inscription to
Grant, the one who hailed from Edinburgh, and the man carried it
carefully wrapped in his handkerchief. They went away waving their hats
and keeping step."

A croquet-ground and tennis-court were laid out, and Vailima was the
scene of balls, dinners, and parties of all kinds. No birthday or
holiday, English, American, or Samoan, was allowed to pass unnoticed,
and the natives were included in these festivities whenever possible.

The first Christmas at Vailima they had a party for the children who had
never before seen a Christmas tree.

Tusitala's birthday was always a special event to his island friends.
The feast was served in native style; all seated about on the floor.
Rather large gatherings they must have been, to judge from Mrs. Strong's
account. "We had sixteen pigs roasted whole underground, three enormous
fish (small whales, Lloyd called them), four hundred pounds of beef,
ditto of pork, 200 heads of taro, great bunches of bananas, native
delicacies done up in bundles of _ti_ leaves, 800 pineapples, many
weighing fifteen pounds, all from Lloyd's patch. Among the presents for
Tusitala, besides flowers and wreaths, were fans, native baskets ... and
cocoanut cups beautifully polished."

[Illustration: A feast of chiefs]

On these occasions the hosts were often entertained with dances and
songs. All the Samoans are great singers. They composed songs about
everything and everybody, so that one could judge the standing a person
held by the songs that were sung about him.

Those sung at Vailima parties were usually written by one of the house
"boys" and "they were danced and acted with great spirit.... Sometimes
every member of the family would be represented ... but the central
figure, the heart of the song was always Tusitala."

It is a marvel with the many demands made upon him, his varied
interests, and frequent visits to neighboring islands, Stevenson still
found time to write stories, poems, prayers, notes of the South Sea
Islands, Samoan history, and many, many letters. "It is a life that
suits me but absorbs me like an ocean," he said. Through it all his
health continued fairly good. He was able to take long tramps and rides
that would have been physically impossible two years before.

Mrs. Strong acted as his secretary and the majority of his writing now
was done by dictation. "He generally makes notes early in the morning,"
she wrote, "which he elaborates as he reads them aloud ... he never
falters for a word, but gives me the sentence with capital letters and
all the stops as clearly and steadily as though he were reading from an
unseen book."

The two South Sea books occupied much of his time, but it was of his own
land and people so far away that he had so little hope of ever seeing
again, he loved best to write.

"It is a singular thing," he wrote to James Barrie, "that I should live
here in the South Seas, and yet my imagination so continually inhabit
the cold old huddle of grey hills from which we came."

He finished and sent away further adventures of David Balfour and Alan
Breck under the title of "David Balfour." "St. Ives" followed with its
scenes laid around Edinburgh Castle, Swanston Cottage, and the Pentland
Hills. In his last book, "Weir of Hermiston," the one he left
unfinished, broken off in the midst of a word, he roamed the streets of
Auld Reekie again with a hero very like what he had once been himself,
who was likewise an enthusiastic member of the "Spec."

Something which pleased him greatly at this time was the news from his
friend Charles Baxter in Edinburgh that a complete edition of his works
was to be published in the best possible form with a limited number of
copies, to be called the "Edinburgh Edition."

"I suppose it was your idea to give it that name," Stevenson wrote,
thanking him. "No other would have affected me in the same manner....
Could a more presumptuous idea have occurred to us in those days when we
used to search our pockets for coppers, too often in vain, and combine
forces to produce the threepence necessary for two glasses of beer, than
that I should be strong and well at the age of forty three in the island
of Upolu, and that you should be at home bringing out the 'Edinburgh
Edition'?"

In spite of the many interests in his present life, his love for the
people and the country, the yearning for the friends far away grew
daily.

How he longed to have them see Vailima with all its beauties! To talk
over old times again. Such visits were continually planned, but they
were never realized.

He seldom complained and those who were with him every day rarely found
him low in spirits. It was into the letters to his old intimates that
these longings crept when it swept over him that, though a voluntary
exile in a pleasant place, he was an exile none the less, with the fate
of him who wrote:

 "There's a track across the deep,
  And a path across the sea,
  But for me there's nae return
  To my ain countree."

"When the smell of the good wet earth" came to him it came "with a kind
of Highland tone." A tropic shower found him in a "frame of mind and
body that belonged to Scotland." And when he turned to write the
chronicle of his grandfather's life and work, the beautiful words in
which he described the old gentleman's farewell to "Sumbraugh and the
wild crags of Skye" meant likewise his own farewell to those shores. No
more was he to "see the topaz and ruby interchange on the summit of Bell
Rock," no more to see "the castle on its hills," or the venerable city
which he always thought of as his home.

"Like Leyden," he wrote, "I have gone into a far land to die, not stayed
like Burns to mingle in the end with Scottish soil."

It was drawing near the close of their fourth year in Apia. On November
13 his birthday had been celebrated with the usual festivities, and on
Thanksgiving Day he had given a dinner to his American friends--and then
the end of all his wanderings and working came suddenly.

"He wrote hard all that morning of the last day," says Lloyd Osbourne,
"on his half-finished book Hermiston.... In the afternoon the mail fell
to be answered; not business correspondence--but replies to the long,
kindly letters of distant friends, received but two days since, and
still bright in memory.

"At sunset he came downstairs.... He was helping his wife on the
verandah, and gaily talking, when suddenly he put both hands to his
head, and cried out, 'What's that?' Then he asked quickly, 'Do I look
strange?' Even as he did so he fell on his knees beside her. He was
helped into the great hall, between his wife and body-servant, Sosimo,
losing consciousness instantly, as he lay back in the arm-chair that had
once been his grandfather's. Little time was lost in bringing the
doctors, Anderson of the man-of-war, and his friend Dr. Funk. They
looked at him and shook their heads ... he had passed the bounds of
human skill....

"The dozen and more Samoans that formed part of the clan of which he was
chief, sat in a wide semicircle on the floor, their reverent, troubled,
sorrow-stricken faces all fixed upon their dying master. Some knelt on
one knee to be instantly ready for any command that might be laid upon
them....

"He died at ten minutes past eight on Monday evening the 3rd of
December, in the forty-fifth year of his age.

"The great Union Jack that flew over the house was hauled down and laid
over the body, fit shroud for a loyal Scotsman. He lay in the hall which
was ever his pride, where he had passed the gayest and most delightful
hours of his life.... In it were the treasures of his far off Scottish
home.... The Samoans passed in procession beside his bed, kneeling and
kissing his hand, each in turn, before taking their places for the long
night watch beside him. No entreaty could induce them to retire, to
rest themselves for the painful arduous duties of the morrow. It would
show little love for Tusitala, they said, if they did not spend their
last night beside him. Mournful and silent, they sat in deep dejection,
poor, simple, loyal folks, fulfilling the duty that they owed their
chief.

"A messenger was dispatched to a few chiefs connected with the family,
to announce the tidings and bid them assemble their men on the morrow
for the work there was to do....

"The morning of the 4th of December broke cool and sunny.... A meeting
of chiefs was held to apportion the work and divide the men into
parties. Forty were sent with knives and axes to cut a path up the steep
face of the mountain, and the writer himself led another party to the
summit--men chosen from the immediate family--to dig the grave on the
spot where it was Robert Louis Stevenson's wish that he should lie....
Nothing more picturesque can be imagined than the ledge that forms the
summit to Væa, a place no wider than a room, and flat as a table. On
either side the land descends precipitously; in front lies the vast
ocean and surf-swept reefs; to the right and left green mountains
rise....

"All the morning Samoans were arriving with flowers, few of these were
white, for they have not learned our foreign custom, and the room glowed
with the many colors. There were no strangers on that day, no
acquaintances; those only were called who would deeply feel the loss. At
one o'clock a body of powerful Samoans bore away the coffin, hid beneath
a tattered red ensign that had flown above his vessel in many a remote
corner of the South Seas. A path so steep and rugged taxed their
strength to the utmost, for not only was the journey difficult in
itself, but extreme care was requisite to carry the coffin shoulder
high....

"No stranger hand touched him.... Those who loved him carried him to his
last home; even the coffin was the work of an old friend. The grave was
dug by his own men."

Tusitala had left them, and his friends in the South Seas had lost a
faithful friend and companion, a wise and just master.

His family and friends the world over had lost not only these but far
more. His life had been a chivalrous one with all the best that chivalry
stands for, "loyalty, honesty, generosity, courage, courtesy, and
self-devotion; to impute no unworthy motives and to bear no grudges; to
bear misfortune with cheerfulness and without a murmur; to strike hard
for the right and to take no mean advantage; to be gentle to women and
kind to all that are weak; to be rigorous with oneself and very lenient
to others--these ... were the traits that distinguished Stevenson."

"They do not make life easy as he frequently found."

His resting-place on the crest of Væa Mountain is covered by a tomb of
gray stone. On one side is inscribed in English the verses he had
written for his own requiem:

   A            ROBERT LOUIS     [Symbol: Omega]
  1850           STEVENSON            1894

    "Under the wide and starry sky,
     Dig the grave and let me lie,
     Glad did I live and gladly die,
     And I laid me down with a will.

    "This be the verse you grave for me:
     Here he lies where he longed to be;
     Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
     And the hunter home from the hill."

[Illustration: The tomb of Stevenson on Væa Mountain]

On the other side, written in Samoan and surrounded by carvings of
thistles, his native flowers, and the hibiscus flowers, emblem of the
South, are the words from the Bible:

  "Whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge;
  thy people shall be my people; and thy God my God; where thou diest
  will I die, and there will I be buried."

The Samoan chiefs have forbidden the use of firearms upon Væa hillside,
"that the birds may live there undisturbed, and raise above his grave
the songs he loved so well."

 "Tusitala, the lover of children, the teller of tales,
  Giver of counsels and dreams, a wonder, a world's delight,
  Looks o'er the labours of men in the plain and the hills; and the sails
  Pass and repass on the sea that he loved, in the day and the night."

                                                           --ANDREW LANG.




BIBLIOGRAPHY

SOME WORKS IN RELATION TO STEVENSON'S LIFE, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF AND
OTHERS


GENERAL BIOGRAPHY

Balfour, Graham: "Life of Robert Louis Stevenson." Two vols.

Colvin, Sidney, ed.: "Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson," with
biographical notes and an introduction by the editor.

Simpson, E. Blantyre: "The Robert Louis Stevenson Originals."

Strong, Mrs. Isobel: "Robert Louis Stevenson."

Watts, Lauchlan Maclean: "Hills of Home"--with Pentland Essays by R.L.
Stevenson.

Watts: "Robert Louis Stevenson."


ANCESTORS

Stevenson, R.L.: "A Family of Engineers."

----"Thomas Stevenson"--in "Memories and Portraits."

Stevenson: "Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh"--In "Essays of Travel and in
the Art of Writing."

Talbot, F.A.: "Lightships and Lighthouses." Chapters relating to the
building of Bell Rock and Skerryvore.

Poems by Stevenson: "To My Father." "Skerryvore."


CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL-DAYS

Stevenson, R.L.: "The Manse"--in "Memories and Portraits."

----"Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured"--in "Memories and Portraits."

----"Child's Play"--in "Virginibus Puerisque."

----"The Lantern Bearers"--in "Across the Plains."

----"Child's Garden of Verses."


THE STUDENT AND WANDERER

Simpson, E. Blantyre: "Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh Days."

Stevenson, R.L.: "An Apology for Idlers"--in "Virginibus Puerisque."

----"Crabbed Age and Youth"--in "Virginibus Puerisque."

----"Walking Tours"--in "Virginibus Puerisque."

----"Some College Memories"--in "Memories and Portraits."

----"Old Mortality"--in "Memories and Portraits."

----"A College Magazine"--in "Memories and Portraits."

----"Pastoral"--in "Memories and Portraits."

----"An Old Scotch Gardener"--in "Memories and Portraits."

----"Books Which Have Influenced Me"--in "Later Essays."

----"Memories of an Islet"--in "Memories and Portraits."

----"Random Memories"--in "Across the Plains."

----"Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin."

----"An Inland Voyage."

----"Travels with a Donkey in the CГ©vennes."

Low, Will H.: "A Chronicle of Friendships." Chapters dealing with
Stevenson's days in the artists' colonies of Fontainebleau and Paris.

Poems by Stevenson: "The Vagabond."
                    "The Song of the Road."
                    "Bright is the Ring of Words."
                    "Youth and Love," II.
                    "The Canoe Speaks."
                    "A Camp."
                    "The Country of the Carnisards."
                    "Our Lady of the Snows."
                    "To a Gardener."
                    "To Will H. Low."
                    "To Andrew Lang."


FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA

Shipman, L.E.: "First Landing in New York"--In _Book Buyer_, vol. 13, p.
13.

Stevenson, R.L.: "The Amateur Emigrant."

----"Across the Plains."

----"The Old Pacific Capital (Monterey)"--in "Across the Plains."

----"The Silverado Squatters."


SCOTLAND AGAIN

Gosse, Edmund: "Personal Memories of Stevenson"--in _Century_, vol. 28,
p. 447.

Osbourne, Lloyd: "Stevenson at Play"--in _Scribner's Magazine_, vol. 24,
p. 709.

Stevenson, Mrs. R.L.: Preface to Biographical edition of "Treasure
Island."

Stevenson, R.L.: "My First Book, 'Treasure Island'"--in _McClure's
Magazine_, vol. 3, p. 283.

----"Chapter on Dreams"--in "Across the Plains."

Stevenson, Mrs. R.L.: Preface to the Biographical edition of "Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde."

Poems by Stevenson: "Skerryvore, the Parallel."
                    "Bells upon the City are Ringing in the Night."
                    "I Know Not How It Is With You."
                    "Ticonderoga--a Legend of the West Highlands."
                    "Heather Ale--a Galloway Legend."


SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA

Low, Will H.: "Chronicle of Friendships." Chapters relating to
Stevenson's second visit to New York and his meeting with General
Sherman and the sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Saint-Gaudens, Augustus: "Reminiscences of Saint-Gaudens." Chapters
dealing with Mr. Saint-Gaudens's recollections of Stevenson at the time
he made his portrait.

Stevenson, Mrs. Margaret: "Letters--From Saranac to the Marquesas and
Beyond."

Poems by Stevenson: "In the States."
                    "Winter."


IN THE SOUTH SEAS

Stevenson, Mrs. Margaret: "Letters--From Saranac to the Marquesas and
Beyond."

Stevenson, R.L.: "In the South Seas."

Stevenson, Mrs. R.L.: "Cruise of the _Janet Nichol_ Among the South Sea
Islands--a Diary."

Stevenson, R.L.: "Beach of FalesГЎ," "Isle of Voices," "Bottle Imp"--in
"Island Nights' Entertainments."

----"The Wrecker."

----"The Ebb Tide."

---- Letters Dealing with Pacific Voyages and Life in Samoa--in his
collected letters edited by Sidney Colvin.

Stevenson, Mrs. Margaret: "Letters from Samoa."

Stevenson, R.L.: "A Foot-Note to History. Eight Years of Trouble in
Samoa."

Strong, Mrs. Isobel, and Osbourne, Lloyd: "Memories of Vailima."

Stevenson, R.L.: "Prayers Written at Vailima."

Poems by Stevenson: "The Song of RahГ©ro--a Legend of Tahiti."
                    "The Feast of Famine--Marquesan Manners."
                    "To an Island Princess."
                    "To Kalakaua."
                    "To Princess Kaiulani."
                    "The House of Tembinoka."
                    "The Woodman."
                    "Tropic Rain."
                    "To My Wife."
                    "To My Wife" (a fragment).

Poems of Farewell: "The Morning Drum-Call on My Eager Ear."
                   "In the Highlands, in the Country Places."
                   "To My Old Familiars."
                   "The Tropics Vanish."
                   "To S.C."
                   "To S.R. Crockett."
                   "Evensong."
                   "We Uncommiserate Pass into the Night."
                   "I Have Trod the Upward and Downward Slope."
                   "An End of Travel."
                   "The Celestial Surgeon."
                   "Home No More Home to Me, Whither Must I Wander?"
                   "Farewell, Fair Day and Fading Light."
                   "Requiem."

Lang, Andrew: "Tusitala"--in "Later Collected Verses."