was not elected. The tales of tropic islands in the South Seas—"beautiful places green for ever, perfect climate, perfect shapes of men and women with red flowers in their hair and nothing to do but study oratory and etiquette, sit in the sun and pick up the fruits as they fall,"—remained in his tenacious memory. A guest at his father's in 1874 spoke of them, and the young Stevenson had stored the description away in his mind, to be unearthed when he willed, as was his habit. When first he heard of those favored spots, he had two anchors which kept him bound to Edinburgh—his parents. The good engineer died in 1887; and the other anchor, his mother, he found could be lifted, and became the best of ballast. When he elected to become a world wanderer, she left her Edinburgh home and, without hesitation, went off with her son and his household when they turned their backs on Europe in 1887. Her journal to her sister tells of these travels "From Saranac to Marquesas." She simply but racily describes their course, which ended in the cruise on the Casco. In her book we enjoy genuine glimpses of the author, not so much as the man who has written himself into fame, but her happy-tempered, hero-hearted, eager-minded boy, who for forty-five years was all the world to her. The invigorating cold of the Adirondacks had its drawbacks, as had Davos; and Stevenson, who, a few years before had felt the sharp pinch of poverty at San Francisco, now chartered from there a ship of his own, and sailed away out of the Golden Gate, on his South Sea Odyssey, to those islands he had heard of years before, little thinking, as he listened "till he was sick with desire to go there," that talk was to be as a sign-post to him where to travel to. "For Louis' sake," his mother explains in her racy journal letters, speaking of having chartered the Casco, "I can't but be glad, for his heart has so long been set upon it, it must surely be good for his health to have such a desire granted." Louis warned his mother years before she had a nomad for a son, but she had never objected, and sat knitting on deck, well content not to be "in turret pent," but to go forth with the bright sword she had forged. "She adapted herself," her brother says, "to her strange surroundings, went about barefoot, found no heat too great for her, and at an age when her sisters at home were old ladies, learnt to ride!" After many wanderings through the warm ocean waters, with "green days in forest and blue days at sea," the yachters finally saw Samoa, and to the author it was the El Dorado of his dreams. "When the Casco cast anchor," he avers, "my soul went down with these moorings, whence no windless may extract nor any diver fish it up." It was indeed a unique experience for one of the master workers of the world, one whose subtle mintage of words had made his readers his friends, to settle in an uttermost isle of the Pacific. He throve there, and was able to enjoy the flavour of the life of adventure he had craved for, and to look into the bright face of danger. He built for himself a palace in the wild named Vailima. From Edinburgh came out the familiar furniture he had been brought up among, which had been the stage scenery of his chimney-corner days, when the back bed-room chairs became a ship, and the sofa-back was his hunter's camp. At Vailima he, like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, received "a race gift from his childhood's home." He had in olden times played at being a minister like his grandfather, to wile away a toyless Sunday. When he grew into his unorthodox dark shirt and velvet-jacket stage, he had been a rebellious, rather atheistical youth; but at Samoa, maybe to please his truly good, uncanting mother, or the sight of the belongings from his old home, made him bethink himself of his father's reverent conducting of family worship. He would have the same, but set to work and composed prayers for himself. Beautifully worded they are, full of his gospel of kindliness and gladness, and he read them with effective fervour in the hall of Vailima, with his betartaned servants gathered round. These devotional exercises of his have been quoted by the "unco guid" to make him into what Henley severely styled "a Seraph in Chocolate, a barley-sugar effigy of a real man." The religious faith of Stevenson was the same as Ben Adhem's in Leigh Hunt's poem, who, when he found his name was not among those who loved the Lord, cheerily asked the angel to write him as one who loved his fellow-men. The heavenly messenger returned

"And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,"
And "lo! Ben Adhem's led all the rest"

To Stevenson, throughout his life, all the world was truly a stage. He went gaily along playing his part, and when he came to Samoa, he, on whose brows the dews of youth still sparkled, gleefully revelled in the pomp and circumstance which allow him to make believe he was a chieftain. He could go flower-bedecked and garlanded without comment in among his adopted subjects. He paid deference to Samoan codes of manners, a thing he had scorned to do in his native land.

All his life he indulged in too few relaxations. The grim Scots divines, whose "damnatory creed" Louis objected to so strongly, in their studies, we read, reserved a corner for rod and gun. In his library there was never a sign of sporting tools, not even a golf-club. He was not effeminate; in fact, if "the man had been dowered with better health, we would have lost the author," says one speaker of him; but he simply never let go the pen, and, doubtless, his singleness of purpose, his want of toil-resting hobbies, was hampering to his health. Walking-tours, during which he was busy all the while taking mental notes for some article, was no brain holiday. In Samoa, he enjoyed the purest of pleasures, gardening. "Nothing is so interesting," he says, in his VAILIMA LETTERS, "as weeding, clearing, and path-making. It does make you feel so well." But despite warring with weeds and forest rides, in an enervating country, he wrote persistently through the swooningly hot days of damp heat.

"I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius, that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming," he wrote; and shortly after, in December 1894, it came and smote him down to the earth with merciful painlessness. His wife, his step-children, and his mother were beside him when, at the highest water-mark his craftsmanship had reached, he paid the debt to overstrain, and laid him down with a will. The closing act of his life's drama befitted his instinct for effective staging. As he lay shrouded in his nation's flag, the Samoans, who loved him, came to pay their tribute and take farewell of their honey-tongued playmate and counsellor, Tusitala. They counted it an honour to be asked to hew a track through the tropic forest up which they bore him to his chosen resting-place on the mountain top of Vaea, overlooking Vailima, There a table tombstone, like that over the martyrs' graves on the hills of home, marks where this kindly Scot is laid, with the Pacific for ever booming his dirge. Samoa, heretofore, to most was but a speck on a great ocean of another hemisphere. Stevenson transformed it into a "Mecca of the Mind," where pilgrims, bearing his name in remembrance, send their thoughts to do reverence at that shrine where,

"High on his Patmos of the Southern Seas,
Our Northern dreamer sleeps"

no longer separated from his own country and kindred by a world of waters, but, as another friend and poet said, divided from us now only by the unbridged river of Death.

Of his writings the list is long and varied, and forms a goodly heritage. Like himself, they are compounded of many parts, for he was essayist, poet, novelist, traveller, moralist, biographer, and historian, and a Master of his Tools at all. Beside his own books, through many of which we may make his intimate acquaintance, his letters, and others telling the story of his life, form many volumes. Stevenson advised every one to read often, not