the facts and circumstances of his wanderings were to be gathered from the admirable letters of Mrs. Stevenson (who has this feminine accomplishment in perfection) rather than from his own.  But when later in the last-mentioned year, 1890, he and his family were settled on their newly bought property on the mountain behind Apia, to which he gave the name of Vailima (five rivers), he for the first time, to my infinite gratification, took to writing me long and regular monthly budgets as full and particular as heart could wish; and this practice he maintained until within a few weeks of his death.

It is these journal-letters from Samoa, covering with a few intervals the period from November 1890 to October 1894, that are printed by themselves in the present volume.  They occupy a place, as has been indicated, quite apart in his correspondence, and in any general selection from his letters would fill a quite disproportionate space.  Begun without a thought of publicity, and simply to maintain our intimacy undiminished, so far as might be, by separation, they assumed in the course of two or three years a bulk so considerable, and contained so much of the matter of his daily life and thoughts, that it by-and-by occurred to him, as may be read on page 200, that ‘some kind of a book’ might be extracted out of them after his death.  It is this passage which has given me my warrant for their publication, and at the same time has imposed on me no very easy editorial task.  In a correspondence so unreserved, the duty of suppression and selection must needs be delicate.  Belonging to the race of Scott and Dumas, of the romantic narrators and creators, Stevenson belonged no less to that of Montaigne and the literary egotists.  The word seems out of place, since of egotism in the sense of vanity or selfishness he was of all men the most devoid; but he was nevertheless a watchful and ever interested observer of the motions of his own mind.  He saw himself, as he saw everything else, (to borrow the words of Mr. Andrew Lang) with the lucidity of genius, and loved to put himself on terms of confidence with his readers; but of confidence kept always within fit limits, and permitting no undue intrusion into his private affairs and feelings.  To maintain the same limits in the editing of an intimate correspondence after his death would have been impossible.  I have tried to do my best under the circumstances; to suffer no feelings to be hurt that could be spared, and only to lift the veil of family life so far as under the conditions was unavoidable.  Neither would it have been possible from such a correspondence to expunge the record of those trivialities which make up the chief part of life, even in surroundings so romantic and unusual as Stevenson in these years had chosen for himself.  It belonged to the personal charm of the man that nothing ever seemed commonplace or insignificant in his company; but in correspondence this charm must needs to some extent evaporate.

Such as they remain, then, these letters will be found a varied record, perfectly frank and familiar, of the writer’s every-day moods, thoughts, and doings during his Samoan exile.  They tell, with the zest and often in the language of a man who remained to the last a boy in spirit, of the pleasures and troubles of a planter founding his home in the virgin soil of a tropical island; the pleasures of an invalid beginning after many years to resume habits of outdoor life and exercise; the toils and satisfactions, failures and successes, of a creative artist whose invention was as fertile as his standards were high and his industry unflinching.  These divers characters have probably never been so united in any man before.  Something also they tell of the inward movements and affections of one of the bravest and tenderest of human hearts.  One part of his life, it should be said, which his other letters will fully reveal, finds little expression in these, namely the relations of cordial and ungrudging kindness in which he stood towards the younger generation of writers at home, including many personally unknown to him.  Neither do ordinary impressions of travel—impressions of the beauties of the tropics and the captivating strangeness of the island people and their ways—fill much space in them.  These things were no longer new to the writer when the correspondence began; they had been part of the element of his life since the day, near two years before, when his yacht first anchored in the Bay of Nukahiva, and his soul, to quote his own words, ‘went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up; and I, and some part of my ship’s company, were from that hour the bondslaves of the isles of Vivien.’  In their stead we find, what to some readers may be hardly so welcome, the observations of a close student of native life, history, and manners, and some of the perplexities and pre-occupations of an island politician.

The political allusions are seldom in the form of direct statement or narrative.  To understand them, the reader must bear in mind a few main facts, which I shall state as briefly and plainly as possible.  At the date when Stevenson settled in Samoa, the government of the island had lately been settled between the three powers interested, namely Germany, England, and the United States, at the convention of Berlin.  Under this convention, Malietoa Laupepa, who had previously been deposed and deported by the Germans in favour of a nominee of their own, was reinstated as king, to the exclusion of his kinsman, the powerful and popular Mataafa, whose titles might be held equally good and whose abilities were certainly greater, but who was specially obnoxious to the Germans owing to his resistance to them during the troubles of the previous years.  For a time the two kinsmen, Laupepa and Mataafa, lived on amicable terms, but presently differences arose between them.  Mataafa had expected to occupy a position of influence in the government: finding himself ignored, he withdrew to a camp a few miles outside the town of Apia, where he lived in semi-royal state as a kind of passive rebel or rival to the recognised king.  In the meantime, in the course of the year 1891, the two white officials appointed under the Berlin Convention, namely the Chief Justice, a Swedish gentleman named Cedarkrantz, and the President of the Council, Baron Senfft von Pilsach, had come out to the islands and entered on their duties.  In Stevenson’s judgment these gentlemen proved quite unequal to their task, an opinion which before long came to be shared and acted on by the foreign offices of the three powers under whom they were appointed.  Stevenson was no abstracted student or dreamer; the human interests and the human duties lying immediately about him were ever the first in his eyes: and petty and remote as these island concerns may appear to us, they were for him near and urgent.  A man of his eager nature and persuasive powers must naturally acquire influence in any community in which he may be thrown, and among the natives in especial, by kindness, justice, and a sympathetic understanding of their ways and character, he soon came to enjoy a singular degree of authority.  His unauthorised intervention in public matters may have been of a nature disconcerting to the official mind, but his purposes were at all times those of a peacemaker.  The steady aim of his efforts was to bring about the withdrawal of the two discredited white officials (against whom, it will be seen, he had no personal animus whatever) and to procure