were you here indeed, would I
commune so continually with the thought of you. I say 'I wonder'
for a form; I know, and I know I should not."

In a way the beauty of these letters is this, that they tell us so
much of Stevenson that is new, and nothing that is strange--nothing
that we have difficulty in reconciling with the picture we had already
formed in our own minds. Our mental portraits of some other writers,
drawn from their deliberate writings, have had to be readjusted, and
sometimes most cruelly readjusted, as soon as their private
correspondence came to be published. If any of us dreamed of this
danger in Stevenson's case (and I doubt if anyone did), the danger at
any rate is past. The man of the letters is the man of the books--the
same gay, eager, strenuous, lovable spirit, curious as ever about life
and courageous as ever in facing its chances. Profoundly as he
deplores the troubles in Samoa, when he hears that war has been
declared he can hardly repress a boyish excitement. "War is a huge
_entrainement_," he writes in June, 1893; "there is no other
temptation to be compared to it, not one. We were all wet, we had been
five hours in the saddle, mostly riding hard; and we came home like
schoolboys, with such a lightness of spirits, and I am sure such a
brightness of eye, as you could have lit a candle at."

And that his was not by any means mere "literary" courage one more
extract will prove. One of his boys, Paatalise by name, had suddenly
gone mad:--

"I was busy copying David Balfour, with my left hand--a most
laborious task--Fanny was down at the native house superintending
the floor, Lloyd down in Apia, and Bella in her own house
cleaning, when I heard the latter calling on my name. I ran out
on the verandah; and there on the lawn beheld my crazy boy with
an axe in his hand and dressed out in green ferns, dancing. I ran
downstairs and found all my house boys on the back verandah,
watching him through the dining-room. I asked what it
meant?--'Dance belong his place,' they said.--'I think this is no
time to dance,' said I. 'Has he done his work?'--'No,' they told
me, 'away bush all morning.' But there they all stayed in the
back verandah. I went on alone through the dining-room and bade
him stop. He did so, shouldered the axe, and began to walk away;
but I called him back, walked up to him, and took the axe out of
his u