or I cannot now remember the exact
date, that I landed in Apia, in the island of Upolu. Naturally enough
that island was not to me so much the centre of Anglo-American and
German rivalries as the home of Robert Louis Stevenson, then become the
literary deity of the Pacific. In a dozen shops in Honolulu I had seen
little plaster busts of him; here and there I came across his
photograph. And I had a theory about him to put to the test. Though I
was not, and am not, one of those who rage against over-great praise,
when there is any true foundation for it, I had never been able to
understand the laudation of which he was the subject. At that time, and
until the fragment of _Weir of Hermiston_ was given to the world,
nothing but his one short story about the thief and poet, Villon, had
seemed to me to be really great, really to command or even to be an
excuse for his being in the position in which his critics had placed
him. Yet I had read _The Wrecker_, _The Ebb Tide_, _The Beach of
Falesa_, _Kidnapped_, _Catriona_, _The Master of Ballantrae_, and the
_New Arabian Nights_. I came to the conclusion that, as most of the
organic chorus of approval came from men who knew him, he must be (as
all writers, I think, should be) immeasurably greater than his books. I
was prepared then for a personality, and I found it. When his name is
mentioned I no longer think of any of his works, but of a sweet-eyed,
thin, brown ghost of a man whom I first saw upon horseback in a grove of
cocoanut palms by the sounding surges of a tropic sea. There are
writers, and not a few of them, whose work it is a pleasure to read,
while it is a pain to know them, a disappointment, almost an
unhappiness, to be in their disillusioning company. They have given the
best to the world. Robert Louis Stevenson never gave his best, for his
best was himself.

At any time of the year the Navigator Islands are truly tropical, and
whether the sun inclines towards Cancer or Capricorn, Apia is a bath of
warm heat. As soon as the _Monowai_ dropped her anchor inside the
opening of the reef that forms the only decent harbour in all the group,
I went ashore in haste. Our time was short, but three or four hours, and
I could afford neither the time nor the money to stay there till the
next steamer. I had much to do in Australia, and was not a little
exercised in mind as to how I should ever be able to get round the world
at all unless I once more shipped before the mast. I was,