coast of
England. Here he occupied the house presented to him by his father, and
which he named "Skerryvore" after the lighthouse off the coast of
Scotland, designed and built by his uncle, Alan Stevenson. Stevenson
continued his literary labours at this place unremittingly, though never
at any one extended period was he really free from the dread grasp of his
malady. Up to now writing had brought him but scant profit, and until his
thirty-sixth year, says Mr. Colvin, his income had scarcely, if ever,
exceeded three hundred pounds per year. His second great success was that
weird tale of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and thenceforth he came to know
his value as a writer of ability, and felt definitely assured that his
labors would return to him a satisfying income.

In 1887, after the death of his father, Stevenson again went to America,
sailing for New York in August of that year, and sojourning for short
periods among and with friends in the East.

In the spring of 1888, when in his thirty-eighth year, Stevenson
accompanied by members of his family, accepted an offer to cruise among
the islands of the South Seas and write the story of his voyagings in a
series of letters to a syndicate of newspapers. Arrangements were made for
the charter of the schooner Casco, Captain Otis, in which he set sail from
San Francisco, early in the spring, bound ostensibly for the "Marquesas."
The cruise covered six months. During the voyage northward the Stevensons
stayed some months at Honolulu and while there a visit was paid to the
leper settlement on the island of Molokai, which ultimately called forth
the "open letter" to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu, wherein that Reverend
gentleman received an unmitigated scathing from Stevenson's incensed pen,
an incident which is only too readily recalled for one to linger over it
at this time.

From Honolulu the cruise was continued southward for another six months on
a trading schooner called the Equator which arrived at Apia, in Samoa,
about Christmas time (1889). Here the company remained for some weeks, and
here Stevenson purchased an estate of some hundreds of acres, lying on the
mountainside overlooking the sea, which he called _Vailima_. The
Stevensons went to Sidney, N. S. W. soon after, but again in the month of
April steamed away in the trading steamer Janet Nicoll, visiting Auckland
and the Penrhyn Islands, thence to the Ellis, Gilbert, and Marshall
Islands and via New Caledonia, Syd