ney, and Auckland to Apia where they
arrived again in the early autumn. They settled here upon their estate and
the following spring Mrs. Stevenson, the elder, joined the household, as
also Stevenson's step-daughter, Mrs. Strong; thus began the four remaining
years of Stevenson's life, amid the ties of kith and kin surrounding him
as he worked in his exile in a far away land.

Amid these pleasant surroundings Stevenson pursued his constant and daily
work, and rode about his island home entertaining the population, both
native and European. He became actively interested in the political life
of the islands, and when international complications came upon them in
1891, he dignified the whole proceedings by his impartial letters to the
_London Times_, and later by the publication of the "Footnote to History,"
a monograph published in 1892.

Meanwhile he was applying himself to his writing with ardous persistancy,
and quoting his own words from a letter written in 1893, he was seriously
overworked, "_I am overworked bitterly, and my hand is a thing that was,
and in the meanwhile so are my brains._"

In January of the same year he suffered from an attack of influenza from
which he never fully recovered. While yet ill in bed he had begun to
dictate "St. Ives" and "Weir of Hermiston."

From the Dictionary of National Biography is taken the following
description of the sad end. "On the afternoon of the Fourth of December he
was talking gaily with his wife, when a sudden rupture of a blood-vessel
in the brain laid him at her feet and within two hours all was over."

* * * * *

Out across the pearly Pacific on the lonely mountainside at Samoa, lies
all that once was mortal of "_Tusitala, the Teller of Tales_."

_APPARITION._

_"Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably,
Neat-footed and weak-fingered: in his face--
Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race.
Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea,
The brown eyes radiant with vivacity--
There shines a brilliant and romantic grace,
A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace
Of passion and impudence and energy.

Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck,
Most vain, most generous, sternly critical,
Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist:
A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,
And something of the Shorter-Catechist."_