Pacific.
About three miles behind Apia, on a slight plateau seven hundred feet
above the level of the sea, he cleared the forest and made a house. "I
have chosen the land to be my land, the people to be my people, to
live and die with," said Stevenson in his speech to the Samoan chiefs.
Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, his step-son, thus describes their abode:

"Unbroken forest covered Vailima when first we saw it; not the forest
of the temperate zone with its varied glades and open spaces, but the
thick tangle of the tropics, dense, dark, and cold in even the hottest
day, where one must walk cutlass in hand to slash the lianas and the
red-edged stinging leaves of a certain tree that continually bar one's
path. The murmur of streams and cascades fell sometimes upon our ears
as we wandered in the deep shade, and mingled with the cooing of wild
doves and the mysterious, haunting sound of a native woodpecker at
work. Our Chinaman, who was with us on our first survey, busied
himself with taking samples of the soil, and grew almost incoherent
with the richness of what he called the 'dirty.' We, for our part,
were no less enchanted with what we saw, and could realize, as we
forced our way through the thickets and skirted the deep ravines, what
a noble labor lay before our axes, what exquisite views and glorious
gardens could be carved out of the broken mountain side and the sullen
forest."

As Stevenson was afraid that villas might be made to intervene between
him and the sea, he bought much land that his view might be forever
unobstructed. He entered into the work of clearing the forest with
vigorous delight. For months he lived in pioneer confusion. Gangs of
native workmen worked from morning to night.

"The new house was built," says Mr. Osbourne; "I arrived from England
with the furniture, the library, and other effects of our old home;
the phase of hard work and short commons passed gradually away, and a
form of hollow comfort dawned upon us. I say hollow comfort, for
though we began to accumulate cows, horses, and the general apparatus
of civilized life, the question of service became a vexing one. An
expensive German cooked our meals and quarreled with the white
house-maid; the white overseer said 'that manual labor was the one
thing that never agreed with him,' and that it was an unwholesome
thing for a man to be awakened in the early morning, 'for one ought to
wake up natural-like,' he explained. The white carter 'couldn't be