t
Light for Lighthouses' and 'The Thermal Influence of Forests,' recall
the period of his engineering and scientific training; and the
interesting facsimile reproductions of the quaint 'Moral Emblems,'
written by him at Davos in 1880 and 1882, and printed with illustrations
on a toy printing press by the then very youthful Mr Lloyd Osbourne, are
yet another proof that even in his time of acute invalidism he was
busily and cheerily employed.

CHAPTER XI

HIS LIFE IN SAMOA

'Sometimes I am hopeful as the spring,
And up my fluttering heart is borne aloft
As high and gladsome as the lark at sunrise,
And then as though some fowler's shaft had pierced it
It comes plumb down in such a dead, dead fall.'
--FROM _Philip Van Artevelde_.

Mr Thomas Stevenson died early in May 1887, having lived long enough to
see his son's fame as an author firmly established. Not very long
afterwards Mrs Thomas Stevenson joined her son and his wife and with
them went to America, and on that yachting tour among the South Sea
islands, which finally resulted in the purchase, by Robert Louis, of the
little property on the slope of the Vaea mountain, above the town of
Apia, in Samoa, which he called by the musical name of Vailima, and
where, in 1890, he finally made his home.

His mother returned to Scotland for some months in 1889, arriving in the
June of that year and remaining till the October of 1890, when she
joined her son and his wife in their Samoan home. In 1893 she again
visited Edinburgh to see her relatives there, and to arrange for the
breaking up of the home at 17 Heriot Row, the sale of the house and of
such things as she did not care to keep or to take with her to that new
home which she also intended to make her headquarters. She remained on
this occasion almost a year, and left for London, en route for Samoa, on
the 5th of March 1894, promising her relatives and her friends, who so
greatly grudged her to her son and his household, that she would pay a
visit to Scotland once every five years.

Alas! in less than one year her son had followed his father into the
Life Eternal, and she was left that most desolate of all mourners 'a
widow and childless.' She remained for a little time with her
daughter-in-law and the sorrow-stricken Vailima household, and on 1st
June 1895 she arrived in Edinburgh to make her home with her sister,
Miss Balfour, as that sister so touc