-bete!_ I wish letters of
that charming quality could be so timed as to arrive when a fellow
wasn't working at the truck in question; but, of course, that can't be.
Did not go down last night. It showered all afternoon, and poured heavy
and loud all night.

You should have seen our twenty-five popes (the Samoan phrase for a
Catholic, lay or cleric) squatting when the day's work was done on the
ground outside the verandah, and pouring in the rays of forty-eight eyes
through the back and the front door of the dining-room, while Henry and
I and the boss pope signed the contract. The second boss (an old man)
wore a kilt (as usual) and a Balmoral bonnet with a little tartan edging
and the tails pulled off. I told him that hat belong to my
country--Sekotia; and he said, yes, that was the place that he belonged
to right enough. And then all the Papists laughed till the woods rang;
he was slashing away with a cutlass as he spoke.

The pictures[20] have decidedly not come; they may probably arrive
Sunday.

TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE

The reference in the first paragraph is to a previous letter
concerning private matters, in which Stevenson had remonstrated with
his correspondent on what seemed to him her mistaken reasons for a
certain course of conduct.

[_Vailima, May 1891._]

MY DEAR ADELAIDE,--I will own you just did manage to tread on my gouty
toe; and I beg to assure you with most people I should simply have
turned away and said no more. My cudgelling was therefore in the nature
of a caress or testimonial.

God forbid, I should seem to judge for you on such a point; it was what
you seemed to set forth as your reasons that fluttered my old
Presbyterian spirit--for, mind you, I am a child of the
Covenanters--whom I do not love, but they are mine after all, my
father's and my mother's--and they had their merits too, and their ugly
beauties, and grotesque heroisms, that I love them for, the while I
laugh at them; but in their name and mine do what you think right, and
let the world fall. That is the privilege and the duty of private
persons; and I shall think the more of you at the greater distance,
because you keep a promise to your fellow-man, your helper and creditor
in life, by just so much as I was tempted to think the less of you (O
not much, or I would never have been angry) when I thought you were the
swallower of a (tinfoil) formula.

I must say I was uneasy about my letter, not because