vitality, and from a trip which the family took for the sake of
change to Sydney, in the month of February, they returned with health
unimproved. In April the illness of Mrs. Stevenson caused her husband
some weeks of acute distress and anxiety. In August he suffered the
chagrin of witnessing the outbreak of the war which he had vainly
striven to prevent between the two rival kings, and the defeat and
banishment of Mataafa, whom he knew to be the one man of governing
capacity among the native chiefs, and whom, in the interest alike of
whites and natives, he had desired to see the Powers not crush, but
conciliate. On the other hand, he had the satisfaction of seeing the
Chief Justice and President removed from the posts they had so
incompetently filled, and superseded by new and better men. The task
imposed by the three Powers upon these officials was in truth an
impossible one; but their characters and endeavours earned respect, and
with the American Chief Justice in particular, Mr. C. J. Ide (whom he
had already known as one of the Land Commissioners), and with his family
the Vailima household lived on terms of cordial friendship. In September
Stevenson took a health-trip to Honolulu, which again turned out
unsuccessful. For some weeks he was down with a renewed attack of fever
and prostration, and his wife had to come from Samoa to nurse and fetch
him home. Later in the autumn he mended again.

During no part of the year were Stevenson's working powers up to the
mark. In the early summer he finished _The Ebb Tide_, but on a plan much
abridged from its original intention, and with an unusual degree of
strain and effort. With _St. Ives_ and his own family history he made
fair progress, but both of these he regarded as in a manner holiday
tasks, not calling for any very serious exercise of his powers. In
connection with the latter, he took an eager interest, as his
correspondence will show, in the researches which friends and kinsmen
undertook for him in Scotland. He fell into arrears in regard to one or
two magazine stories for which he had contracted; and with none of his
more ambitious schemes of romance, _Sophia Scarlet_, _The Young
Chevalier_, _Heathercat_, and _Weir of Hermiston_, did he feel himself
well able to cope. This falling-off of his power of production brought
with it no small degree of inward strain and anxiety. He had not yet
put by any provision for his wife and step-family (the income from the
moderat