t about to close this, when I
observed again your obliging offer of service, and I take you promptly
at your word.

Do you think that you or your son could find a day to visit Neilston and
try to identify Nether Carsewell, find what size of a farm it is, to
whom it belonged, etc.? I shall be very much obliged. I am pleased
indeed to learn some of my books have given pleasure to your family; and
with all good wishes, I remain, your affectionate cousin,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

The registers I shall have seen to, through my lawyer.

TO GEORGE MEREDITH

_Sept. 5th,1893, Vailima Plantation, Upolu, Samoa._

MY DEAR MEREDITH,--I have again and again taken up the pen to write to
you, and many beginnings have gone into the waste paper basket (I have
one now--for the second time in my life--and feel a big man on the
strength of it). And no doubt it requires some decision to break so long
a silence. My health is vastly restored, and I am now living
patriarchally in this place six hundred feet above the sea on the
shoulder of a mountain of 1500. Behind me, the unbroken bush slopes up
to the backbone of the island (3 to 4000) without a house, with no
inhabitants save a few runaway black boys, wild pigs and cattle, and
wild doves and flying foxes, and many parti-coloured birds, and many
black, and many white: a very eerie, dim, strange place and hard to
travel. I am the head of a household of five whites, and of twelve
Samoans, to all of whom I am the chief and father: my cook comes to me
and asks leave to marry--and his mother, a fine old chief woman, who has
never lived here, does the same. You may be sure I granted the petition.
It is a life of great interest, complicated by the Tower of Babel, that
old enemy. And I have all the time on my hands for literary work.

My house is a great place; we have a hall fifty feet long with a great
redwood stair ascending from it, where we dine in state--myself usually
dressed in a singlet and a pair of trousers--and attended on by servants
in a single garment, a kind of kilt--also flowers and leaves--and their
hair often powdered with lime. The European who came upon it suddenly
would think it was a dream. We have prayers on Sunday night--I am a
perfect pariah in the island not to have them oftener, but the spirit is
unwilling and the flesh proud, and I cannot go it more. It is strange to
see the long line of the brown folk crouched along the wall with
lanterns at