brows the dews of youth still sparkled, gleefully revelled
in the pomp and circumstance which allow him to make believe he was
a chieftain. He could go flower-bedecked and garlanded without
comment in among his adopted subjects. He paid deference to Samoan
codes of manners, a thing he had scorned to do in his native land.

All his life he indulged in too few relaxations. The grim Scots
divines, whose "damnatory creed" Louis objected to so strongly, in
their studies, we read, reserved a corner for rod and gun. In his
library there was never a sign of sporting tools, not even a golf-club.
He was not effeminate; in fact, if "the man had been dowered
with better health, we would have lost the author," says one speaker
of him; but he simply never let go the pen, and, doubtless, his
singleness of purpose, his want of toil-resting hobbies, was
hampering to his health. Walking-tours, during which he was busy all
the while taking mental notes for some article, was no brain
holiday. In Samoa, he enjoyed the purest of pleasures, gardening.
"Nothing is so interesting," he says, in his VAILIMA LETTERS, "as
weeding, clearing, and path-making. It does make you feel so well."
But despite warring with weeds and forest rides, in an enervating
country, he wrote persistently through the swooningly hot days of
damp heat.

"I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius, that I have almost
forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it
long of coming," he wrote; and shortly after, in December 1894, it
came and smote him down to the earth with merciful painlessness. His
wife, his step-children, and his mother were beside him when, at the
highest water-mark his craftsmanship had reached, he paid the debt
to overstrain, and laid him down with a will. The closing act of his
life's drama befitted his instinct for effective staging. As he lay
shrouded in his nation's flag, the Samoans, who loved him, came to
pay their tribute and take farewell of their honey-tongued playmate
and counsellor, Tusitala. They counted it an honour to be asked to
hew a track through the tropic forest up which they bore him to his
chosen resting-place on the mountain top of Vaea, overlooking
Vailima, There a table tombstone, like that over the martyrs' graves
on the hills of home, marks where this kindly Scot is laid, with the
Pacific for ever booming his dirge. Samoa, heretofore, to most was
but a speck on a great ocean of another hemisphere. Steve