if it may be, in all our
innocent endeavors. If it may not, give us strength to encounter that
which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in
tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and
down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another." R.L.S.

--_Prayer used with the household at Vailima_.

On the 7th of December, when the family landed at Upolu, the chief of
the Samoas or Samoan Islands, they little dreamed it was to be their
home for the next four years and the last the master of the house was
ever to know.

It had been frequently borne upon Stevenson, however, while cruising
among the Marshall and Gilbert Islands during the past months, that a
home in either England or Scotland again was a vain dream for him.

"I do not ask for health," he said, "but I will go anywhere and live in
any place where I can enjoy the existence of a human being." He seldom
complained and it is rare to find even the brave sort of cry he made
against fate to a friend at this time.

"For fourteen years I have not had a day's real health. I have wakened
sick and gone to bed weary, and I have done my work unflinchingly. I
have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages,
written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam
for weakness, and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and
recovered my glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, since
I first came to the Pacific; and still few are the days when I am not in
some physical distress. And the battle goes on--ill or well, is a
trifle; so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so
willed that my battlefield shall be this dingy inglorious one of the
bed and the physics bottle."

Here in the tropics he might hope to live and work years longer--a
return to a cold climate, he now knew, would be fatal.

Why not turn traders? Often on starry nights, drifting among the low
islands, he and Lloyd and the captain of the _Equator_ had lain out on
deck and planned what a lark it would be to buy a schooner, cruise among
the islands, and trade with the natives. They would write stories, too,
about these strange island dwellers with their many weird superstitions
and of the white men who drifted from all corners of the globe to make
their home there.

Already Captain Reid had told them many such tales which Stevenson wove
into stories. The "