MRS. STEVENSON'S SAMOAN LETTERS.
Letters from Samoa (1891-1895). By Mrs. M. I. Stevenson. Edited and Arranged by Marie Clothilde Balfour. (Methuen and Co. 6s.)—This volume has a greater, or at least more pathetic, interest than its predecessor, containing, as it does, the second and last instalment of the letters written by the mother of Robert Louis Stevenson during her journey to Samoa, and her life there in the household of her son up to her return home after his death. Her kinswoman who edits the volume testifies to her "bright responsive spirit, extraordinary quickness of sympathy and understanding, and sterling common-sense." These qualities pervaded everything this invincibly cheerful Scots gentlewoman wrote about her voyage to Sydney, her experiences in Samoa with the natives, her little adventures in politics and among politicians. One would say a reticent delicacy was the dominating note of her character. She seems to keep in the background not only herself, but the son of whom she was so lovingly proud, and to put wife, and even stepson, into the front of that singularly happy and useful life in Vailima. The same delicacy pervades her narrative of the sudden termination of that happiness. Only three months before it, we find Mrs. Stevenson rejoicing quietly over the fact "that Louis was able to take the saddle off his horse and to ride it late at night. It is such little things as these that show how greatly his health has improved." Yet immediately before the end Stevenson's wife had a presentiment
of calamity. He tried to dispel it. "He read aloud to her the chapter of his book that he had just finished, played a game or two of Patience to induce her to look on, and I fancy it was as much for her sake as his own that the Mayonnaise sauce was begun upon. And strangely enough, both of them had agreed that it could not be to either of them that the dreadful thing was to happen. Thus far and no further can our intuitions, our second sight, go." No more delightful book about Stevenson has been published since his death, and it is a moral tonic as well.
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