meet you,’...  I wept then ... telling myself continually, ’Teriitera returns to his own country and leaves his dear Rui in grief.’...  I will not forget you in my memory.  Here is the thought:  I desire to meet you again.  It is my Teriitera makes the only riches I desire in this world.  It is your eyes that I desire to see again.  It must be that your body and my body shall eat together at one table, there is what would make my heart content.  But now we are separated.  May God be with you all.  May His word and His mercy go with you, so that you may be well and we also, according to the words of Paul.

“ORI A ORI, that is to say, RUI.”

“All told,” said Stevenson, “if my books have enabled or helped me to make this voyage, to know Rui, and to have received such a letter, they have ... not been writ in vain.”

CHAPTER IX

VAILIMA

“We thank Thee for this place in which we dwell; for the love that unites us; for the peace accorded us this day; for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food, and the bright skies that make our lives delightful, for the friends in all parts of the earth, and our friendly helpers in this foreign isle....  Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind.  Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.  Bless us, 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.”