"To live indeed, is to be again ourselves, which being not only a hope, but an evidence in noble believers, it is all one to lie in St. Innocent's Churchyard, as in the sands of Egypt. Ready to be anything in the ecstacy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the _moles_ of Adrianus." This one lies, we are told, on a mountain-top, overlooking the Pacific. At first it seemed so much easier to distrust a News Agency than to accept Stevenson's loss. "O captain, my captain!" ... One needs not be an excellent writer to feel that writing will be thankless work, now that Stevenson is gone. But the papers by this time leave no room for doubt. "A grave was dug on the summit of Mount Vaea, 1,300 feet above the sea. The coffin was carried up the hill by Samoans with great difficulty, a track having to be cut through the thick bush which covers the side of the hill from the base to the peak." For the good of man, his father and grandfather planted the high sea-lights upon the Inchcape and the Tyree Coast. He, the last of their line, nursed another light and tended it. Their lamps still shine upon the Bell Rock and the Skerryvore; and--though in alien seas, upon a rock of exile--this other light shall continue, unquenchable by age, beneficent, serene. * * * * * Nov. 2, 1895. The "Vailima Letters." Eagerly as we awaited this volume, it has proved a gift exceeding all our hopes--a gift, I think, almost priceless. It unites in the rarest manner the value of a familiar correspondence with the value of an intimate journal: for these Samoan letters to his friend Mr. Sidney Colvin form a record, scarcely interrupted, of Stevenson's thinkings and doings from month to month, and often from day to day, during the last four romantic years of his life. The first is dated November 2nd, 1890, when he and his household were clearing the ground for their home on the mountain-side of Vaea: the last, October 6th, 1894, just two months before his grave was dug on Vaea top. During his Odyssey in the South Seas (from August, 1888, to the spring of 1890) his letters, to Mr. Colvin at any rate, were infrequent and tantalizingly vague; but soon after settling on his estate in Samoa, "he for the first time, to my infinite gratification, took to writing me long and regular monthly budgets as full and particular as heart could wish; and this practice he maintained until within a few weeks of his death." These letters, occupying a place quite apart in Stevenson's correspondence, Mr. Colvin has now edited with pious care and given to the public.