At Vailima we had warm champagne, for not even all the wealth of our good-hearted host could buy an ounce of ice in Samoa, and we ate cakes and pineapples where Robert Louis Stevenson had alternately feasted and half starved, as he tells us in those daintily pathetic “Vailima Letters” of his. But a proper respect for the eternal verities forces me to say that this place, round which so many reams of imaginative eulogy have been written and typewritten, entirely disappointed me. Everything was shabby and ragged and squalid except the newly “restored” house and the furniture, which might have been sent by telegraph from Tottenham Court Road that morning. The avenue from the main road to the house, which the Samoans voluntarily made for Stevenson in repayment for the whole-hearted work he had done for them against the foreign aggressor, was puddle-strewn and inches deep in mud. The paddock was no better than you would have found round the shanty of a first-year selector in Australia. There were no paths, only tracks, mostly mud. The historic stream was little more than a stone-strewn brook. Even from the upper verandah of the house you can only just get a glimpse of the sea. A hill crowded with tangled tropical growth rises on either side of the little plateau on which the house stands. On the top of the one to the left hand as you look towards the sea is the grave of the dead Word-Magician. Behind the house another broken, tree-clad slope rising to the misty clouds; and that is all. Personally I would not live at Vailima, rent free and everything found, for a thousand a year. I know other places in the Pacific where with suitable society life would be a dream of delight if one only had a tent, a hammock, and about ten shillings sterling a week to spend. The steam-roller did not stop long enough for us to attempt the ascent of the mountain. I left Vailima dejected and disappointed, in a state of mind which even the warm champagne had failed to cheer. I tramped back through the mud under the everlasting mist, and through the same cloud of flies. When I got on board I found a sort of political demonstration, mingled with a cosmopolitan orgie going on. The ship was crowded from end to end with splendid specimens of Samoan manhood. There was a brass band on deck, and the smoking-room was simply floating in champagne. When I got to the heart of matters I found that the most popular man in Samoa was leaving. He was the American Consul, and his name was Blacklock, which, being translated into Samoan, is Pillackie-Lockie. Certain friends of his—men who would raise you out of your boots on a pair of twos—were coming with us, and from Samoa to Auckland it was my privilege to travel with the hardest crowd I have ever been shipmates with.