During these years at Samoa, while he was fighting so bravely for health, Stevenson worked hard at his writing. He was careful to an extraordinary degree. He weighed and considered, not only every idea he wrote out, but every word he used. He would go over his writing again and again, making slight corrections which to some authors would not have seemed very important, but which to him mattered a great deal. The result of all this care is seen in his books. There is not a faulty sentence or a word out of place. There are few books in the English language more carefully written than those of Robert Louis Stevenson. The amazing courage and cheerfulness of Stevenson will never be forgotten. He seemed to laugh at difficulties. There was a time when he was living in San Francisco when he was so reduced in circumstances that he lived in a cheap boarding-house, paying one dollar and fifty cents a week for his room, and so hard-up that his main meal each day consisted of a bowl of soup, yet notwithstanding all this, he kept on writing brave and cheerful essays and stories. We may be sure that those who read and so greatly enjoyed them had little idea what troubles the man had who wrote them. One day, early in December, 1894, Stevenson was taken ill very suddenly in his Samoan home. Doctors were summoned, but in spite of all they could do he passed away. A number of his devoted Samoans were in the room when he died. As soon as the sad news of his death was known on the island the natives brought gifts and soon the house was more than filled with beautiful flowers. He had asked to be buried on the summit of Vaea Mountain, and as there was no path, the natives got busy with their knives and axes and cut a path up the steep mountain-side. There he was buried, and on his tomb was inscribed the beautiful “Requiem” which he had written: “Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live, and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: ‘Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.’” CHAPTER V THE COMPOSER WHO COULD NOT HEAR HIS OWN MUSIC Ludwig van Beethoven, who became one of the greatest--if not the greatest--of all musical composers, was born at Bonn, Prussia, in 1770. His childhood was not by any means a happy one. His father, who was a musician, earned only a very small salary wherewith to support his family of seven children, and besides he was a man whose drunken habits reduced the family income still further. Often the three boys, Carl, Ludwig, and Johann Beethoven, had to stop their play and assist their staggering father into the house. The Beethovens had to sell their linen and much of their furniture and tableware. Frau van Beethoven grew paler and paler and then it was that Ludwig’s musical ability was discovered.