when it was fairly installed two years later at Vailima. From Honolulu Stevenson made several excursions, including one, which profoundly impressed him, to the leper settlement at Molokai, the scene of Father Damien's ministrations and death. The result of this first year's voyaging and residence among the Pacific Islands had been so encouraging a renewal of health, and so keen a zest added to life by the restored capacity for outdoor activity and adventure, that Stevenson determined to prolong his experiences in yet more remote archipelagoes of the same ocean. He started accordingly from Honolulu in June, 1889, on a trading schooner, the Equator, bound to the Gilberts, one of the least visited and most primitively mannered of all the island groups of the Western Pacific; emerged toward Christmas of the same year into semi-civilization again at Samoa; stayed there for six weeks, enchanted with the scenery and the people; bought a property, the future Vailima, on the mountain-side above Apia, with a view to making it, if not a home, at least a place of rest and call on later projected excursions among the islands; and began to make collections for his studies in recent Samoan history. In February he went on to Sydney to find his correspondence and consider future plans. It was during this stay at Sydney that his righteous indignation was aroused by the publication of a letter in depreciation of Father Damien, written by the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu. Here also he fell once more sharply ill, with a renewal of all his old symptoms, and the conclusion was forced upon him that he must make his home for the rest of his life in the tropics—though with occasional excursions, as he then thought, at least half-way homeward to places where it might be possible for friends from England to meet him. With a view to shaking off the effects of his fresh attack, he started with his party on a fresh sea voyage from Sydney, this time on a trading steamer, the Janet Nicoll, which took him by a very devious course among many remote islands during the months of April-August, 1890. During this journey he began to put into shape the notes for a comprehensive book on the South Seas—not one of incidents and impressions only, which was what his readers craved from him, but one of studious inquiry and research—which he had been compiling ever since he left San Francisco. On the return voyage of the Janet Nicoll he left her at New Caledonia, staying for some days at Noumea before he went on to Sydney, where he spent four or five weeks of later August and September; and in October he came to take up his abode for good on his Samoan property, where the work of clearing and planting had been going on busily during his absence.