MY DEAR CHARLES,--At last I have the accounts: the Doer has done excellently, and in the words of ----, "I reciprocate every step of your behaviour."... I send a letter for Bob in your care, as I don't know his Liverpool address,[30] by which (for he is to show you part of it) you will see we have got out of this adventure--or hope to have--with wonderful fortune. I have the retrospective horrors on me when I think of the liabilities I incurred; but, thank God, I think I'm in port again, and I have found one climate in which I can enjoy life. Even Honolulu is too cold for me; but the south isles were a heaven upon earth to a puir, catarrhal party like Johns'one. We think, as Tahiti is too complete a banishment, to try Madeira. It's only a week from England, good communications, and I suspect in climate and scenery not unlike our dear islands; in people, alas! there can be no comparison. But friends could go, and I could come in summer, so I should not be quite cut off. Lloyd and I have finished a story, _The Wrong Box_. If it is not funny, I am sure I do not know what is. I have split over writing it. Since I have been here, I have been toiling like a galley slave: three numbers of _The Master_ to rewrite, five chapters of _The Wrong Box_ to write and rewrite, and about five hundred lines of a narrative poem to write, rewrite, and re-rewrite. Now I have _The Master_ waiting me for its continuation, two numbers more; when that's done, I shall breathe. This spasm of activity has been chequered with champagne parties: Happy and Glorious, Hawaii Ponoi paua: kou moi--(Native Hawaiians, dote upon your monarch!) Hawaiian God save the King. (In addition to my other labours, I am learning the language with a native moonshee.) Kalakaua is a terrible companion; a bottle of fizz is like a glass of sherry to him; he thinks nothing of five or six in an afternoon as a whet for dinner. You should see a photograph of our party after an afternoon with H. H. M.: my! what a crew!--Yours ever affectionately, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Ill-health and pressing preoccupations, together with uncertainty as to when and where letters would reach him, had kept me from writing during the previous autumn and winter. _Honolulu, March 1889._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--Still not a word from you! I am utterly cast down; but I will try to return good for evil and for once give you news. We are here in the suburb of Honolulu in a rambling house or set of houses in a great garden. [Illustration: _a a a_, stairs up to balcony.]