Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III HIS FIRST WORK IN SAMOA. After I had bought the Vailima land for Stevenson, it was arranged that I should build him a house upon it, a temporary structure in which the family might live pending the erection of a more commodious building. It was to be a very cheap affair, with but three or four rooms. Meantime, Stevenson, accompanied by his wife and Lloyd Osbourne, went off on a jaunt to Sydney. It had long been his desire to visit Australia, and he thought this would be a good opportunity. I built this small cottage, and on my own responsibility I had a passion fruit arbor erected a little distance away, with a summer house on the top of it, thinking that it would make a suit- Tivoli Road, on the way to Vailima able place for the novelist to do his writing in. When he returned from Sydney, he told me that his health had suffered by the trip. No sooner had he begun to feel the colder airs than his strength seemed to leave him, so that when he reached Port Jackson he was hardly able to get ashore. Shortly after his arrival in Sydney he was measured for some dress clothes and other wearing apparel, but he was able to make little use of them, for most of his time in the city was spent in bed. He could not go out anywhere, and the visitors who called upon him had in a good many instances to make the return calls themselves. I was not surprised that in these circumstances, he had fled back to Samoa at the first opportunity. It was wonderful how he regained his health again under the influence of the genial warmth of the tropics, for in four or five days after his return to Apia he was to be seen riding about on horseback full of life and vigor. The small family immediately took up their residence in the cottage I had built for them. Stevenson was highly...