Editorial Note

grave of Stevenson is not as * neglected as the foregoing would suggest: on the other hand, it by no means resembles a memorial in a care fully-tended cemetery. When this writer saw it, last year, it appeared as the photograph indicates —just a rectangular, very battered and discoloured block of concrete, dwarfed amid the luxuriant and encroaching growth of the tropical jungle.

There is a track, of a sort, leading up the steep mountainside; and, as the Swedish captain says, pin-headed fools of people have scribbled their names about, and tried to souvenir bits of the tomb.

One can understand the world-wide anger with which this complaint will be received. The better one knows the works of Stevenson, King of Stylists, the more one learns to love Stevenson the man; and hundreds of thousands of people would like to show that love by keeping his grave tended and inviolate.

All travellers in Samoa visit the tomb, and all are stirred to read there, on the bronze tablet in the front of the tomb, the words of the famous epitaph which Stevenson wrote for himself:

1850 R.L.S, 1894

Under the wide and starry sky.

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live, and gladly die.

And lay 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.

In one corner of this bronze tablet there is engraved a hibiscus flower, and in the other a lily. There is another tablet, with an inscription in Samoan, on the other side of the tomb.

At one end, there is the bronze tablet in memory of Mrs. Stevenson, placed there, as Mrs. Field says, in 1914. It bears the words of the great writer’s tribute to his wife: F.V.De G.S. “O Alolele” (the name the Samoans gave her).

Teacher, tender comrade, wife, A fellow-farer true through life.

Heart-whole and soul-free.

The august Father gave to me. 1914.