It was a very happy party in spite of some misfortunes and anxieties, occasional visits of the influenza, and the dread of ruin from rain or hurricane; and after their first difficulties as to house-building were over, it was to a very spacious and pleasant house that they welcomed the elder Mrs Stevenson when she returned to Samoa in 1893. The scrub still, however, required much clearing, and we find in The Vailima Letters Mr Stevenson dividing his day into so many hours of literary work and so many hours of weeding!
The day began early, and Mr Stevenson, after the first breakfast, did his literary work, until the sound of a conch summoned the family to a lunch, or second breakfast, about eleven o'clock. After this there was rest and music till four, and then outdoor work or play, lawn-tennis being a very favourite pastime, and in the evening they had more music, and a game at cards. It was a simple, natural life, and one that made far more for health, mental and physical, to those whose constitutions suited the climate, than the bustle and the clamour of cities. Visitors, too, often came up the hill to Vailima, sometimes the residents in Apia, sometimes home friends or distinguished strangers, who were glad to visit the much-loved author in his distant retreat, and to all was given the same cordial welcome, to all there remains the memory of delightful hours in the company of those who knew so well how to make time pass bewitchingly.
The household by this time consisted of Mr Stevenson, his wife, his mother, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, his sister, Mrs Strong, who acted as her stepfather's amanuensis, her little boy, Austin, who went to school in California in 1892, and Mr Graham Balfour, a cousin of Mr Stevenson's.
Until he left for school, Mr Stevenson gave Austin his lessons, and, as his uncle Lloyd had done, the boy considered the teacher only a larger playfellow.
A very pretty picture of the home life is given in a note-book of Mrs Thomas Stevenson's, in which she describes a birthday feast in her honour, at which little Austin Strong recited some verses made for the occasion by her son. Very amusing the verses are, and in them the small scholar repeats with pride what strides in knowledge he had made under the able tuition of his step-grandfather. It is not a little comic to think that Mr Stevenson had at this time a well-grown step-grandchild, and had, indeed, held the honourable and venerable position of a step-grandparent shortly after he was thirty.
Very amusing features of the letters that Mrs Thomas Stevenson sent home were the funny illustrations of daily life enclosed in them, and which were drawn by a clever pencil in the household. Like the old plays in the Leith Walk shop the youthful Louis once so frequently visited, they were A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured. Sometimes they were mere outlines of domestic processions, sometimes they were gay with paint in shades of brown and green and blue. In them all the members of the family were represented, and now and then there appeared the dusky semblance of a Samoan domestic Faauma, 'the bronze candlestick,' or Lafaele, the amiable and the willing. As one recalls them one sees again a verandah, with long chairs and lazy loungers, Mr Stevenson pretending to play his flageolet, but too comfortable actually to begin; the rest in attitudes more or less suggestive of that warmth and satisfaction which we in colder climes can only dream of; or in another a few bold strokes pictured the ladies of the family on household cares intent, domestic service of the humblest, cooking, dusting, bed-making, and all the trivial daily doings that were so mirthfully treated both by pen and pencil.
Mr Stevenson and his wife took a keen interest in their garden, which stood so high above sea-level, that they could have the pleasure of trying to grow in it some British flowers, fruits, and vegetables, as well as those native to the tropics. This endeavour to naturalise the products of the old home in the new one was a great pleasure to Mrs Stevenson, and one fully shared by her husband, who was so often, in spite of his delight in the soft airs, the blue skies, heart-sick for the cold grey ones of the old country, and who was reminded on a fresh wet morning after a storm, of the West Highlands, near Callander, and
'The smell of bog, myrtle and peat,'
by the rain dashing on the roof, and trickling down the window panes, of far-off misty Scotland, where
'On the moors the whaups are calling.'