[1] “In the missionary work which is being done among the Samoans, Mr. Stevenson was especially interested. He was an observant, shrewd, yet ever generous critic of all our religious and educational organisations. His knowledge of native character and life enabled him to understand missionary difficulties, while his genial contact with all sorts and conditions of men made him keen to detect deficiencies in men and methods, and apt in useful suggestion.” The above is the testimony of the Mr. Clarke here mentioned (Rev. W. E. Clarke of the London Missionary Society). This gentleman was from the first one of the most valued friends of Mr. Stevenson and his family in Samoa, and, when the end came, read the funeral service beside his grave on Mount Vaea.
[2] The lady in the Vicar of Wakefield who declares herself “all in a muck of sweat.”
[3] First published in the New Review, January 1895.
[4] Afterwards changed into The Beach of Falesá.
[5] Mr. Lloyd Osbourne had come to England to pack and wind up affairs at Skerryvore.
[6] The lines beginning “I heard the pulse of the besieging sea”; see Vol. xxiv., p. 366.
[7] “The Monument” was his name for my house at the British Museum, and George was my old faithful servant, George Went.
[8] The late Mr. John Lafarge, long an honoured doyen among New York artists, whose record of his holiday in the South Seas, in the shape of a series of water-colour sketches of the scenery and people (with a catalogue full of interesting notes and observations), was one of the features of the Champ de Mars Salon in 1895.
[9] Mrs. B. W. Procter, the stepdaughter of Basil Montagu and widow of Barry Cornwall. The death of this spirited veteran in 1888 snapped one of the last links with the days and memories of Keats and Coleridge. A shrewd and not too indulgent judge of character, she took R. L. S. into warm favour at first sight, and never spoke of or inquired after him but with unwonted tenderness.