The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls

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  friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our
  innocent endeavors. If it may not, give us strength to encounter that
  which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in
  tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and
  down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another." R.L.S.

                        --_Prayer used with the household at Vailima_.


On the 7th of December, when the family landed at Upolu, the chief of
the Samoas or Samoan Islands, they little dreamed it was to be their
home for the next four years and the last the master of the house was
ever to know.

It had been frequently borne upon Stevenson, however, while cruising
among the Marshall and Gilbert Islands during the past months, that a
home in either England or Scotland again was a vain dream for him.