The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls

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[Illustration: The house at Vailima]

All this ground-breaking, house-building, and gardening were new to
Stevenson, and he revelled in them to the neglect of his writing.

"This is a hard and interesting and beautiful life we lead now," he
wrote to Sidney Colvin. "Our place is in a deep cleft of Vaea Mountain;
some six hundred feet above the sea, embowered in forest, which is our
strangling enemy, and which we combat with axes and dollars. I am crazy
over outdoor work, and had at last to confine myself to the house, or
literature must have gone by the board. _Nothing_ is so interesting as
weeding, clearing, and pathmaking; the oversight of laborers becomes a
disease; it is quite an effort not to drop into the farmer; and it does
make you feel so well. To come down covered with mud and drenched with
sweat and rain after some hours in the bush, change, rub down, and take
a chair in the verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience."