His
wife, his step-children, and his mother were beside him when, at the
highest water-mark his craftsmanship had reached, he paid the debt
to overstrain, and laid him down with a will. The closing act of his
life's drama befitted his instinct for effective staging. As he lay
shrouded in his nation's flag, the Samoans, who loved him, came to
pay their tribute and take farewell of their honey-tongued playmate
and counsellor, Tusitala. They counted it an honour to be asked to
hew a track through the tropic forest up which they bore him to his
chosen resting-place on the mountain top of Vaea, overlooking
Vailima, There a table tombstone, like that over the martyrs' graves
on the hills of home, marks where this kindly Scot is laid, with the
Pacific for ever booming his dirge. Samoa, heretofore, to most was
but a speck on a great ocean of another hemisphere. Stevenson
transformed it into a "Mecca of the Mind," where pilgrims, bearing
his name in remembrance, send their thoughts to do reverence at that
shrine where,
"High on his Patmos of the Southern Seas,
Our Northern dreamer sleeps"
no longer separated from his own country and kindred by a world of
waters, but, as another friend and poet said, divided from us now
only by the unbridged river of Death.
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