Vailima Letters

MY DEAR COLVIN, -This is a hard and interesting and beautiful life that we lead now. Our place isin a deep cleft of Vaea Mountain, some six hundred feet above the sea, embowered in forest, whichis our strangling enemy, and which we combat with axes and dollars. I went crazy over outdoorwork, and had at last to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by theboard. Nothing is so interesting as weeding, clearing, and path-making; the oversight of labourersbecomes a disease; it is quite an effort not to drop into the farmer; and it does make you feel sowell. To come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after some hours in thebush, change, rub down, and take a chair in the verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience. And thestrange thing that I mark is this: If I go out and make sixpence, bossing my labourers and plying thecutlass or the spade, idiot conscience applauds me; if I sit in the house and make twenty pounds, idiot conscience wails over my neglect and the day wasted. For near a fortnight I did not go beyondthe verandah; then I found my rush of work run out, and went down for the night to Apia; put inSunday afternoon with our consul, 'a nice young man, ' dined with my friend H. J. Moors in theevening, went to church-no less-at the white and half-white church-I had never been before, and was much interested; the woman I sat next looked a full-blood native, and it was in the prettiestand readiest English that she sang the hymns; back to Moors', where we yarned of the islands, beingboth wide wanderers, till bed-time; bed, sleep, breakfast, horse saddled; round to the mission, to getMr. Clarke to be my interpreter; over with him to the King's, whom I have not called on since myreturn; received by that mild old gentleman; have some interesting talk with him about Samoansuperstitions and my land-the scene of a great battle in his (Malietoa Laupepa's) youth-the placewhich we have cleared the platform of his fort-the gulley of the stream full of dead bodies-thefight rolled off up Vaea mountain-side; back with Clarke to the Mission; had a bit of lunch andconsulted over a queer point of missionary policy just arisen, about our new Town Hall and the ballsthere-too long to go into, but a quaint example of the intricate questions which spring up daily inthe missionary p