Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 16, 2025
Colonel and Mrs. Logan very graciously invited the Fields to Vailima and placed the house and grounds at their disposal. "It is strange," wrote Mrs. Field, "being here at Vailima. I was so afraid to come, but mercifully it is not the same.
The next thing was to choose a name, and they finally decided upon the native word Vailima, meaning "five waters," in reference to a stream fed by four tributaries that ran through the place. Without more ado they plunged eagerly into the business of clearing the forest and building their house a task for which Fanny Stevenson, by taste and early training, was supremely fitted.
Stevenson to sell Vailima, but, in order to retain it she would have had to keep a force of men there constantly at work "fighting the forest," which, if left alone for a short time, speedily envelops and smothers everything in its path.
"After a farewell ava ceremony in Samoan fashion at Vailima, the Spray stood out of the harbor August 20, 1896, and continued on her course. A sense of loneliness seized upon me as the islands faded astern, and as a remedy for it I crowded on sail for lovely Australia, which was not a strange land to me; but for long days in my dreams Vailima stood before the prow."
Vailima, Upolu, Samoa. You have trusted me with the choice and arrangement of these papers, written before you departed to the South Seas, and have asked me to add a preface to the volume. But it is your prose the public wish to read, not mine; and I am sure they will willingly be spared the preface.
Once a high chief, one of the highest, bearing the somewhat lengthy name of Tuimalealiifono, came on a visit to Vailima. He was quite unacquainted with white ways of living, and, when shown to his bedroom, looked askance at the neat, comfortable bed that had been prepared for him.
Field arrived they found the Union Jack flying over Vailima, now used as Government House by the Administrator, Colonel Logan, and his staff. The natives, interested spectators of these stirring events, remarked among themselves that Tusitala, not going back to his own country, had drawn his country out to him.
She had hoped that Palema would continue to make his home with them, and she had great confidence in and love for him. He would have been a link between her and the old associations of the Vailima life, and his engagement to an English girl proved to her that this would no longer be possible.
Again he writes: "The guid wife had bread to bake, and she baked it in a pan, O! But between whiles she was down with me weeding sensitive in the paddock. Our dinner the lowest we have ever been consisted of an avocado pear between Fanny and me, a ship's biscuit for the guid man, white bread for the missis, and red wine for the twa; no salt horse, even, in all Vailima!"
In these various trips between San Francisco and the islands she usually sailed on the Mariposa, and because she had so much baggage Captain Morse and the other officers took to calling the ship "Mrs. Stevenson's lighter." Their home-coming, being unexpected, was rather forlorn. They reached Vailima in the evening and went to bed rather drearily in the empty house, Mrs.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking