his simple monument was inscribed the Requiem written by himself:
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live, and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me;
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
One of the most significant things in his life was his relation to the natives there. His native servants idolized him. To the chiefs and the other islanders Tusitala ("the teller of tales"—so they called him) was as a brother. To the missionaries and traders, and brother Europeans there, he was a friend and counsellor. With their own hands the natives, chiefs and all, built a road from the seaport, Apia, to Stevenson's house; and they named it Ala Loto Alofa, The Road of the Loving Heart.
Twice, at least, he used his powers as a writer in a public protest against injustice. Father Damien, a devoted young Catholic priest, who was giving his life to the service of the lepers in their colony at Molokai had been basely slandered. Stevenson took up his cause, and denounced his traducers. Again, seeing the incompetence and injustice existing in Samoa under the three-fold government of Germany, England, and the United States, Stevenson wrote a series of vigorous letters to the London Times, which, though they made enemies for him, eventually helped to bring to an end a bad condition of government. An account of these events may be read in his A Footnote to History. It was for this crowning service that the chiefs built The Road of the Loving Heart.
Stevenson's work is of three kinds: fiction, essays, and poetry. The best known is his fiction; the least known—with the conspicuous exception of A Child's Garden of Verses—is his poetry.
