_Vailima_, _Samoan Islands_, _October_ 7_th_, 1892.
DEAR MADAM,—I have a great diffidence in answering your valued letter.
It would be difficult for me to express the feelings with which I read
it—and am now trying to re-read it as I dictate this.
You ask me to forgive what you say ‘must seem a liberty,’ and I find that
I cannot thank you sufficiently or even find a word with which to qualify
your letter. Dear Madam, such a communication even the vainest man would
think a sufficient reward for a lifetime of labour. That I should have
been able to give so much help and pleasure to your sister is the subject
of my grateful wonder.
That she, being dead, and speaking with your pen, should be able to repay
the debt with such a liberal interest, is one of those things that
reconcile us with the world and make us take hope again. I do not know
what I have done to deserve so beautiful and touching a compliment; and I
feel there is but one thing fit for me to say here, that I will try with
renewed courage to go on in the same path, and to deserve, if not to
receive, a similar return from others.
You apologise for speaking so much about yourselves. Dear Madam, I
thought you did so too little. I should have wished to have known more
of those who were so sympathetic as to find a consolation in my work, and
so graceful and so tactful as to acknowledge it in such a letter as was
yours.
Will you offer to your mother the expression of a sympathy which (coming
from a stranger) must seem very airy, but which yet is genuine; and
accept for yourself my gratitude for the thought which inspired you to
write to me and the words which you found to express it.