“Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars.”

– Robert Louis Stevenson,
In the South Seas, a documentary of his travels in the islands from 1888 until 1894, when he died there. (Like Mark Twain and Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Henry Davies, Robert Louis Stevenson was a contemporary of Leo Tolstoy.)

“The company of the inn-kitchen that night were all men employed in survey for one of the projected railways. They were intelligent and conversable, and we decided the future of France over hot wine, until the state of the clock frightened us to rest.”

– Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1878) p. 83