From The Misspent Sunday, by W. E. Clarke, in Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections, ed. by R. C. Terry (Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 164-169:
Abstract: From ‘Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa’, Yale Review, X (Jan 1921) 275–96. The Reverend William Edward Clarke (1854–1922) was the London Missionary Society’s representative in Samoa. About as knowledgeable a mentor as Louis could have hoped to meet, Clarke knew the people and their customs well, and took the new arrival around schools and communities on the island. A simple, devout man, Clarke had to keep Stevenson up to the mark where Sunday worship was concerned. For his part Stevenson, the one-time agnostic, probably benefited from Clarke’s practical Christianity. Louis wrote of Clarke: ‘A man … I esteem and like to the sole of his boots. I prefer him to anyone in Samoa, and to most people in the world’ (quoted in Field, This Life, 332). When Louis lay dying, Clarke was at his side. He accompanied the cortège to the burial place on Mount Vaea and recited Louis’s own prayer at the interment, part of which reads: Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, have us play the man under affliction. Be with our friends; be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns, return to us, our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts — eager to labour — eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion — and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.
Far Outliers 