of Darkness, Lord Jim. With his imagination still residing in Scotland and returning to earlier form, Stevenson also wrote Catriona (1893), a sequel to his earlier novel Kidnapped (1886), continuing the adventures of its hero David Balfour. Although he felt, as a writer, that "there was never any man had so many irons in the fire". by the end of 1893 Stevenson feared that he had "overworked" and exhausted his creative vein. His writing was partly driven by the need to meet the expenses of Vailima. But in a last burst of energy he began work on Weir of Hermiston. "It's so good that it frightens me," he is reported to have exclaimed. He felt that this was the best work he had done. Set in eighteenth century Scotland, it is a story of a society that (however different), like Samoa is witnessing a breakdown of social rules and structures leading to growing moral ambivalence. Death On 3 December 1894, Stevenson was talking to his wife and straining to open a bottle of wine when he suddenly exclaimed, "What's that?", then asked his wife, "Does my face look strange?", and collapsed. He died within a few hours, at the age of 44, due to a stroke. The Samoans insisted on surrounding his body with a watch-guard during the night and on bearing him on their shoulders to nearby Mount Vaea, where they buried him on a spot overlooking the sea on land donated by British Acting Vice Consul Thomas Trood. Based on Stevenson's poem Requiem, the following epitaph is inscribed on his tomb: 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 Stevenson was loved by Samoans, and his tombstone epigraph was translated to a Samoan song of grief. The requiem appears on the eastern side of the grave. On the western side the biblical passage of Ruth 1:16-17 is inscribed: Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: And thy people shall be my people, and thy God shall be my God: Where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried.