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+Project Gutenberg's Robert Louis Stevenson, by Margaret Moyes Black
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Author: Margaret Moyes Black
+
+Release Date: August 10, 2007 [EBook #22294]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Stephen Hope, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+
+FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES
+
+_The following Volumes are now ready:--_
+
+
+THOMAS CARLYLE. By HECTOR C. MACPHERSON.
+
+ALLAN RAMSAY. By OLIPHANT SMEATON.
+
+HUGH MILLER. By W. KEITH LEASK.
+
+JOHN KNOX. By A. TAYLOR INNES.
+
+ROBERT BURNS. By GABRIEL SETOUN.
+
+THE BALLADISTS. By JOHN GEDDIE.
+
+RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor HERKLESS.
+
+SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON.
+
+THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. GARDEN BLAIKIE.
+
+JAMES BOSWELL. By W. KEITH LEASK.
+
+TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By OLIPHANT SMEATON.
+
+FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. OMOND.
+
+THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir GEORGE DOUGLAS.
+
+NORMAN MACLEOD. By JOHN WELLWOOD.
+
+SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor SAINTSBURY.
+
+KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By LOUIS A. BARBE.
+
+ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. GROSART.
+
+JAMES THOMSON. By WILLIAM BAYNE.
+
+MUNGO PARK. By T. BANKS MACLACHLAN.
+
+DAVID HUME. By Professor CALDERWOOD.
+
+WILLIAM DUNBAR. By OLIPHANT SMEATON.
+
+SIR WILLIAM WALLACE. By Professor MURISON.
+
+ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. By MARGARET MOYES BLACK.
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+BY MARGARET MOYES BLACK
+
+FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES
+
+PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE AND DEDICATION
+
+In so small a volume it would be somewhat hopeless to attempt an
+exhaustive notice of R. L. Stevenson, nor would it be desirable. The
+only possible full biography of him will be the _Life_ in preparation by
+his intimate friend Mr Sydney Colvin, and for it his friends and his
+public look eagerly. This little book is only a reminiscence and an
+appreciation by one who, in the old days between 1869 and 1880, knew him
+and his home circle well. My earlier and later knowledge has been
+derived from his mother and those other members of his mother's family
+with whom it was a pleasure to talk of him, and to exchange news of his
+sayings and doings.
+
+In the actual writing of this volume, I have received most kind help for
+which I return grateful thanks to the givers. For the verification of
+dates and a few other particulars I am indebted to Mr Colvin's able
+article in the _Dictionary of National Biography_.
+
+It is dedicated, in the first instance, to the memory of Mr and Mrs
+Thomas Stevenson and their son, and, in the second, to all the dearly
+prized friends of the Balfour connection who have either, like the
+household at 17 Heriot Row, passed into the 'Silent Land,' or who are
+still here to gladden life with their friendship.
+
+                                      MARGARET MOYES BLACK.
+_August_ 1898.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+                                                     Page
+HEREDITY AND ANTECEDENTS                                9
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CHILDHOOD                                              22
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+BOYHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS                               33
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+AS I FIRST KNEW HIM                                    45
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HIS HOME LIFE                                          57
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+HIS CHOICE OF A LITERARY LIFE AND HIS EARLY BOOKS      70
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+WANDERINGS IN SEARCH OF HEALTH                         83
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+HIS MARRIAGE AND FRIENDSHIPS                           92
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+HIS ESSAYS AND VERSES                                 101
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+HIS STORIES                                           117
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+HIS LIFE IN SAMOA                                     131
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+HIS DEATH                                             141
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+HIS LIFE-WORK                                         150
+
+
+
+
+ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+HEREDITY AND ANTECEDENTS
+
+
+     'These are thy works, O father, these thy crown,
+     Whether on high the air be pure they shine
+     Along the yellowing sunset, and all night
+     Among the unnumbered stars of God they shine.
+     Or whether fogs arise, and far and wide
+     The low sea-level drown--each finds a tongue,
+     And all night long the tolling bell resounds.
+     So shine so toll till night be overpast,
+     Till the stars vanish, till the sun return,
+     And in the haven rides the fleet at last.'
+                                         --R. L. STEVENSON.
+
+
+In no country in the world is heredity more respected than in Scotland,
+and her hard-working sons freely acknowledge the debt they owe, for the
+successes of to-day, to the brave struggle with sterner conditions of
+life their ancestors waged from generation to generation. We of the
+present are 'the heirs of all the ages'; but we are also in no small
+degree the clay from the potter's hands, moulded and kneaded by the
+natures, physical and mental, of those who have gone before us, and
+whose lives and circumstances have made us what we are.
+
+Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson--for so the writer whom the world knows
+as Robert Louis Stevenson, was baptised--valued greatly this doctrine of
+heredity, and always bore enthusiastic testimony to the influence his
+ancestry and antecedents had exercised in moulding his temperament and
+character. He was proud of that ancestry, with no foolish pride, but
+rather with that appreciation of all that was noble and worthy in his
+forefathers, which made him desire to be, in his own widely differing
+life-work, as good a man as they.
+
+
+      ... 'And I--can I be base?'--he says;
+     'I must arise, O father, and to port
+     Some lost complaining seaman pilot home.'
+
+
+He had reason to think highly of the honourable name which he received
+from his father's family. Britain and the whole world has much for which
+to thank the Stevensons; not only all along our rough north coasts, but
+in every part of the world where the mariner rejoices to see their
+beacon's blaze have the firm, who are consulting engineers to the
+Indian, the New Zealand, and the Japanese Lighthouse Boards, lit those
+lights of which Rudyard Kipling in his 'Songs of the English,' sings--
+
+
+     'Our brows are bound with spindrift, and the weed is on our knees;
+     Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas;
+     From reef and rock and skerry, over headland, ness, and voe,
+     The coastguard lights of England watch the ships of England go.'
+
+
+Wild and wind-swept are the isles and headlands of the northern half of
+the sister kingdoms, but from their dreariest points the lights that
+have been kindled by Robert Stevenson, the hero of Bell Rock fame, and
+his descendants flash and flame across the sea, and make the name of
+Stevenson a word of blessing to the storm-tossed sailor.
+
+The author was third in descent from that Robert Stevenson, who, by
+skill and heroism, planted the lighthouse on the wave-swept Bell
+Rock--only uncovered for the possibility of work for a short time at low
+tides--and made safety on the North Sea, where before there had been
+death and danger, from the cruel cliffs that guard that iron coast.
+
+What child has not thrilled and shivered over the ballad of 'Ralph the
+Rover,' who, hoping doubtless that the wrecked ships might fall into his
+own piratical hands, cut the bell which the good monks of Aberbrothock
+had placed on the fatal rock, and who, by merited justice, was for lack
+of the bell himself, on his return voyage, lost on that very spot! What
+boy has not loved the story of one of the greatest engineering feats
+that patience and skill has ever accomplished!
+
+If other young folk so loved it what a depth of interest must not that
+noble story have had for the grandson of the hero, whose childish soul
+was full of chivalry and romance, and whose boyish eyes saw visions of
+the future and pictures of the past as no ordinary child could see them,
+for his was the gift of genius, and even the commonplace things of life
+were glorified to him.
+
+Alan Stevenson, who was the father of Robert, died of fever when in the
+island of St Christopher on a visit to his brother, who managed the
+foreign business of the Glasgow West India house with which they were
+connected. The brother unfortunately dying of the same fever, business
+matters were somewhat complicated, and Alan's widow and little boy had
+to endure straitened circumstances. The mother strained every nerve to
+have her boy, whom she intended for the ministry, well educated, and the
+lad profited by her self-denial. Her second marriage, however, very
+fortunately changed her plans for Robert, for her second husband, Mr
+Smith, had a mechanical bent which led him to make many researches on
+the subject of lighting and lighthouses, and finding that his stepson
+shared his tastes, he encouraged him in his engineering and mechanical
+studies.
+
+The satisfactory results of Mr Smith's researches caused the first Board
+of Northern Lights to make him their engineer, and he designed Kinnaird
+Head, the first light they exhibited, and illuminated it in 1787. He was
+ultimately succeeded as engineer to the Board by his stepson, of Bell
+Rock fame, and his descendant, Mr David Alan Stevenson, who now holds
+the post, is the sixth in the family who has done so. Young Stevenson
+not only became his stepfather's partner but married his eldest
+daughter, and with her founded a home that was evidently a happy one,
+for the great engineer was a most unselfish character, and made an
+excellent husband and father. He was a notable volunteer in the days
+when a French invasion was greatly feared, and all his life he took a
+keen interest in the volunteering movement.
+
+Like his son Thomas, Mr Robert Stevenson was a man of much intellect and
+humour, though of a grave and serious character. He was also a keen
+Conservative and a loving member of the Established Church of Scotland.
+He was warmly beloved and his society was greatly sought after by his
+friends; a voyage of inspection with him on his tours round the coast
+was much appreciated. On one occasion Sir Walter Scott made one of the
+party which accompanied him. Mr Robert Stevenson died in July 1850, a
+few months before the birth of his grandson, Robert Louis.
+
+That this grandson held in high esteem the deeds and sterling qualities
+of his grandfather is amply proved by his Samoan Letters to Mr Sydney
+Colvin, published in 1895. In many of them he speaks of the history of
+his family, which he intended to write, and into which he evidently felt
+that he could put his best work. Alas! like so much that the brave
+spirit and the busy brain planned, it was not to be, and the writer
+passed to his rest without leaving behind him a full record of the
+workers who had made his name famous.[1]
+
+Mr Alan, Mr David, and Mr Thomas Stevenson worthily handed on the
+traditions of their father, and in its second generation the lustre of
+the great engineering family shone undimmed; while now the sons of Alan
+Stevenson maintain the reputation of their forefathers, and the
+Stevenson name is still one to conjure with wherever their saving lights
+shine out across the sea.
+
+Mr Thomas Stevenson served under his brother Alan in building the famous
+lighthouse of 'Skerryvore,' and with his brother David he built 'The
+Chickens,' 'Dhu Heartach,' and many 'shore lights' and harbours. He was
+a notable engineer, widely known and greatly honoured at home and
+abroad, besides being a very typical Scotsman.
+
+When one thinks of his grand rugged face, and remembers how the stern
+eyes used to light up with humour and soften with tenderness, as their
+glance fell on his wife and his son, one realises what a very perfect
+picture of such a character in its outward sternness and its inward
+gentleness, lies in those lines of Mr William Watson's, in which he
+speaks of
+
+
+     'The fierceness that from tenderness is never far.'
+
+
+Mr Stevenson's broad shoulders, his massive head, his powerful face,
+reminded one of that enduring grey Scotch stone from which he and his
+ancestors raised round all our coasts, their lighthouses and harbours.
+
+Strong, grey, silent, these solid blocks resist winds and waves, and so
+one felt would that powerful reticent nature stand steadfast in life's
+battle, a tower of strength to those who trusted him. Like his own
+'Beacon Lights,' on cliff and headland brilliant gleams of humour bright
+gems of genius flashed out now and then from the silence. One felt too
+that safe as the ships in his splendid harbours, would rest family and
+friends in the strong yet loving heart that could hold secure all that
+it valued through the tests and changes of time and the conflicts of
+varying thoughts and opposing opinions. A man of strong prejudices, a
+man too of varying moods, Mr Stevenson knew what it was at times to
+endure hours of depression, to suffer from an almost morbidly religious
+conscience, but he always kept a courageous hold on life and found the
+best cure for a shadowed soul lay in constant and varied work.
+
+The charming dedication of _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_ is a
+delightful tribute from the gifted son to the strength and nobility of
+his father's character.
+
+Highly favoured in his paternal heredity Mr R. L. Stevenson was no less
+fortunate in his mother and his mother's family.
+
+If strength and force of intellect characterised Mr Thomas Stevenson,
+his wife, Margaret Balfour, had no less powerful an individuality; in
+beauty of person, in grace of manner, in the brilliance of a quick and
+flashing feminine intelligence--that was deep as well as bright--she was
+a fitting helpmate for her husband, and the very mother to sympathise
+with and encourage a son whose genius showed itself in quaint sayings,
+in dainty ways, and in chivalrous thoughts almost from his infancy.
+
+Mrs Stevenson was the youngest daughter of the Rev. Dr Lewis Balfour,
+from 1823 to 1860 minister of Colinton, and of Henrietta Scott Smith,
+daughter of the minister of Galston. There had been thirteen children in
+the manse of Colinton, and father and mother had made of the picturesque
+old house a home in truth as well as in name. Many of these children
+survived long enough, two of them indeed are still living, to carry the
+sacred traditions of that happy home out into a world where they made
+honourable positions for themselves.
+
+After the death of the mother her place was taken by her daughter Jane,
+that aunt of whom Robert Louis Stevenson wrote so sweetly in his
+_Child's Garden of Verses_--
+
+
+     'Chief of our Aunts not only I
+     But all your other nurslings cry,
+     What did the other children do?
+     And what were childhood wanting you?'
+
+
+To other 'motherless bairns,' as well as to her own brothers and
+sisters, nephews and nieces, that most motherly heart and gentle and
+beautiful soul has been a comfort and a refuge on the thorny highway of
+life, and many whose love she has earned by the tenderness of her
+sympathy still call Miss Balfour blessed.
+
+She was a true helper to her father in the motherless home and in his
+parish work, and in spite of much bad health filled the mother's place
+in the house and won for herself the undying affection and regard not
+only of her own family but of her father's parishioners and friends.
+
+A testimony to the high esteem in which her father's memory and hers,
+and indeed that of all the Balfour family, is still held in Colinton,
+was given to me a few years ago by the old beadle there. Fond as he was
+of Dr Lockhart, to speak to him of the Balfours, whom he remembered in
+his younger days, at once won his attention and regard. On my saying to
+him it was for their sakes I wished to see the inside of the church he
+queried with a brightening face:
+
+'Ye'll no be ane o' them, will ye?'
+
+'No' was the reply, 'but they have been so long known and loved they
+seem like my "ain folk" to me.'
+
+'Aweel come awa' an' see the kirk. Will ye mind o' him?'
+
+Alas! no; for the minister of Colinton had died seven years before my
+friendship with the Balfours began.
+
+'Eh!' was all the old man said, but that and the shake of his head
+eloquently expressed what a loss that was for me!
+
+'But ye'll ken _her_?' meaning Miss Balfour, he queried again, and as I
+said I did and well, the face brightened with a great brightness.
+
+So, having found a friend in common, together we went over the church
+and the manse grounds, but, as Dr Lockhart was away from home, I
+resisted his persuasion to ask leave to go through the house and
+contented myself with a pleasant talk with him of Dr John Balfour, who
+had fought the mutineers in India and the cholera at Davidson's Mains,
+Slateford, and Leven; of Dr George, who is still fighting the ills that
+flesh is heir to, in Edinburgh; of the sons and daughters of the manse
+who had gone to their rest; of Mrs Stevenson, then in Samoa with her
+son, and whose charm of personality made her dear to the old man, and
+lastly of 'the clivir lad,' her son, who had spent such happy days in
+the old manse garden.
+
+Of all the children in that large family Maggie, the youngest, was
+perhaps especially her sister's charge; and one knows, from that elder
+sister's description, how sweet, and good, and bright the little girl
+was, and how charming was the face, and how loving the heart of the
+mother of Robert Louis Stevenson when she too was a child at play in the
+manse garden. The mother's beauty and that dainty refinement of face and
+voice which she bequeathed to her son came to her in a long and
+honourable descent from a family that had for many centuries been noted
+for the beauty and the sincere goodness of its women, for the godliness
+and the manliness of its men.
+
+The Rev. Dr Lewis Balfour of Colinton was the third son of Mr Balfour,
+the Laird of Pilrig. The quaint old house of Pilrig stands a little back
+from Leith Walk, the date on it is 1638; and the text inscribed on its
+door-stone, 'For we know, that if our earthly house of this tabernacle
+were dissolved we have a building of God, an house not made with hands
+eternal in the heavens,' is a fitting motto for a race whose first
+prominent ancestor was that James Balfour of Reformation times, who not
+only was a cousin of Melville the Reformer, but who married one of the
+Melville family. This double tie to those so entwined with the very life
+of that great period in Scotland's history brought Mr James Balfour into
+very close communion with such men as Erskine of Dun, the Rev. John
+Durie, and many others of the Reforming ministers and gentlemen, with
+whom a member of the Pilrig family, the late James Balfour-Melville,
+Esq., W.S., in his interesting pamphlet dealing with his family says,
+that his ancestor had much godly conversation and communing.
+
+The early promise of the race was not belied in its later descendants,
+and the Balfours were noted for their zeal in religion, and in their
+country's affairs, as well as for an honourable and prudent application
+to the business of life on their own account. Andrew Balfour, the
+minister of Kirknewton, signed the protestation for the Kirk in 1617,
+and was imprisoned for it. His son James was called to the Scotch Bar,
+and was a Clerk of Session in Cromwell's time. A son of his was a
+Governor of the Darien Company, and his son, in turn, purchased the
+estate of Pilrig where his descendants kept up the godly and honourable
+traditions of the house, and dispensed a pleasant and a kindly
+hospitality to their friends in Edinburgh, from whom, at that time,
+their pretty old home was somewhat distant in the country!
+
+With such an ancestry on both sides one can easily understand the bent
+of Robert Louis Stevenson's mind towards old things, the curious
+traditions of Scotch family history and the lone wild moorlands,
+
+
+     'Where about the graves of the martyrs
+     The whaups are calling,'
+
+
+one can comprehend, too, the attraction for him of the power and the
+mystery of the sea. All these things came to him as a natural
+inheritance from those who had gone before, and in the characters who
+people his books, in _Kidnapped_, in _Catriona_, in _Weir of Hermiston_,
+we see live again, the folk of that older Edinburgh, whom those bygone
+Balfours knew.
+
+In the fresh salt breeze that, as it were, blows keen from the sea in
+_Treasure Island_, in _The Merry Men_, and about the sad house of
+Durrisdeer in _The Master of Ballantrae_, we recognise the magic wooing
+of the mighty ocean that made of the Stevensons builders of lighthouses
+and harbours, and masters of the rough, wild coasts where the waves beat
+and the spray dashes, and the sea draws all who love it to ride upon its
+breast in ships.
+
+From the union of two families who have been so long and so honourably
+known in their different ways, there came much happiness, and one feels
+somewhat sorry that when Louis Stevenson signed his name to the books by
+which he is so lovingly remembered, he did not write it in full and
+spell 'Lewis' in the old-time fashion that was good enough for our
+Scotch ancestors in the days when many a 'Lewis' drew sword for Gustavus
+Adolphus, or served as a gentleman volunteer in the wars of France or
+the Netherlands, and when 'O, send Lewie Gordon hame' rang full of
+pathos to the Scotch ears, to which the old spelling was familiar. Mr
+Stevenson's Balfour relatives naturally regret the alteration of the
+older spelling and the omission of his mother's family name from his
+signature. With regard to the latter, he himself assured his mother that
+having merely dropped out the Balfour to shorten a very long name, he
+greatly regretted having done so, after it was too late, and he had won
+his literary fame as 'Robert Louis Stevenson,' and much wished that he
+had invariably written his name as R. L. Balfour Stevenson. The spelling
+of Lewis he altered when he was about eighteen, in deference to a wish
+of his father's, as at one time the elder Mr Stevenson had a prejudice
+against the name of Lewis, so his son thereafter signed himself Louis.
+That he may have himself also preferred it is very possible; he was fond
+of all things French, and he may have liked the link to that far off
+ancestor, the French barber-surgeon who landed at St Andrews to be one
+of the suite of Cardinal Beaton! In spite of the belief on the part of
+Robert Louis, who had a fancy to the contrary, the name in the Balfour
+family was _invariably_ spelt Lewis. His grandfather was christened
+Lewis, and so the entry of his name remains to this day in the old
+family Bible at Pilrig; so also it is spelt in that, already mentioned,
+most interesting pamphlet for private circulation, written by the late
+James Balfour-Melville, Esq., who gives the name of his uncle, the
+minister of Colinton, as Lewis Balfour, and so the old clergyman signed
+himself all his life.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] The portion of this family history--_Family of
+Engineers_--which Mr Stevenson had completed, at the time of his death,
+is to be found in 'The Edinburgh Edition' of his works.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CHILDHOOD
+
+
+     ... 'With love divine
+     My mother's fingers folded mine.'
+         --FROM VERSES IN AN AMERICAN PAPER.
+
+
+     'We built a ship upon the stairs,
+     All made of the back bedroom chairs;
+     And filled it full of sofa pillows,
+     To go a-sailing on the billows.'
+                               --R. L. STEVENSON.
+
+
+Mr and Mrs Thomas Stevenson, who were married in 1848, made their first
+home at 8 Howard Place, and there, on 13th November 1850, Robert Lewis
+Balfour Stevenson was born. In 1853 they moved to a house in Inverleith
+Terrace, and in 1857, when Louis was about seven years old, they took
+possession of 17 Heriot Row, the house so long and so intimately
+associated with them in the minds of their many friends.
+
+The little Louis was from his earliest babyhood a very delicate child,
+and only the most constant and tender care of his devoted mother and
+nurse enabled him to survive those first years which must have been so
+full of anxiety to his parents. In _The Child's Garden of Verses_ there
+are some lines called 'The Land of Counterpane,' the picture heading of
+which is a tiny child propped up against his bed pillows, and with all
+his toys scattered on the coverlet. Beneath it are four verses that
+give a wonderfully graphic description of the life the little boy too
+often led.
+
+In the last verse he was a giant who saw before him all 'the pleasant
+land of counterpane,' and in the very word 'pleasant' the temperament of
+the child shows itself. How many children would have found anything
+'pleasant' in the enforced days of lie-a-bed quietness, and would have
+made no murmurs over the hard fate which forbade to them the active joys
+of other boys and girls?
+
+But this small lad had a sweet temper and an unselfish, contented
+disposition, and so he bore the burden of his bad health as bravely in
+those days as he did in after years, and made for himself plays and
+pleasures with his nimble brain while his weary body was often tired and
+restless in that bed whereof he had so much. His mother used to
+describe, with the same graphic touch that gives life to all her son
+wrote, the bright games the little fellow invented for himself when he
+was well enough to be up and about, and tell how, in a corner of the
+room, he made for himself a wonder-world all his own, in which heroes
+and heroines of romance loved and fought and walked and talked at the
+bidding of the wizard in frock and pinafore.
+
+It was not all indoor life happily, and if there were many bad days
+there were some good and glad ones also, when he was well and allowed to
+be out and at play in the world of outdoor life he always loved so
+dearly.
+
+Two quaint pictures of the child as he was in those days have been
+supplied by his aunt, Miss Balfour. One of them is from a note-book of
+his mother's, in which she had jotted down a few things that had been
+said or written of him. The first interesting description is that given
+by a very dear old friend of the family, and is an exceedingly early
+one, for it was written in October 1853, when Louis was barely three,
+and the family had just settled in Inverleith Terrace.
+
+'One day,' she says, 'I called and missed you, and found Cummie' (the
+valued nurse) 'and Louis just starting for town, so we walked up
+together by Canonmills, keeping the middle of the road all the way.'
+
+Louis, she continues, was dressed in a navy blue pelisse trimmed with
+fur, a beaver hat, a fur ruff, and white gloves. A very quaint little
+figure he must have been with the thin delicate face and the wonderfully
+bright eyes, so luminous and far-seeing even then!
+
+The tiny mite repeated hymns all the way, 'emphasising so prettily,' the
+friend goes on to say, 'with the dear little baby hands. All of a
+sudden, when near St Mary's Church he stood still, and looking in my
+face, said:
+
+
+     '"But by-the-bye did I ever give you my likeness?"
+
+     '"No," was the reply, "have you got your likeness?"
+
+     '"Oh! yes, I will give it you; I will send it by the _real_ post
+     to-morrow."'
+
+
+'It seemed,' the lady adds, 'as if the wonderful little mind had been
+considering what other kind thing he could do besides repeating the
+hymns.'
+
+The whole incident is an excellent example of his sweetness of
+disposition, and his innate thoughtfulness for others. It is pleasant to
+know that the pretty promise was fulfilled, Mrs Stevenson herself acting
+'postman,' and taking the likeness to her friend next day.
+
+The second picture is from the memory of Miss Balfour herself. She too
+describes the blue pelisse trimmed with grey astrakhan, which he wore in
+the winter of 1853 and '54. In the spring of 1854 she went to the
+Stevensons' house to tell her sister that their father had been given
+the degree of Doctor of Divinity. The small Louis, on hearing his
+grandfather spoken of as 'Doctor,' immediately said:
+
+'Now that grandpapa is a doctor, surely you'll have him instead of Dr
+Hunter?'
+
+A wonderfully quick thought and old-fashioned remark from a child not
+four years old, but a suggestively sad one too; he already knew so well
+the necessity of a doctor to help human bodies, although he could not
+yet comprehend the use of one for the 'cure' of human souls!
+
+When he heard that his aunt was going to see a relative in Saxe Coburg
+Place, he begged to be allowed to go with her, and, the permission
+granted, started off in great pride on his very first expedition without
+his nurse, that faithful friend of the Stevenson family having promised
+to follow later to take him home. The aunt at least had cause to
+remember that walk! He had started gloveless, and would not go back for
+his gloves, but popped his cold hands under the cape of his pelisse, and
+even then, unconventional as to clothing, said cheerfully:
+
+'That will keep them from John Frost.'
+
+So the pair set out on what proved a chilly and prolonged excursion;
+for, in spite of all remonstrances, the child calmly sat down on every
+doorstep and rested till he felt inclined to go on again, to the no
+small dismay of his aunt, who knew how serious a thing the taking of a
+cold was to the placid little personage smiling at her from the steps.
+
+During the Crimean war, while he was still a very tiny mite, he,
+entirely of his own accord, always prayed for the soldiers. When asked
+by his mother if he would like to be a soldier, his answer was--
+
+'I would neither like to kill nor to be killed,'--a very sensible reason
+to have been thought out by so young a child.
+
+His aunt says of him--
+
+
+     'I never knew so sweet a child.'
+
+
+And his mother always said of him that his sweetness and patience were
+beautiful. On one subject only mother and child sometimes differed.
+Louis wished her to agree with him that grandpapa's home was the nicest
+in the world, but the mother maintained their own home was best.
+
+Until his grandfather died in 1860, when he was ten years old, the manse
+at Colinton was the little boy's favourite abiding place. Here 'Auntie'
+lived, and near here, too, was the home of the 'sister-cousin,' and her
+brother who grew up with him, and who, of all the much loved cousins of
+that large connection, were nearest and dearest in his child-life, and
+to whom he sings--
+
+
+     'If two may read aright
+     These rhymes of old delight,
+     And house and garden play
+     You two, my cousins, and you only may.
+
+     'You in a garden green,
+     With me were king and queen,
+     Were soldier, hunter, tar,
+     And all the thousand things that children are.'
+
+
+With these two cousins the favourite game was the fleeing from,
+conquering, and finally slaying a huge giant called Bunker, invented by
+Louis, who, the trio believed, haunted the manse garden, and required
+continual killing. One time, on the Bonaly Road, they were shipwrecked
+hungry sailors, who ate so many buttercups that the little boys were
+poisoned and became very ill, and the little girl only escaped because
+she found the flowers too bitter to eat! In the 'Redford burn of happy
+memories' they sailed ships richly laden with whin pods for vanilla, and
+yellow lichen for gold. They always hoped to see ghosts, or corpse
+candles, and were much disappointed they never saw anything more
+terrible, in the gruesome place where the sexton kept his tools, than a
+swaying branch of ivy.
+
+Of the tall, pale, venerable grandfather, with his snowy hair, Louis
+stood a good deal in awe; and he tells us in his charming paper, 'The
+Manse,' in _Memories and Portraits_, that he had not much in common with
+the old man although he felt honoured by his connection with a person
+reverend enough to enter the pulpit and preach the sermon every Sunday.
+So many Balfours were scattered over the world, in India and the
+Colonies, that the old rooms at the manse were full of eastern
+curiosities and nick-nacks from distant lands dear to the hearts of
+little folks. And, while the garden was a bower of delight, the house
+was a veritable treasure trove to the grandchildren from far and near
+who played in it.
+
+To Robert Louis Stevenson, with his mind full of romance, it must have
+been a paradise indeed, and one that he admirably pictures in the verses
+addressed to an Anglo-Indian cousin who, as a married woman, has
+returned to the India of her birth.
+
+It is worth mentioning--as a note by the way which illustrates that
+abiding boyishness in Mr Stevenson, so well known to all who knew
+him--that four particularly hideous Indian idols stood guard at the hall
+door of 'The Turret,' the house of his uncle, John Balfour, at Leven.
+Two of them were life-size with their hands discreetly folded in prayer,
+two of them were smaller and made in a kneeling posture, and, as
+something rattled if you shook them, it was our juvenile belief that
+treasure was concealed inside their bodies. This idea Mr R. L. Stevenson
+eagerly fostered in the slightly younger generation, and, with the love
+of harmless mischief natural to him, implored us to 'rattle them
+_soundly_ when we were about it!'
+
+In the manse garden at Colinton there was a mysterious and delightful
+gap that gave egress to the Water of Leith, and to pass through this and
+stray, out of safe and guarded precincts, into a wide and wet world
+beyond was a keen pleasure to the little boy whose gipsy instincts were
+already loudly calling to him to take 'the road' his wandering soul so
+dearly loved.
+
+'Keepsake Mill' is a charming tribute to the joys of those illicit
+escapes and to the memories of the cousin playfellows now scattered in
+far lands, or for ever at rest from life's labour, who played in the
+garden where the delicate bright-eyed lad was the inventor and leader in
+their games.
+
+One sweet fancy of the imaginative child, who all his life had a fine
+mental and physical courage in spite of his delicacy, is still recalled
+by his 'sister-cousin'; the graveyard wall was at one place high above
+the garden it partially enclosed, and the little boy, afflicted with no
+superstitious terrors, had an idea that the souls of the dead people at
+rest in 'God's acre,' peeped out at him from the chinks of the wall. And
+one feels sure that here as all through his life, shadowed by so much of
+suffering, he held fast, after a fashion of his own, the belief that
+goes deeper than his playful rendering of it in _The Unseen Playmate_
+seems at first to infer:
+
+
+     'Whene'er you're happy and cannot tell why,
+     The Friend of the children is sure to be by.'
+
+
+A faith that was taught him by an earnest father and by the loving voice
+of a mother who held it fast through her own happy childhood and the
+joys and sorrows that as wife and mother came to her in later years.
+
+After the death of the Rev. Dr Balfour, in April 1860, the manse ceased
+to be the second home of Louis Stevenson, and in the November of that
+year his aunt, Miss Balfour, and the nephews and nieces who stayed with
+her moved to a house in Howard Place.
+
+In 1858 he went to school, and from 1860 to 1861 he and his cousin,
+Lewis Charles Balfour, were together at Mr Henderson's preparatory
+school in India Street from which both went to the Academy in 1861. Of
+Lewis Stevenson,--who in later life was always called Louis or Lou by
+his family and friends,--Mr Henderson reports: 'Robert's reading is not
+loud, but impressive.'
+
+In July he was in bed with scarlet fever on his examination day, which
+was a great disappointment to him. He had a first prize for reading that
+year; but his zeal over school and lessons was very short-lived, and he
+never hungered for scholastic honours.
+
+As a child he did not learn quickly, and he was in his eighth year
+before he could read fluently for himself. Nevertheless his especial
+bent showed itself early, and when in his sixth year he dictated a
+_History of Moses_, which he illustrated, giving the men pipes in their
+mouths. This, and an account of _Travels in Perth_, composed in his
+ninth year, are still in existence. The _History of Moses_ was written
+because an uncle had offered a prize to his own children for the best
+paper on the subject, and the little Louis was so disappointed at not
+being asked to compete that he was finally included among the
+competitors, and did a paper which though not best was still good and
+which was given a prize. He had begun to print it for himself, with much
+toil, but his mother offered to write it out from his dictation. Another
+composition of this time was a fierce story of shipwreck and fighting
+with savages.
+
+In 1863 he was sent for a few months to a boarding school kept by a Mr
+Wyatt at Spring Grove, near London. Life at a boarding school was misery
+to a lad so fond of wandering at his own sweet will as the small Louis,
+and he was full of distress at the prospect of leaving home. In _Random
+Memories_ he gives his ideas as to going to school, and expresses his
+belief that it is not so much the first night or day at school that is
+so terrible to a courageous child, as the dismay at the thought of
+leaving home with its familiar life and surroundings, and the painful
+suspense for some days before the plunge into the new world of school is
+taken. It was, he says, this miserable feeling of suspense that made
+him share his sorrows with a desolate, but amiable cat in the Easter
+Road, which mingled its woes with his and as it purred against him
+consoled him.
+
+His tender-hearted parents were so touched by his evident affliction,
+and especially by the little story of the cat that his father took him a
+trip round the coast of Fife in _The Pharos_ and he thus made an early
+and delightful acquaintance with some of the lights and harbours which
+his father had gone to inspect.
+
+Although the cousin, Lewis Charles Balfour, who had been his
+schoolfellow in Edinburgh, and two of his younger brothers were day
+pupils at the Spring Grove School, and his aunt, Miss Balfour, was
+living near, he became very homesick and unhappy, and the regular school
+work, with its impositions and punishments, fretted him and made him so
+ill, that in December his father, who had been at Mentone with his
+mother, hastily returned and took him away from school. It was too late,
+however, the few months had been too great a trial for his health, and
+he had a serious illness, during which, Dr Henry Bennett prescribed some
+very bracing treatment of which the youthful patient highly disapproved.
+
+Of the home where so much consideration was shown to a child's health
+and feelings, no better description can be given than the graphic one of
+a little Stevenson cousin who had gone with his parents to stay there,
+and who thus spoke of it: 'A child who never cries, a nurse who is never
+cross, and late dinners.'
+
+Can one imagine a dignified, childish paradise that could go much
+further! Nor were the joys of books awanting to the happy small boy who
+describes himself as in early days being carried off by his nurse
+
+
+     'To bed with backward looks,
+     At my dear world of story books.'
+
+
+As soon as he had learned to read he was an eager and an omnivorous
+reader, and could, from his eighth year, pass happy hours with a book,
+any book so long as it did not mean lessons.
+
+He was before very long a book-buyer as well as a book-lover, and he has
+for ever immortalised, in the charming pages of _A Penny Plain and
+Twopence Coloured_, that old bookshop (late J. L. Smith) at the corner
+of Leith Walk, where eager boys without coppers were but coldly
+received, but whence the fortunate capitalist could emerge, after having
+spent his Saturday pocket-money, the proud possessor of plays positively
+bristling with pirates and highwaymen. With these treasures he fled home
+in the gathering dusk, while 'Leerie-Light-the-Lamps' was kindling his
+cheery beacons along the streets, and, with pleasant terrors, devoured
+the weird productions, finally adding to their weirdness by the garish
+contents of a child's paint-box.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+BOYHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS
+
+
+     'A boy's will is the wind's will,
+     And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.'
+                                               --LONGFELLOW.
+
+
+      ... 'Strange enchantments from the past
+     And memories of the friends of old,
+     And strong tradition binding fast
+     The "flying terms" with bands of gold.'
+                                      --ANDREW LANG.
+
+
+The years 1861 and 1862 found Louis, with his childhood left behind him,
+a boy among other boys who sat on the forms and who played in the yards
+of the Academy, at which, during the greater part of the present
+century, many of the sons of Edinburgh men, and indeed of Scotsmen
+everywhere at home and abroad, have received their education.
+
+From 1864 to 1867 he was principally at a Mr Thompson's school in
+Frederick Street, and he studied from time to time with private tutors
+at the different places to which his parents went for the benefit of
+their own health or his. These rather uncommon educational experiences
+were of far more value to him in after life than a steady attendance at
+any one school, as they made him an excellent linguist and gave him,
+from very youthful years, a wide knowledge of foreign life and foreign
+manners. In 1862 the Stevenson family visited Holland and Germany, in
+1863 they were in Italy, in 1864 in the Riviera, and at Torquay for some
+months during the winter of 1865 and 1866; but after 1867 the family
+life became more settled and was chiefly passed between Edinburgh and
+Swanston.
+
+In those days Louis was a lean, slim lad, inclined to be tall, and with
+soft, somewhat lank, brown hair and brown eyes of a shade that seemed to
+deepen and change with every passing impression of his quick working
+brain. His features were rather long, the upper part of his narrow face
+was delicately formed like his mother's, but the lips were full, and a
+more virile strength in chin and jaw faintly reminded one of his
+father's powerful physiognomy.
+
+He had opinions of his own in regard to education, and they by no means
+led him to consider a strict attendance at school or a close application
+to lessons as necessary for his future life-work. He read, it is true,
+voraciously, but it was hardly on the lines of the sternly respectable
+classical curriculum which his tutors or the Academy offered him. He was
+an historical student after a fashion of his own, dipping deep into such
+books of bygone romance as Sir Walter Scott had conned and loved. His
+geography at that time took a purely practical and somewhat limited
+form, and resolved itself into locating correctly the places and abodes
+sacred to the characters in his favourite books.
+
+In the delightful dedication of _Catriona_,--to Mr Charles Baxter, W.S.,
+Edinburgh, who was his life-long friend--he describes those pilgrimages
+charmingly, and one can, in imagination, see the eager lads wandering in
+search of famous 'streets and numbered houses,' made historic for them
+by some such magic pen as that which has for ever made sacred the _Old
+Tolbooth_ or the _Heart of Midlothian_, from the coblestones of which,
+in the pavement of St Giles and near the Parliament House, one
+reverently steps aside lest careless feet should touch that memento of
+the past. One can picture too as he himself does, the romantic boys of
+to-day following the wanderings of David Balfour by Broughton and
+Silver-mills, the Water of Leith, the Hawes Inn at Queensferry, and the
+wind-swept shores of the Forth. But one can still more clearly see that
+slim, brown-eyed youth--a-quiver with the eagerness that was so
+conspicuous a characteristic of his,--as in these very places he
+remembered bygone tales and even then formed plans for, and saw visions
+of, his own stories yet to be.
+
+One can think of him with his eyes shining, and his face luminous, as he
+held forth to some choice friend, of sympathetic soul, on all these
+things of which his heart and brain were so full. One knows that when
+his walks were solitary his time was already put to a good account, and
+that the note-books which even then he carried in his pocket were in
+constant requisition.
+
+The boy, from the very first, felt a strong leading to the profession of
+letters, which he ultimately followed; and he describes himself as from
+very early boyhood having been given to make notes for possible
+romances, and to choose words of peculiar fitness for the purpose he had
+in hand, as well as to weave tales of thrilling adventure.
+
+Style was from the first a passion with him; and the lad had already
+begun in these juvenile note-books that careful choice of words and
+language which was at the very outset of his literary career to make so
+competent a critic as Mr Hamerton call him one of the greatest living
+masters of English prose. That he became something of a master in verse
+also those few thin volumes of deep thoughts, in a setting of fitly
+chosen words and rhymes, which he has published, amply prove.
+
+To return, however, to the boy who went to the Academy, or rather who
+did _not_ go to the Academy, for he had a faculty for playing truant
+which must have been extraordinarily provoking to parents and masters.
+No sooner was he out of the door in the morning than he could truly
+say--
+
+
+     'I heard the winds, with unseen feet,
+     Pass up the long and weary street,
+
+     'They say "We come from hill and glen
+     To touch the brows of toiling men."
+
+     'That each may know and feel we bring
+     The faint first breathings of the spring.'
+
+
+And the voice of the spring thus calling him as soon as it was heard,
+was obeyed; and, careless of the frowns that were bound to greet his
+return, he was off to wander on his beloved Braids and Pentlands, to lie
+long days among the whin and the broom, or to slip away to watch the
+busy shipping on the Forth, and to think deep thoughts beside the
+wave-washed shore of that sea which ever drew him like the voice of a
+familiar friend.
+
+To that intense love of Nature, and of Nature's solitude, his readers
+owe much, and we to-day may all say with the writer who gave such an
+interesting description of Swanston in _Good Words_ in the spring of
+1895, that those truant hours of his educated him for his future work
+far better than a careful attendance at school and college could have
+done. The same writer says that it was this open air life that he loved
+so dearly which gave to Stevenson's books their large leisure, and to
+his style its dignity. There is much truth in the remark; but as far as
+the style is concerned it is the product of time and thought, and it was
+most carefully and diligently formed by labour so earnest and
+painstaking, that few authors can even conceive of it.
+
+In _Memories and Portraits_ Mr Stevenson gives a delightful account of
+boyish days at a seaside resort, that is evidently North Berwick, and
+lovingly describes adventures with bull's-eye lanterns; adventures which
+seem to be intimately associated with the young folk of his connection,
+and which repeated themselves a few years later on the other side of the
+Forth, where boys and girls recalled the doings of Robert Louis and his
+friends with bull's-eye lanterns and gunpowder, in that cheerful form
+known to Louis Stevenson as a 'peeoy,' and considered it a point of
+honour to do likewise, no matter how indignant such mischief made the
+authorities. As for him, he was always the inventor and prime mover in
+every mischievous escapade the heart of youth could glory in.
+
+The wind-swept coast about North Berwick had a strong fascination for
+him, and in several of his books we feel the salt breeze blowing in from
+the sea, across the bents, and hear the sea birds crying on the lonely
+shore. The autumn holidays were a great joy to him, and another
+epoch-making event must have been the taking of Swanston Cottage, in May
+1867, to be the summer home of the Stevensons.
+
+The boy took intense pleasure in his rambles about the hills, in his
+dreamy rests on 'Kirk Yetton'[2] and 'Allermuir,' and in his wanderings
+with John Todd, the shepherd, after that worthy had ceased, as he
+comically puts it, to hunt him off as a dangerous sheep-scarer, and so
+to play 'Claverhouse to his Covenanter'! The two soon became great
+friends, and many a bit of strange philosophy, many a wild tale of
+bygone droving days the lad heard from the old man. Another great friend
+of early Swanston years was Robert Young, the gardener, whose austere
+and Puritan views of life were solemnly shared with his young master.
+
+Existence at Swanston was even more provocative of truant-playing than
+it had been in Edinburgh, and Louis, in his later school days and his
+early sessions at the University, was more than ever conspicuous by his
+absence from classes, more lovingly wedded to long hours among the
+hills, long rambles about the 'Old Town,' the Figgate Whins, the port of
+Leith, and the rapidly changing localities round Leith Walk, somewhat
+back from which, Pilrig, the ancient home of his ancestors, still stands
+gravely retired from the work-a-day world.
+
+In the year 1867 he went with his father to the 'Dhu Heartach'
+Lighthouse, and so began to develop that passion for the Western Isles
+and the Western seas which future voyages in _The Pharos_ were to bring
+to the state of fervour and perfection which gave birth of _The
+Merrymen_, and to those descriptions of the wild and lovely scenery of
+Appin and the West Highlands, in which David Balfour and Alan Breck
+wander through the pages of _Kidnapped_.
+
+It was his father's intention that he should follow the family
+profession of engineering, and with this in view he went to the
+Edinburgh University in the autumn of 1868. The professors in those days
+included Professors Kelland, Tait, Crum-Brown, Fleeming-Jenkin, Blackie,
+Masson, and many others whose names are still remembered as 'a
+sweet-smelling savour' in that Edinburgh which they and the truant
+student, who honoured his class attendance 'more in the breach than the
+observance,' loved so well.
+
+It was a stirring time at the University, and the students who warred
+manfully against the innovation of Dr Sophia Jex-Blake and the pioneers
+of the Lady Doctors' movement, were, it would seem on looking back,
+scarcely so mildly mannered, so peacefully inclined as those who now sit
+placidly beside 'the sweet girl graduates' of our day, on the class-room
+benches, and acknowledge the reign of the lady doctor as an accomplished
+fact. A torchlight procession of modern times is apparently a cheerful
+and picturesque function, smiled on by the authorities, and welcomed as
+a rather unique means of doing honour to a new Lord Rector or some
+famous guest of the city or the University. In Mr Stevenson's time, a
+torchlight procession had all the joys of 'forbidden fruit' to the merry
+lads who braved the police and the professors for the pleasure of
+marching through the streets to the final bonfire on the Calton Hill,
+from the scrimmage round which they emerged with clothes well oiled and
+singed, and faces and hands as black as much besmearing could make them;
+while anxious friends at home trembled lest a night in the police cells
+should be the reward of the ringleaders.
+
+Of one such procession, in the spring when Mr Stevenson's law studies
+were first interrupted by a journey south for his health, a clever
+student wrote an epic which was presented to me by one of Louis
+Stevenson's Balfour cousins as something _very precious_! The occasion
+was the Duke of Edinburgh's wedding, in 1874, and, yellow and faded, the
+_Epic_ still graces my _Every Day Book_, and, as one reads its
+inspiriting lines, one sees again those bygone days in which the slim
+figure and eager face of Louis Stevenson are always so conspicuous in
+every memory of the old, grey city of his birth.
+
+The following lines from the clever skit give a really excellent picture
+of the college life in his day.
+
+
+                       ... 'A deputation we
+     Sent hither by the students to demand
+     That they--that is the students--in a band
+     May march, illumed by torches flaring bright,
+     Along the leading streets on Friday night.
+     Brave was the Provost, yet towards his heart
+     The glowing life blood thrilled with sudden start;
+     Well might he tremble at the name he heard,
+     The Students! Kings might tremble at the word!
+     He thought of all the terrors of the past,
+     Of that fell row in Blackie's, April last--
+     Of Simpson wight, and Stirling-Maxwell too,
+     Of Miss Jex-Blake and all her lovely crew--
+     He thought, "If thus these desperadoes dare
+     To act with ladies, learned, young and fair,
+     Old women, like the Councillors and me,
+     To direr torments still reserved may be.
+     The better part of valour is discretion,
+     I'll try to soften them by prompt concession."
+     Then coughing thrice, impression due to make
+     And clear his throat, in accents mild he spake,
+     "Ye have my leave, 'V.R.,' I mean 'D.V.'"
+     The students bowed, retired, and he was free.'
+
+
+The High Sheriff and the Chief of Police, when they heard of the
+Provost's weakness, were filled with wrath and dismay, and very promptly
+insisted on his lordship taking back the concession, so that this
+historic procession was as much 'forbidden fruit' as its predecessors,
+and the students probably enjoyed it the more that they had as usual to
+dare all those in authority to carry it out.
+
+Another old-time enjoyment of that date was a snowball fight. Whether
+snow is less plentiful, or students are too cultured and too refined for
+these rough pastimes it is impossible to say, but certain it is that a
+really _great_ snowball fight is also a thing of the past. In those days
+they were Homeric combats, and a source of keen enjoyment to Robert
+Louis Stevenson, a very funny account of whom, on one of these
+occasions, was given me at the time by his cousin, Lewis Balfour, from
+Leven, himself a jovial medical student enjoying an active part in the
+melee. On the occasion of a great battle in the winter of 1869--or
+1870--Mr Stevenson and one or two men, now well known in various
+professions, had seated themselves on a ledge in the quadrangle to watch
+the fight. From this vantage ground they encouraged the combatants, but
+took no active part in the fray. Within swarmed the students armed with
+snowballs, without, the lads of the town, equally active, stormed the
+gates. All were too intent on the battle to notice the advent of the
+police, who rushed into the college quadrangle and made prisoners where
+they could. Craning his neck too much, in his keen enjoyment, Mr
+Stevenson overbalanced himself, slipped from his perch and was promptly
+captured by 'a bobby,' and, in spite of gallant efforts for his rescue,
+was ignominiously marched off to the Police Office at the very moment
+that his blandly unconscious mother was driving up the Bridges. It was
+useless for his attendant friends to assert that he had been a
+non-combatant. Was he not taken in the very thick of the fight? The
+police had him and they meant to keep him for he could not produce
+sufficient bail from his somewhat empty pockets. His cousin and his
+friends, by leaving all their stray coins, their watches and other
+valuables, managed to secure his release so that he had not the
+experience--which it is possible he might have enjoyed--of passing a
+night in the police cells of his native city.
+
+In his introduction to the _Memoirs of Professor Fleeming-Jenkin_, he
+himself tells a good story of his relations with that Professor, who was
+always a true and appreciative friend to his clever if idle student. He
+had handed in so few cards at the class of Engineering that his
+certificate was not forthcoming until he told his friend that his father
+would be very vexed if he could not produce the certificate--which he
+never intended to _use_--whereat the tender-hearted Professor handed it
+to him.
+
+Another prime favourite of his among the Professors was Professor
+Kelland; and one can well understand the attraction which the dainty,
+gentle refinement of that most kind-hearted of men had for a nature so
+akin to it as young Stevenson's. All Professor Kelland's students loved
+him; this one understood him also. Professor Masson was one of the
+giants of those days whom he was also most capable of appreciating, and
+whose lectures he occasionally attended although not a member of his
+class; and, himself not without his amiable eccentricities, he could not
+fail to have a soft spot in his heart for the quaint humour and the
+pleasant eccentricity which endeared Professor Blackie to his class and
+to the public. He was a poor attender at the Greek Class, however, and
+when he presented himself for his certificate the keen blue eyes of the
+Professor looked at him critically, and the Professor's remark was that
+he had been so seldom present at lectures it was hardly possible to
+recognise his face!
+
+Many of the students of that day have taken a good place in the world;
+some of them have long ere now left the things of time behind them; one
+or two of them Mr Stevenson has pictured in his graphic pages. Several
+of them regarded him as an interesting personality, but very few of them
+suspected that he was 'the chiel amang them takin' notes' for future
+work that would bring world-wide fame, not only to himself, but to his
+University and to the city of his birth.
+
+On the 2nd March 1869 he was proposed by George Melville, Esq.,
+Advocate, as a member of the Speculative Society, and we know from
+_Memories and Portraits_ how much he appreciated his membership of that
+Society, which has in its day included in the roll, on which his name
+stood No. 992, most of the men whose names are honoured in Scotland's
+capital, and many of whom the fame and the memory are revered in far
+places of the earth. That he might smoke in the hall of the Speculative,
+in the very stronghold of University authority, he playfully professes
+to have been his chief pleasure in the thing; but other men, to whom his
+earnest face, his eagerness in debate, made one of the pleasures of its
+meetings, tell another story, and it was commonly said in those days
+that there would always be something of interest in hand if Stevenson
+took a part in it.
+
+When he forsook the profession of engineering, Mr Stevenson attended the
+Law classes at the University, with the intention of being called to the
+Bar, but it is not on record that he was a more exemplary student of law
+than he had been of engineering, and he still found more satisfaction in
+his truant rambles and his meditations in old graveyards than he did in
+the legitimate study of his profession.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[2] Cairketton is the form used in the Ordnance Survey.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+AS I FIRST KNEW HIM
+
+
+     'Blessed are his parents in a son, so graced in face and figure
+     And of mind so wise.'
+                    --LORD DERBY'S TRANSLATION OF _The Iliad_.
+
+
+That was one of the quotations by which in those days we were wont to
+describe Mr Stevenson. Strictly speaking, perhaps he was not a handsome
+man. He was too slim, too ethereal, if one may use the term, to attain
+to anything sufficiently commonplace to be described as merely handsome.
+But he was indeed 'graced in face and figure,' for he possessed that
+rare attribute _distinction_, and his face, with its wonderfully
+luminous eyes, its ever changing expression, had a beauty peculiar to
+itself, and one which harmonised perfectly with the quaint wisdom of his
+mind.
+
+That wisdom was so deep, yet so whimsical, so peculiar and so many-sided
+that one can only apply to its possessor another quotation half
+indignantly thrown at him, when he was too successful in argument, by an
+acquaintance of his, whose quick wit had a great charm for him.
+
+
+     'We gaze and still the wonder grows
+     That one small head can carry all he knows.'
+
+
+He bowed to the compliment, he demurred as to the smallness of his head,
+and he enjoyed the quotation immensely. With the same opponent he once
+tried a competition in verse-making. Both showed considerable skill, but
+the umpire decided that Louis had won, so he bore off in triumph the
+prize of a bottle of olives, and was only sorry that he could not compel
+the loser to share his feast, which he well knew would be as abhorrent
+to her as it was delightful to him.
+
+With Edinburgh, wind-swept and grey, with its biting breeze, its
+swirling dust of March, there will always be associated in my mind
+certain memories of Robert Louis Stevenson, and of that happy home of
+the Stevenson family, 17 Heriot Row. In summer sunshine Swanston, lying
+cosily at the foot of the Pentlands, claimed them year by year, but
+every winter found them, for business or pleasure, established in that
+most homelike house, the windows of which, to the front, looked into the
+Heriot Row gardens, and at the back, from that upper flat where was the
+book-lined study of the son of the house, snatched a glimpse, over roofs
+and chimney cans, of the gold-fringed shores of Fife.
+
+Across the blue Forth in Fife, at the little seaside town of Leven, well
+known to golfing fame, there had settled in 1866 an uncle of R. L.
+Stevenson, Dr John Balfour, who was noted for his gallantry and skill
+throughout the Indian Mutiny, and in more than one outbreak of cholera
+in India and at home. Of the town and the man Mr Stevenson gives a
+graphic picture in _Random Memories_, when describing a visit to the
+Fife coast, where his father was making an inspection of lights and
+harbours.
+
+In 1849 when home on leave Dr Balfour volunteered to go to Davidson's
+Mains, in the parish of Cramond, where as a specialist in cholera
+symptoms he was amazed to find the outbreak as virulent and as fatal as
+the Asiatic cholera he had seen in India. In 1866, when another wave of
+cholera swept over Britain, he was asked to go to Slateford, where he
+coped with its ravages almost single-handed, saving life in every case
+after he went, except those already too far gone before his arrival. In
+late autumn of the same year the scourge broke out seriously in the
+small towns on the coast of Fife, and Dr Balfour went to Leven, where
+the doctor had just died of it, and a state of panic prevailed, and
+there too he succeeded in quickly stamping it out.
+
+Having retired from his Indian appointment he felt idle time hang heavy
+on hand, so he acceded to the request of the inhabitants and went to
+Leven to take up practice there. His wife, who was a cousin of his own,
+and their four children, shortly after followed him from Edinburgh, and
+he built a house called 'The Turret' there, where he remained until his
+greatly lamented death in 1887.
+
+There from childhood I grew up in intimate friendship with the young
+Balfours, and went out and in to the doctor's house, receiving in it
+such kindness from parents and children that it was regarded by me as a
+second home, and its inmates were looked upon as one's 'ain folk.' As
+one's 'ain folk,' too, by-and-bye, were regarded those other Balfour
+families, notably Dr George W. Balfour's household and Miss Balfour, and
+the nephews and nieces who had their home with her--who made of the
+little Fife town their holiday resort. Later an Edinburgh school and
+long visits to Edinburgh relatives made the Scotch capital as familiar
+to me as Fife; and then the Stevenson family in their home at Heriot Row
+were added to the little circle of friends, now, alas! so thinned by
+grievous blanks. Old and young have passed into 'The Silent Land,' and
+life is infinitely the poorer for those severed friendships--those lost
+regards of early days.
+
+Not a few of the old folk were notable in their time, some of the
+younger generation have made, or mean to make, some stir in the world.
+But round none of them gathers so much of romance of honour and of
+distinction as about Robert Louis Stevenson, who used to visit his
+uncle's house in Leven, doubtless from one of those expeditions to
+Anstruther, of which he tells us that he spent his time by day in giving
+a perfunctory attention to the harbour, at which his father's firm were
+working, and lived his real life by night scribbling romances in his
+lodgings. It is on record that he felt a thrill of well-merited pride
+when an Anstruther small boy pointed to him, as he stood beside the
+workmen, and said: 'There's the man that's takin' charge.' But he
+assuredly knew more of pleasure in his hours of scribbling than in his
+hours of inspection, although the out-of-door, wind-swept, wave-splashed
+part of engineering was never so abhorrent to him as office work. In the
+office he was known very little; but tradition has it that a small pile
+of evil spellings is still treasured there as a characteristic memento
+of the genius, and the thought has been known to comfort the sad hearts
+of other apprentice engineers afflicted with a like shakiness in their
+orthography, that the now much appreciated man of letters once shared
+their melancholy failing.
+
+Stories of all sorts were handed about in our little clique of the
+wondrous Robert Louis whose sayings and doings were already precious to
+an appreciative circle of relatives and friends. But it was not till
+sometime in the autumn of 1869 that he first became personally known to
+me.
+
+The introduction took place on a September afternoon in the drawing-room
+of 'The Turret,' and he inspired a great deal of awe in a youthful
+admirer who even then had literary aspirations, and who therefore looked
+up to him with much respect as someone who already wrote. From that time
+he was regarded as one of the quaintest, the most original and the most
+charming personalities among one's acquaintances. There was about him,
+in those days, a whimsical affectation, a touch of purely delightful
+vanity that never wholly left him in later life, and that far from
+repelling, as it would have done in any one more commonplace, was so
+intrinsically a part of his artistic nature that it was rather
+attractive than otherwise. Full of delightful humour, his idlest
+sayings--when he took the trouble to say anything which he frequently
+did not!--were teeming with the elements not only of laughter but of
+thought, and you wondered, long after you had talked with him, why it
+was that you saw new lights on things, and found food for mirth and
+matter for reflection where neither had suggested itself before.
+
+In those days he was not only original himself, but he had to a great
+degree that rare faculty of bringing to the surface in others the very
+smallest spark of originality, and of remembering it and appreciating
+it in a way that was stimulating and helpful to those who had the
+pleasure of knowing him. When the little seaside town was empty of
+visitors, and it was not time to pay Edinburgh visits for the season, in
+February and March, one kindness of his was very greatly prized by some
+of us who beguiled the tedium of the winter months by writing for and
+conducting an amateur magazine, called _Ours_. For this, in 1872 and
+1873, Mr Stevenson gave us a short contribution, _The Nun of Aberhuern_,
+a trifle in his own graceful style, which, as he was even then beginning
+to be known in the world of letters, we valued much. Moreover, he took a
+friendly interest in the sheets of blue MS. paper so closely written
+over with our somewhat juvenile productions, and made here a criticism,
+there a prediction, which has not been without its effect on the future
+work of some of us.
+
+Mr Stevenson was always kind and always sympathetic; he laughed at your
+follies of course, but he did it so pleasantly that the laughter seemed
+almost a compliment, and the kindness was more memorable than the mirth.
+In one among his juniors at least, imbued like himself with a love of
+old-time romance and of ancient story, he inspired a passion of
+gratitude that abides to this day. Mr Stevenson not only never laughed,
+as the other boys and girls did, nor treated the memory of delightful
+childish plays with contempt, as was the fashion of the generation just
+grown up, he never even smiled over the unfeminine tastes of a child who
+went pirate-hunting in an upturned table with a towel for a sail and
+dried orange skins for provender--or whose dolls were not treated as
+those dainty girlish playthings ought to be, as pretty babies and gay
+society dames, but figured as the tattered and battered followers of
+Prince Charlie--himself a hero very much the worse for the wear in a
+plaid and a kilt!--after Culloden. Or, in gayer moods, the same dolls
+attended his receptions at Holyrood in garish garments, or masqueraded
+as Mary Queen of Scots and her four Maries in that 'turret chamber high
+of ancient Holyrood' where 'she summoned Rizzio with his lute and bade
+the minstrel play.'
+
+Mr Stevenson listened gravely to all these things. He professed a real
+interest in them. He even remembered the names of the puppets and the
+parts they had played, and so gained for himself an enduring niche in
+the heart that had bitterly resented the mockery of the others. It is
+quite possible that a nature so gentle and so appreciative as his really
+_felt_ the sympathy. The juniors are rarely mistaken as to the
+genuineness of the feelings of their elders, and his interest certainly
+rang true to the youthful mind. He had been himself a delicate child, so
+he was capable of understanding how many weary and solitary hours the
+romantic plays had filled pleasantly.
+
+It is not a memory of much moment, perhaps, but it shows that even at an
+age when most young men are too keenly concerned with themselves and
+their own affairs to take much trouble for those who are a few years
+their juniors, Mr Stevenson had thought and sympathy to spare for the
+small joys and sorrows, the interests, and the 'make-believes' that had
+amused a lonely child, and which, after all, in one form or another,
+make up a good deal of life to most of us.
+
+One is inclined to gather from his books, and from the statements
+accredited to him in magazines and newspapers, that he never took women
+very seriously. He may not have done so--save those who were very near
+and dear to him, and they were set in a sacred shrine of their own--but
+he certainly always treated women very charmingly; and the young girl
+relatives and friends, who were accustomed to be much in his home
+circle, had never any reason to complain of the lack of the most dainty
+and courtly attentions or of a most constant and spontaneous kindness
+from the somewhat solemn youth, who, like other youths of twenty,
+considered that it showed a great knowledge of the world to affect a
+rather cynical disdain of the feminine half of humanity. In himself
+there was, curiously enough, always a reminder of the feminine; an
+almost girlish look passed now and again, in those days, over the thin
+delicately-tinted face, and a womanly gentleness in voice and manner
+reminded one of his mother.
+
+The same ready sympathy, the same power, as it were, of putting himself
+into a friend's place and entering with heart and soul into the affairs
+of others which made him so interested a listener to a young girl's
+story of her childhood's plays, made him in his later years the friend
+of the Samoans, the champion of Samoan liberties, and, all through his
+life, the one man whom the men and women who knew him loved with the
+love that is only given to the very few, and those the few, too often,
+whose death in life's prime, or before it, prove them to have been among
+those whom the old poet tells us 'the gods love.'
+
+Nothing at this time was more remarkable in Mr Stevenson than his
+extraordinary youthfulness of mind. At an age when other young men
+affect to be blase and world weary he was delightfully and fearlessly
+boyish. Boyish even in his occasional half-comic solemnity of
+appearance; he was boyish likewise in his charming jests and jokes, and,
+above all, in his hearty delight in any outdoor 'ploy' that came in his
+way.
+
+A comical instance of this nearness of the boy to the surface in him
+displayed itself one grey east-windy afternoon at Leven, when one saw
+quite another side to him than the literary and dilettante one
+displayed, with something of a mannered affectation, the day before in
+'The Turret' drawing-room. He had walked down to the sands with his aunt
+and there were assembled various younger members of the Balfour clique,
+and some whom age and sex ought perhaps to have taught to despise,
+though it had not, the hoydenish pleasures of 'a sea-house.' A
+'sea-house,' for the benefit of the uninitiated, is a deep hole dug in
+the sand while the tide is out, and the sand taken from the hole is
+built round in broad, high walls to make the fort resist as long as
+possible the rush of the incoming waves. It takes hours to make, but no
+trouble is too great, for is there not the fierce joy of adventure at
+the last when the waves finally win in the struggle and the
+huddled-together inmates of the now submerged house are thoroughly
+soaked with spray and salt water?
+
+The 'sea-house,' the shouts of its builders, the tempting curl on the
+waves, as each one came a little further, the slight rise of the wind
+driving the breakers hurriedly landwards, were evidently too much for Mr
+Stevenson. One moment the weight of his nineteen years and the duty of
+politeness to his aunt restrained him, the next Mrs Balfour was left
+standing alone, and overcome with laughter, while Louis was in the sea
+house scolding, praising, and exhorting all at once, but above all
+imploring us to 'sit it out a little longer' as wave after wave widened
+the breach in the ramparts of sand, and
+
+
+     'In every hole the sea came up,
+     Till it could come no more,'
+
+
+while wetter and wetter grew the heroic few who, with Mr Stevenson 'sat
+it out' loyally, till it was possible to sit there no longer. Then
+wet--wetter indeed than ever before--the remnant crept home to be
+frowned upon and punished but to know no repentance; for had not Robert
+Louis been the ringleader, and was there any punishment invented that
+could take from the joy and the pride of a mischievous adventure in
+which _he_ had had a part! And he, with the water dripping from his
+trousers and 'squirching' in his boots, was perfectly and placidly
+happy, regardless of his aunt's dismay and the future horrors of a
+possible bad cold. He had been a schoolboy again for the all too brief
+half hour beside the grey and gurly sea, and that youthfulness, that
+survived through all the patient suffering of his life and that seems to
+laugh out of the pages of his books to the last, was in the ascendant as
+he walked off jauntily townwards, amiably oblivious of the lecture his
+aunt gave him by the way.
+
+Anything which brought him into close contact with the sea had a charm
+for him, even that mock combat with the waves of the autumn equinox on
+the flat shore of Fife. Therefore at this time although classes and
+study were a weariness to him his days spent in the old-fashioned town
+of Anstruther, or on the desolate coast of Caithness, had many
+pleasures; had many romances also, for everywhere he went he picked up
+odd and out-of-the-way knowledge, and came across strange stories and
+stranger characters, from the lingering tradition of the poor relic of
+the Spanish Armada, the Duke of Modena Sidonia,[3] who after his sojourn
+in Fair Isle landed at Anstruther and still glorified the quaint
+sea-port in the East Neuk with his ghostly dignity--to the peer of the
+realm, in actual flesh and blood, whom Mr Stevenson found acting as a
+home missionary to the present day population of the Fair Isle. All
+things were treasured in the note-book of his memory, or jotted down in
+the note-book in his pocket; and, while the engineer progressed very
+little in his profession, the future novelist was undergoing a training
+for his work almost perfect in its way and assuredly most admirably
+suited to the nature that loved an open air life and revelled in an
+existence on the sea or beside it.'
+
+Possibly not all aspiring civil engineers, certainly very few budding
+novelists, so test the reality of things as to go down into the ocean
+depths in a diver's dress and in the company of a professional diver,
+but this Robert Louis Stevenson actually did. His account of it, in
+bygone days, was gruesomely graphic, his pen-and-ink sketch of it, to be
+read in _Random Memories_, is not less so; and the thing itself must
+have been an experience well worth having to a mind like his. Well worth
+knowing too, both to the man and to the future creator of character,
+were those brave hardy sons of toil who did the rough work of his firm's
+harbours and lighthouses; and many a good yarn he must have heard them
+spin as he stood side by side with them on some solid block of granite,
+or on some outlying headland, or chatted and smoked with the captain and
+the sailors of _The Pharos_ as she made her rounds among the islands.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[3] Although Mr Stevenson spoke and wrote of this personage as
+'the Duke of Modena Sidonia,' he was in reality Don Jan Gomez de Modena,
+who is mentioned in T. M'Crie's 'Life of Andrew Melville.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HOME LIFE
+
+
+     'O, pleasant party round the fire.'
+                               --R. L. STEVENSON.
+
+
+Often a little indifferent, sometimes politely bored in general society,
+it was at home that Robert Louis Stevenson seemed to me to be seen to
+the greatest advantage. That little household of three, that delightful
+trio who so thoroughly appreciated each other were charming everywhere,
+but only quite perfect when taken together within the hospitable walls
+that enshrined so true a home. Not a house or an abiding place merely,
+whence the business or the gaieties of life could be comfortably
+indulged in, but a _home_ where, however much the amusements of the
+Scotch capital were shared in and appreciated, the truest happiness lay
+around the quiet fireside where the mother, father, and son loved and
+understood each other with a love the deeper, that the intense Scotch
+reticence of all made it, like a hidden jewel, the more precious because
+so rarely displayed to strangers' eyes.
+
+No son could be more fortunate in his parents, no parents could have
+given a child a more unselfish devotion, a more comprehending sympathy.
+His very delicacy and the anxiety it had so often caused them had drawn
+their hearts more tenderly to him, and, absolutely happy in each other,
+they were equally happy in their pride and pleasure in their son's
+evident genius and most original personality.
+
+In days when discontent and extravagance have done so much to lessen, at
+least upon the surface of things, the sacredness of home, and weaken the
+solemnity of marriage, it is comforting and pleasant to look back upon
+such a home as that was, and to realise that it is possible, in the
+midst of a busy life of work and of pleasure, to preserve an inner holy
+of holies around the domestic hearth, into which no jarring discord, no
+paltry worldly worry, can come, because love is there. Before love's
+clear gaze all that is selfish and petty and false dies away, while all
+that is true, good, and gentle makes for sweet peace and that perfect
+union of hearts which can alone create a true marriage and a perfect
+home life.
+
+Into the Stevenson household, as into other households, came from time
+to time real worry, real grief, and not infrequent anxiety. The very
+frailty of tenure by which their son had always held his life was in
+itself a daily burden to the parents. Mrs Stevenson, especially in her
+earlier married life, was often far from strong; to Mr Stevenson came
+now and then those darker moods to which the Scotch temperament,
+particularly when tinged with the Celtic, is liable. Personal and
+business disappointments were not wholly unknown, although life in these
+latter respects was one saved at least from monetary anxieties, and
+crowned with a large measure of success. But in "all the changes and
+chances of this mortal life" this household had a sure sheet anchor on
+which to depend. Love met the trials smiling, and because they loved
+each other they were clothed in the armour of defence.
+
+It was a home ennobled by a high ideal of what life ought to be, and
+hallowed by a strong and personal faith in God. Mr Stevenson's somewhat
+austere Calvinism gave a gravity to his character and his religion that
+were admirably balanced by the happy nature and the sunny active faith
+of his wife, whose religion was none the less real and earnest that it
+was bright and always cheerfully practical. Both loved the grand old
+Church of Scotland, with her far-reaching history and her noble
+traditions; both, with money and with personal interest, helped not only
+their own congregation of St Stephen's but the missions and schemes of
+the Church at large, and many private kindnesses and public charities
+besides evinced their liberality of heart. Mrs Stevenson, among other
+things, took a keen pleasure in work for the Indian Zenanas, and among
+his many engrossments Mr Stevenson was greatly occupied as to the public
+good of Edinburgh, and notably interested himself in the restoration of
+St Giles, that grand old landmark of national history of which, in its
+present condition, Scotland has every reason to be proud.
+
+In such a home as this Robert Louis Stevenson was from early childhood
+educated in a deeply-rooted respect for the Bible and the old solemn
+teachings which gave to Scotland those 'graves of the martyrs,' of which
+he so often writes. The Calvinism of his ancestors, inherited to a
+certain extent by his father, softened to him by his mother's sweetness
+of nature and brightness of faith, always remained with him something
+to be regarded with a tender reverence; and if, as he grew to manhood,
+the 'modern spirit' changed and modified his beliefs, so that it might
+be said of him, as of so many large natures and earnest souls,
+
+
+     'His God he cabins not in creeds,'
+
+
+God and religion remained very real to him; and the high ideal of duty
+first learned in his childhood's home guided his life to the last.
+Robert Fergusson's life and poems interested him greatly, and he often
+declared himself drawn to him by a certain spiritual affinity; while,
+when suffering from his frequent attacks of distressing illness, he
+sometimes thought with dread of Fergusson's sad fate.
+
+Pleasure as well as duty, however, was always made welcome in the
+Stevenson home. Mr and Mrs Thomas Stevenson held no stern views of
+everyday life, no gayer or brighter household could be found than
+theirs. None certainly existed where young folk received a warmer
+welcome, whether the family were established for the winter at 17 Heriot
+Row, or were spending the summer at Swanston, that delightful nook,
+nestling in the shelter of the Pentland hills, where the old-fashioned
+flowers had so sweet a scent, the rustic sounds of country life were so
+full of charming music, and where the home trio themselves loved
+
+
+     'Every path and every plot,
+       Every bush of roses,
+     Every blue forget-me-not
+       Where the dew reposes.'
+
+
+Differing much in their natures, but fitting, as it were, closely into
+each other's souls and characters, Louis Stevenson's parents early made
+for him that ideal of home and of marriage that shows itself from the
+first in his writings, just here a line and there a sentence, which
+indicates how his thoughts ran, and how, whatever enjoyment he might
+take in poking cynicism at women in the abstract, he was full of a noble
+idea, a manly longing for that one woman, of whose soul and his own, he
+could say--
+
+
+     'Once and beyond recollection,
+       Once ere the skies were unfurled,
+     These an immortal affection
+       Found at the birth of the world,'
+
+
+a woman who would be what his mother was to his father, a something as
+sacred as all through his life that mother was to him. Save that Mrs
+Thomas Stevenson's eyes were rather hazel than blue, it might have been
+of her that the late Professor Blackie wrote so sweetly:--
+
+
+     'True to herself and to the high ideal
+     That God's grace gave her to inform the real,
+     True to her kind, and to your every feeling
+     Respondent with a power of kindliest healing
+     She knows no falseness, even the courtliest lie;
+     She dreams not, truth flows from her deep blue eye,
+     And if her tongue speaks pleasant things to all,
+     'Tis that she loveth well both great and small,
+     And all in her that mortals call politeness
+     Is but the image of her bright soul's brightness.'
+
+
+That Stevenson home was to many of us, besides the son of the house, a
+picture of what a true life ought to be, and one that seemed to make the
+realisation of all high ideals possible in whatever fashion one's own
+existence might ultimately be led.
+
+There was something so strong and manly in Mr Thomas Stevenson,
+something so sweetly womanly in his wife. A beautiful woman always,
+because hers was the beauty of soul, as well as of feature, in those
+early seventies, one cannot imagine anyone more graceful, more gracious,
+or more charming than she was.
+
+It would also be difficult to imagine a wife or mother more sympathetic
+or more sensible. She could always see the fun of things; she never
+objected to clubs and men's dinners, and the excuse for a night away
+from the home hearth, that is so dear to the best of men.
+
+Not many weeks before her death, when we were talking of those happy
+days of long ago, she told me that she always took a book and contented
+herself, and then was ready to be interested when the truant returned
+with a latch-key. An example, that if closely followed, would assuredly
+make for domestic peace. And one fancies that the woman who said
+smilingly, she always much approved of 'The Evening Club,' because her
+husband or son could make merry there so late, that she was sound
+asleep, and could not miss their conversation, was likely to be a
+pleasant wife to live with, and an ideal mother for a son of such
+Bohemian tendencies as Robert Louis.
+
+Even that marvellous taste in dress which her son affected, and which
+would certainly have dismayed more conventional mothers, only amused her
+immensely. Among other jottings of hers about him in her little
+note-book is one which relates with much appreciation that a faithful
+servant says of him, 'One summer he tried to wear a frock-coat and tall
+hat, but after a little he laid them aside and said, "I am not going to
+be a swell any more," and returned to the velveteen coat and the straw
+hat which he preferred.'
+
+Except at a wedding, or some such solemn function, whereat he probably
+looked misery personified, one cannot remember him so conventionally
+apparelled as in the frock-coat and the tall hat. Possibly it was before
+this access of propriety temporarily had him in its grasp that one day
+we saw him in Princes Street 'taking the air' in an open cab with a
+Stevenson cousin, attired in like manner with himself. In those days
+fashionable people often walked in Princes Street in the afternoon, so
+what was our dismay, in the midst of quite a crowd of the gay world, to
+see that open cab, at a word of command from Robert Louis, draw near the
+pavement as we approached, when two battered straw hats were lifted to
+us with quite a Parisian grace. Both young men wore sailor hats with
+brilliant ribbon bands, both were attired in flannel cricketing jackets
+with broad bright stripes, and round Louis's neck was knotted a huge
+yellow silk handkerchief, while over both their heads one of them held
+an open umbrella. In days when the wearing of cricketing clothes, except
+in the playing fields, was in Scotland still so uncommon that it is on
+authentic record that an elderly unmarried lady in an east coast
+watering place, on meeting in its high street a young man in boating
+flannels, was so shocked at the innovation that she promptly went home,
+leaving all her shopping undone and her tea-drinking and friendly gossip
+forgotten, such an apparition as that in the open cab required more
+courage to face than people accustomed to the present-day use of gay
+tennis garb can easily imagine. It was fortunate that nerve to return
+the salutation smilingly was not wanting, or Mr Stevenson would
+certainly have pitilessly chaffed the timid victims of conventionality
+afterwards.
+
+Having borne the ordeal with such courage as we possessed, we hastened
+to have tea with Mrs Stevenson, whose first question was, 'Have you seen
+Lou?'
+
+And when we described that startling vision that was slowly creeping
+along Princes Street in the open cab, she laughed till her tears fell.
+In half an hour or so her son came in cool and unconcerned, and as
+punctiliously polite as if his attire had been the orthodox apparel for
+an afternoon tea-party.
+
+The effects of his dressing and appearance on the foreign mind is most
+humorously described by himself in his _Epilogue to an Inland Voyage_,
+where the extraordinary nature of his garments so dismayed the French
+police that while his friend, the late Sir Walter G. Simpson, 'The
+Cigarette,' was allowed to go free, 'The Arethusa' was popped into
+prison, kept there for an hour or two, and finally hustled off to Paris,
+an adventure of the two friends, who were so systematically taken for
+'bagmen,' on that charming expedition, which was always told with much
+laughter by 'The Arethusa's' parents.
+
+One of the last memories of Mr Stevenson in Edinburgh that distinctly
+remains with me was finding him looking into the window of Messrs
+Douglas & Foulis in Castle Street on a grey, east windy day that was
+cold enough to make the thickest great-coat necessary. But he was
+visibly shivering in one of his favourite short velvet coats. It was
+palpably too short in the arms, and certainly the worse for wear; his
+long hair fell almost to his shoulders, and he wore a Tyrolese hat of
+soft felt. With a whimsical and appreciative glance at his garments, he
+offered to accompany me along Princes Street; so we set off westwards
+together, when, so charming was his conversation, that long before we
+reached the doorsteps of his relative's house, which was my destination,
+one had forgotten that the wind was in the east, and the sky greyer than
+the pavements, and only longed for the walk to begin over again, that he
+might talk all the way. These eccentricities of attire were merely a
+part of the rather attractive vanity of a clever youth, whose exuberance
+of spirits was, in spite of much bad health, at that time so great that
+he was often merry with a gaiety that was as child-like as it was
+amusing. In later life he gradually modified his ideas as to dress, and
+in the _Vailima Letters_ he writes of himself in Samoa as going to Apia
+to social amusements in most orthodox coats and ties.
+
+At evening parties he always looked like a martyr in the dismal black
+coat and white tie, which he described as a mixture of the livery of a
+waiter and the mourning of an undertaker. At dances, he propped himself
+against a wall, in a doorway or in some coign of vantage about the
+staircase, looking limp and miserable, but keenly observant all the
+time. When he found a congenial soul, whether man or woman, to talk to,
+he brightened, the limpness vanished, and his quick flow of wit and
+fancy streamed on in a delightful river of talk which touched on grave
+and gay with equal ease, and was exactly what a poet describes, as--
+
+
+     'His talk was like a stream that runs
+       With rapid change from rocks to roses,
+     It skipped from politics to puns,
+       It passed from Mahomet to Moses.
+     Beginning with the laws that keep
+       The planets in their rapid courses,
+     And ending with a precept deep
+       For stewing eels or shoeing horses.'
+
+
+Although he looked so unhappy at dances or 'at homes,' at dinners, if
+the guests were fitly chosen, he was thoroughly at his ease and
+exceedingly amusing. With his few intimate friends too he was seen at
+his best; but in general society he was usually as bored as he looked.
+
+The Edinburgh of that day was very pleasant socially. Its world seemed
+somewhat smaller than it is now, less ostentatiously rich, more
+seriously cultured; or so at least it appeared to the young folk who
+belonged to the old-fashioned law and professional set in which the
+Stevensons largely had their acquaintance. People in that set still
+lived, more than they do to-day, eastwards or northwards of Heriot Row,
+in the large old houses which were so homelike and so comfortable. The
+centre of things was in those grand grey houses from Heriot Row upwards
+to Charlotte Square, westwards to Randolph Cliff and a little way over
+the Dean Bridge. Drumsheugh Gardens was an innovation. The terraces,
+Royal, Regent, and Carlton, that 'west end of the east,' were still
+fashionable, and few people had, as yet, migrated southwards to
+
+
+     'That proud part of Morningside,
+     Where houses girt with gardens
+     Do stretch down far and wide.'
+
+
+It was not a very large world, but it was a very agreeable one, and one
+which had its notabilities. Lord Neaves with his delightful songs, and
+the other old-time judges were still with us. Sir David Brewster was not
+so very long dead; Sir James Y. Simpson was yet a very recent memory.
+Professor Blackie was in the zenith of his fame. Sir Daniel Macnee told
+his wonderful stories; Professor, now Sir, Douglas Maclagan sang his
+delightful songs. Mr Sam Bough's hearty laugh rang out among the
+artists, and Sir R. Christison, and Syme, and Keith, and Lister, had
+made the Edinburgh medical world famous. Professors Masson, Tait,
+Kelland, Crum-Brown, Fleeming-Jenkin--in whose theatricals R. L.
+Stevenson took a picturesque part--and a host of other well-known names
+were among the guests at dinners, and most beloved personality of all,
+perhaps, Dr John Brown, accompanied by his 'doggies' still nodded to us
+out of his carriage window, or left wonderful scraps of drawings on the
+hall tables as he passed out from seeing a patient. And everywhere in
+that pleasant world the Stevenson family were welcome and well known.
+
+By the host of young people who are now in turn taking the busy work of
+life, from which so many of the elders are resting for ever, parties at
+17 Heriot Row and at Swanston were much appreciated. Dinner parties for
+young people were not then so common as now, and the delightful ones
+given by Mr and Mrs Thomas Stevenson were greatly enjoyed. The guests
+were carefully chosen, and limited to ten or twelve, so that
+conversation at dinner was general. And how amusing that conversation
+was! The humour of father and son as they drew each other out was
+wonderful, they capped each other's good things, and somehow made less
+gifted folk shine in the conversation also in a way peculiar to them and
+which was fully shared by Mrs Thomas Stevenson, who made the most
+charming of hostesses. Father and son on these occasions were simply
+full of jests and jollity, everything started an argument, and every
+argument lent itself to fun. It is odd that nothing definite of those
+clever sayings of theirs seems to return to one; it is only, as it were,
+the memory of an aroma that filled the air sweetly at the time, and is
+still faintly present with one that remains; the actual 'bon-mots' have
+unhappily passed away. It is consoling to find that Mr Edmund Gosse, who
+in _Kit-Cats_ writes delightfully of his friend Louis Stevenson, notes
+the same intangible character of his talk.
+
+After the little dinners there were delightful informal dances, to which
+nephews, nieces, friends, and neighbours came as well as the dinner
+guests, and one can still remember with a smile, perilously near to
+tears, Mr Thomas Stevenson driving his unwilling son to dance the
+old-time dance 'Sir Roger de Coverley,' which the elder man loved and
+the younger professed to scorn even while he entered with a zeal that
+finally satisfied his father into the performance of it, that always
+ended an informal evening at 17 Heriot Row.
+
+Music, too, was a pleasant feature of those little parties, and one
+still recalls, especially, the songs and the lovely voice of a favourite
+niece of Mrs Stevenson, whose early death made the first break in the
+home at 'The Turret,' too soon to be followed by the passing away of all
+save one of that happy household. Even now, after the lapse of so many
+years, one seems to see Mr Thomas Stevenson leaning eagerly forward as
+she sang such sweet old songs as 'My Mother bids me bind my Hair,' and
+'She wore a wreath of Roses,' or Robert Louis applauding his favourites,
+'I shot an Arrow into the Air,' and 'The Sea hath its Pearls.'
+
+On one occasion one of these merry parties was enlivened by the presence
+of some young Japanese engineer students, who were on tour in Edinburgh,
+and who had brought introductions to the distinguished engineer, who
+made them very cordially welcome. It was not then very common to meet
+Japanese, and these quiet dignified young men, in their gracefully
+flowing black garments, interested the Stevenson family and their
+youthful guests greatly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+HIS CHOICE OF A LITERARY LIFE AND HIS EARLIER BOOKS
+
+
+     'A clerk foredoom'd his father's soul to cross,
+     Who pens a stanza when he should engross.'
+                        --POPE'S _Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot_.
+
+
+His son's refusal to become a civil engineer, and to take his natural
+position in the family business, was undoubtedly a great trial to a man
+of Mr Thomas Stevenson's character and professional traditions. That
+business had in it not only wealth, honour, and success, but, to every
+Stevenson, the glamour of romance, the fascination of adventure, and to
+the father his firm's history appealed strongly. Therefore the blow that
+fell upon him during that memorable walk, when his son at last found
+courage to confess to him that he could not persevere in the traditional
+path which he was expected to tread, must have been a crushing one, and
+it said much for the strength of his fatherly affection that he received
+it as he did. It was a painful decision for the son to make, and an
+equally painful one for the parents to hear.
+
+Mrs Thomas Stevenson as well as her husband felt it a keen
+disappointment that her son could not walk in his father's footsteps. To
+them, as to all parents of their position and very natural social
+prejudices, it seemed a foolish thing for a man to turn seriously to
+literature as a means of winning his daily bread. The Edinburgh of that
+day did not think much of the profession of letters, and although the
+memory of Sir Walter Scott, the 'Edinburgh Reviewers,' and the literary
+lights of an earlier time was still green, all parents held the opinion
+that, although a few authors had made for themselves fame and fortune,
+literature was but a beggarly trade at the best, and one to which no
+wise man would apprentice his son.
+
+Only those who knew the elder Mr Stevenson's nature well could fully
+understand how great a trial to him was his son's decision; and only
+those very near and dear to him could quite appreciate the depth of the
+father's love, the tenderness of the father's heart, which permitted no
+tinge of bitterness, no lasting shadow of repining, to darken his
+relations with his son or to lessen in the slightest his overwhelming
+affection for him. Sensitive in the extreme, the son in his turn could
+not fail to feel his father's disappointment, almost to exaggerate its
+effect on the older man in his own tender-hearted remorse that he was
+unable to fulfil his destiny in any other way than by following
+literature, which was calling him with no uncertain voice. It was good,
+therefore, to hear from the lips of the wife and mother, who was so
+fully in the confidence of both, that no abiding cloud remained between
+the father and the son, and that both quietly accepted the inevitable
+when law, like engineering, was also laid aside to allow Louis to fulfil
+his one strong desire. Lovingly and unselfishly the parents finally
+accepted the fact that genius must have its way, and that in the dainty
+book lined study, in travel by ways quaint and unusual, in prolonged
+sojourns in search of health in distant lands, the younger Stevenson's
+life-work was to be done.
+
+When he found that his son would not be an engineer, Mr Thomas Stevenson
+very naturally wished him to have a profession to fall back upon should
+literature not prove a success, and it was agreed that he should read
+for the Bar. Louis, therefore, about the end of 1871, entered the office
+of the firm which is now known as Messrs Skene, Edwards, & Garson, W.S.
+The late Mr Skene, LL.D., was then senior partner of the firm. Another
+partner was the father of Mr J. R. P. Edwards, who has kindly supplied
+the following very interesting facts about Robert Louis Stevenson while
+he was undergoing his legal training in his office.
+
+'Mr Stevenson entered the office, which was then in 18 Hill Street, in
+1871, and left it about the middle of the year 1873, and was afterwards
+called to the Bar. His position in the office was neither that of a
+clerk nor of an apprentice, but merely of a person gaining some
+knowledge of business. He never received any salary, and, as is usual
+with aspirants for the Bar, his position was in no way subject to the
+ordinary office discipline. After searching through papers which were
+written in the office during the time Stevenson was in the office, I
+find a good many papers which were written by him, but they are all
+merely copies of documents, and I can find no trace of any deeds which
+were actually drawn up by him. This is no doubt accounted for, firstly,
+because he was not experienced enough in the drafting of deeds, and,
+secondly, because he may have found the somewhat dry intricacies of
+conveyancing, which are for the most part governed by hard and fast
+rules of law, foreign to his marvellous imagination.
+
+'I have not been able to trace any of the staff of the office who were
+in it with Robert Louis Stevenson, with the exception of two men, who
+seem to remember little about him, but they said that he was very
+reserved and kept very much to himself. One of the men did not even know
+that he was the great Stevenson. The other man, however, said that he
+remembered that Stevenson had, as he described it to me, "an awful
+notion of the Pentland hills, and was that fond of talking about them."
+I believe he was very fond of scribbling pieces of writing on odd pieces
+of paper in his spare moments, but, unfortunately, I can find no trace
+of these; but that is not to be wondered at, as the firm have removed to
+two different houses since Stevenson was in the office.
+
+'Mr Skene, who was head partner of the firm during the time that
+Stevenson was in the office, had always a great admiration for his
+writings, and shortly before his (Mr Skene's) death he said that it was
+a great regret to him that he had not known him better, and recognised
+in him a brother in letters. My father, who saw a good deal more of
+Stevenson, says that he struck him as being a very shy and nervous man,
+or rather, as he then was, a boy. My father also states that Stevenson
+was a tremendous walker, and that he used often to come into the office
+in the morning in the somewhat unprofessional garb of walking kit,
+having covered a good many miles before breakfast.'
+
+The office staff in 1871 consisted of ten men. Six of them have died,
+two cannot now be traced, and the remaining two mentioned by Mr Edwards
+are very old men.
+
+Mr Edwards also says that in one deed which was written by Louis
+Stevenson there are five errors on two short pages, so that although the
+handwriting in it is neat, round, and clear, it is evident that his
+thoughts were not on his work, and that he was no more diligent in law
+than he had been in engineering. His handwriting, although neat and
+distinct, can hardly be called pretty, he seemed to use a good deal of
+ink in those days as the down strokes are all black and heavy. In spite
+of his lack of interest in his office work he passed advocate with
+credit on 14th July 1875, was called to the Bar on the 15th, and had his
+first brief on the 23rd.
+
+He duly donned a wig and gown during the following session, and the
+delicate face that was so grave and refined looked very picturesque with
+the luminous eyes gleaming out from under the grey horse-hair. He joined
+the ranks of those 'Briefless Barristers' whose business it is to walk
+the hall of the Parliament House in search of clients. He had either one
+or two briefs, but he gave them away as he never acted as an advocate.
+His mother treasured the shillings he got for them among her relics of
+his early days.
+
+Although his connection with the Parliament House was totally devoid of
+that professional success that ultimately leads to a seat on the
+Bench--but for which Mr Stevenson had no desire--it was not without its
+uses as an education for that other success by reason of which very many
+people who have never seen his face know and love him to-day. If his
+sojourn within those venerable halls was useless for law it was
+fruitful for literature, and one can imagine that as he now and then
+haunted the courts and listened to the advocates and the judges he was
+already, from a study of the Bench of the present, laying the foundation
+for those brilliant pictures of the judges of a ruder past which he
+gives us in Lord Prestongrange or Lord Hermiston. It is not very fair or
+very complimentary to the judges of 1875 to compare them with such a
+creation as Lord Hermiston, but it was not much more than half a
+century, before their day, that customs and manners like his were
+possible.
+
+The robes, the forms, the etiquette, and the procedure of the Court of
+Session are still a sufficiently picturesque survival of an older time;
+and to a mind like Mr Stevenson's that short association with the
+historic Parliament House, with its far-reaching traditions and with the
+acting majesty of the law in Scotland that is so old and so unchanged an
+institution, which to-day employs the very words and phrases of bygone
+centuries, and still holds, in many points, to the structure of the
+ancient Roman Law, could not fail to be interesting and useful. Like Sir
+Walter Scott, when he too walked in the Advocates' Hall, he no doubt
+found much that was worth studying in the old law procedure as well as
+in the men and manners of his own day, and appreciated to the full the
+magnificent library in its dark and silent rooms that are such a
+contrast to the bustle of the courts, and every corner of which is
+teeming with history.
+
+But his heart was not in the Law Courts, and already in that book-lined
+study at 17 Heriot Row, the window of which looked over the Forth to
+Fife, and the walls of which were so temptingly covered with books, his
+real life work had begun. No treat was greater, no honour more esteemed,
+than a visit to that study and a learned disquisition there on its
+owner's favourite books or methods of work.
+
+Walking up and down with the hands thrown out in gesticulations,
+semi-foreign but eminently natural--for did not the child of three do it
+while repeating hymns on that walk to Broughton!--Mr Stevenson gave his
+opinions on matters grave and gay. Possibly he even produced his
+note-books, and with a slim finger between the leaves showed us the
+practice which he considered necessary for the creation of an author and
+the making of a style, breaking off in the middle of his disquisition to
+quote some master of the art or to take from the shelves a favourite
+book and read aloud a pertinent illustration of the subject in hand.
+
+Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, Borrow's _Bible in Spain_, the Bible
+itself, Butler's _Hudibras_, George Meredith's novels, then less
+appreciated than now, were all books for a better knowledge of which
+some of us had to thank those visits to the study: on the shelves too
+were Bulwer Lytton, Sir Walter Scott, the old dramatists, ballads, and
+chapbooks, and innumerable favourites that had a place in his heart as
+well as in his bookcase.
+
+Keen and clever were the criticisms he made on them--criticisms that
+come back to one with the pathos of 'a voice that is still' when one
+reads in his _Gossip on Romance_ and _A Humble Remonstrance_ his delight
+in Boswell, his pleasure in _All Sorts and Conditions of Men_, and his
+admiration for Scott as a Prince of Romance writers, for whose style he
+had not one good word to say!
+
+He had early edited and written for amateur magazines, and when only
+sixteen he wrote a pamphlet on the Pentland Rising of 1666,[4] which is
+still in existence but a great rarity; the same subject inspired a
+romance, and another romance was composed about Hackston of Rathillet,
+that sombre and impressive witness of the murder of Archbishop Sharp,
+whose conscientious refusal either to take part for or against the
+victim had from childhood appealed to Mr Stevenson as pathetic and
+picturesque. He also wrote in those days a poetical play, some dramatic
+dialogues, and a pamphlet called _An Appeal to the Church of Scotland_,
+in which his father was keenly interested. The style in his early
+letters and notes of travel was excellent, but he destroyed most of his
+writings at that time as he worked for practice rather than for
+publication. He contributed frequently about 1871 to the _University
+Magazine_, in which, as he kindly lent it to us, some of us had the
+pleasure of reading _An Old Gardener_ and _A Pastoral_, two papers of
+much promise, very full of outdoor life, the caller air of the Pentland
+hills and the scent of the old-fashioned flowers in the Swanston garden.
+
+Edinburgh, as a picturesque, historic city, he loved with a life's
+devotion; Edinburgh, as a frivolous social centre, he despised; so some
+of the strictures he made on it in _Picturesque Edinburgh_, published
+in 1879, and beautifully illustrated by Mr Sam Bough and Mr Lockhart,
+gave dire offence at the time to the denizens of 'Auld Reekie,' and are
+in some quarters hardly pardoned even now when death and fame have made
+Scotland's capital value her gifted son at his true worth.
+
+In 1873 Mr Stevenson made the acquaintance of Mr Sydney Colvin and a
+life-long friendship ensued. The older man was of great use in many ways
+to the younger, whose genius he early discovered, and whose leaning to
+literature he encouraged. In the interesting preface to _The Vailima
+Letters_ Mr Colvin tells of his help in that time of trial, and that he
+used his influence to persuade the parents that Louis had found his real
+vocation in literature, and ought to follow it. No doubt when the large
+and full _Life_ of Mr Stevenson, which Mr Colvin is preparing, appears,
+he will have much of interest to tell of that turning-point in the young
+man's life. He was of service also in introducing his friend to editors,
+and Mr Stevenson's first serious appearance in literature was an essay
+on _Roads_ sent by Mr Colvin to Mr Hamerton, the editor of _The
+Portfolio_, in 1873. It appeared shortly, and was followed by more work
+there and elsewhere; _Cornhill_, _Longmans_, and _Macmillan_ having all
+before long printed papers by the new writer. In Macmillan the paper
+_Ordered South_ appeared in April 1874, and had a pathetic interest as
+it was an account of the first of its author's many pilgrimages in
+search of health, which, after he grew to manhood, were to make up so
+much of his life's experience.
+
+In _Fraser's_, _Scribner's_, _The New Amphion_, _The Magazine of Art_,
+his early work also found acceptance, and he occasionally contributed to
+_The Contemporary Review_ and _The English Illustrated_, a list of
+well-known magazines in the home country which makes the more remarkable
+the refusal of the American papers to use his contributions largely,
+during his stay in San Francisco and Monterey.
+
+Of that charming dreamy sketch of those days, _Will o' the Mill_, which
+appeared in _Cornhill_, Mr Hamerton wrote in the highest terms of
+praise. Most of these early essays, sketches, and tales have been
+republished, and in the beautiful _Edinburgh Edition_ of his works,
+presently being seen through the press by Mr Colvin and Mr Baxter, and
+all but completed, his many admirers will be able to read all that came
+from his busy and graceful pen.
+
+In 1878 Mr Stevenson's first book, _An Inland Voyage_, was published by
+Messrs Chatto & Windus. It is a bright, fresh account of a trip in
+canoes, 'The Arethusa' and 'The Cigarette,' made by Mr Stevenson and his
+friend the late Sir Walter G. Simpson up the Oise and the Sambre. The
+travellers had unique opportunities of observing people and scenery, and
+of these the writer made the most, consequently the book is full of
+pretty pictures of scenery and quaint touches of human life which make
+it charming reading.
+
+'There is nothing,' he says, 'so quiet and so much alive as a woodland.
+And surely of all smells in the world the smell of many trees is
+sweetest and most satisfying.'
+
+These are the reflections of a man to whom the teeming silence of the
+woods was very dear, and who, in _Prince Otto_, afterwards wrote a prose
+poem on the mystery of the woods which Thoreau himself could not have
+excelled.
+
+'If we were charged so much a head for sunsets, or if God sent round a
+drum before the hawthorns came into flower, what a work we should make
+about their beauty. But these things, like good companions, stupid
+people early cease to observe;' a state of affairs fortunately
+incomprehensible to Mr Stevenson, who had not only a keen perception of
+the beauty of the world but 'that inward eye which is the bliss of
+solitude' that enabled him to recall and reproduce from memory these
+pleasures of the past.
+
+The volume which ends with the statement that 'The most beautiful
+adventures are not those we go to seek,' is from its first page to its
+last brightly readable and full of pleasant and graceful thoughts and
+fancies. Its style is more mannered and less excellent than that of his
+later work, but it already appealed to that cultured public who welcomed
+the appearance of a new writer likely to make his mark as a 'maker' of
+English style.
+
+In 1895 _An Inland Voyage_ had run into its seventh edition; it was
+followed by the even more popular _Travels in the Cevennes with a
+Donkey_, which the same publishers sent out in 1879, and which in 1895
+had reached a ninth edition.
+
+On this occasion Mr Stevenson travelled alone. He had been living for a
+time in the little town of Le Monastier, fifteen miles from Le Puy, and
+here, in the late autumn, he bought an ass which he called 'Modestine,'
+and with it, to the great interest of his simple neighbours, started on
+a tour in the Cevennes. The pair set forth speeded on their way by many
+good wishes and, in spite of a slow pace and not a few misfortunes with
+the baggage and the pack-saddle, the tour was most successful. As to
+Modestine's pace her master describes it as being 'as much slower than a
+walk as a walk is slower than a run'!
+
+The experiences of the traveller in the crisp, bright autumn weather and
+the perfect scenery of the Cevennes were thoroughly enjoyable. The
+simple peasantry and the homely innkeepers proved more friendly and
+agreeable than those along the route of the canoeists had done. In the
+monastery of 'Our Lady of the Snows' he had a kindly welcome from the
+Trappist monks, who seemed to have found it possible to break their
+stern rule of silence in their eagerness to convert him to Roman
+Catholicism. Among themselves this rule of silence and the poorest diet
+is rigidly enforced, and as the traveller left their hospitable doors he
+'blessed God that he was free to wander, free to hope, and free to
+love.'
+
+In the country of the Camisards--that little sect of persecuted
+religionists whose fierce brief struggle against the tyranny of the
+Church of Rome he so graphically describes--the descendant of Scotch
+Covenanters found himself at home, and at 'Pont de Montvert' his heart
+beat in a certain stern sympathy with the persecuted remnant, who here
+slew Du Chayla, and with that strange weird prophet Spirit Seguir, who,
+after the deed was done, and he was about to suffer death for it at the
+stake, said: 'My soul is like a garden full of shelter and fountains.'
+
+The rising took place on 24th July 1702, and Mr Stevenson says of it:
+
+''Tis a wild night's work with its accompaniment of psalms; and it seems
+as if a psalm must always have a sound of threatening in that town upon
+the Tarn.'
+
+There is a delightful description of a night among the firs in which the
+very spirit of nature breathes through his words, and his reason for
+travelling as he does is happy and convincing.
+
+'I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move, to feel the
+needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off the feather
+bed of civilisation and find the globe granite under foot and stern with
+cutting flints. Alas! as we get up in life and are more pre-occupied
+with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing to be worked for.'
+
+Many people have all through life a closer acquaintance with 'the globe
+granite under foot' than with 'the feather bed of civilisation,' and
+daily bread even more than a holiday is a thing to be worked for. But Mr
+Stevenson's lines had hitherto fallen in very pleasant places, and he
+had not as yet entered as seriously as he had to do later into the
+bitter battle of life.
+
+After twelve days together he sold Modestine at St Jean du Gard and made
+his return journey by diligence. This book, like the first, was widely
+read and heartily appreciated as soon as it appeared.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[4] This is to be found reprinted in the Edinburgh Edition, in
+which are also published for the first time the _Amateur Emigrant_ in
+full, a fragmentary romance, _The Great North Road_, and other papers
+and letters, &c., not hitherto known to the public.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+WANDERINGS IN SEARCH OF HEALTH
+
+
+     'Know how sublime a thing it is
+     To suffer and be strong.'--LONGFELLOW.
+
+
+Mr Stevenson's health, although always a cause of more or less anxiety,
+was from time to time somewhat better; else he could hardly have learned
+the practical work of a brass foundry, superintended the building of
+light towers and harbours, and taken such very active holidays as _An
+Inland Voyage_, and the tour _Through the Cevennes with a Donkey_.
+Nevertheless the delicacy was there, and it not only increased in 1873
+but culminated in the autumn of that year in the first of those serious
+attacks of illness which afterwards frequently caused himself so much
+suffering and his friends such keen distress all through the life that,
+in spite of them, he lived so bravely.
+
+In the October of 1873 the doctors took so grave a view of his
+indisposition that they ordered him south for the winter, and on the 5th
+of November he started on the first of those pilgrimages in search of
+health of which he says, somewhat sadly, in writing of his grandfather,
+in his paper on _The Old Manse_:
+
+'He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight; I have sought it
+in both hemispheres, but whereas he found it and kept it, I am still on
+the quest.'
+
+The anxiety and distress of his parents during that winter were
+naturally intense, and there is something tragic in the dates so
+carefully preserved:
+
+'Lou started on 5th November 1873.'
+
+'He returned to Heriot Row on 26th April 1874.'
+
+_Ordered South_ appeared in _Macmillan_ for that same April, and in its
+very beauty there is a most painful pathos. The polish of its style, its
+exquisitely chosen words, give to it something of the sadness of the
+brilliant autumn tints on a wood, the red gold and the glory of decay.
+It is a brave paper and it is an intensely sad one, the sadness in which
+goes straight to the reader's heart, while the courage takes his respect
+by storm. No wonder it calls forth universal sympathy; too many homes
+have been darkened by the dread sentence 'Ordered South,' too many
+sufferers have obeyed it in life's gay noonday, or in its sunny prime,
+and few, alas! very few, have even returned to face the long struggle
+with fate that Mr Stevenson fought so heroically! This was the first,
+for him, of many journeys 'South'; for although the winter in the
+Riviera sent him back somewhat stronger, the inherent delicacy was still
+there, and time after time, in the twenty years and eleven months that
+he lived after the November morning when he set out on that melancholy
+journey, the recurrence of the graver symptoms of his malady obliged him
+to seek sunnier skies and warmer climates.
+
+Scotland which he loved, the grey skies, the greyer mists, the snell
+winds,--that even in his happy Samoan life his exile's heart hungered
+for to the last,--were fatal to his delicate lungs, and year by year he
+was compelled to live less and less in his old Edinburgh home.
+
+In 1880 when he brought his wife to Scotland to visit his parents his
+health was so precarious that he had to hurry abroad before the winter,
+and he and his wife and stepson went to Davos where they met and formed
+a pleasant friendship with Mr J. A. Symonds and his family. On their
+return it was hoped that the climate of the south of England might suit
+Mr Stevenson and be conveniently near London for literary business and
+literary friendships, so he, and his wife and son settled at Bournemouth
+in a house called Skerryvore, after the famous lighthouse so dear to all
+the Stevensons. Here too, alas! his enemy found him out; and chronic,
+indifferent health, with not infrequent attacks of lung disease in its
+more serious forms, finally obliged him about 1887 to take another
+journey to America in the hope that it might do him good.
+
+Through all his life the shadow of death was never quite out of sight
+for him or for those who loved him; the skeleton hand was continually
+beckoning to him. When we think what that means, in a man's life, we
+realise with amazement his charming cheerfulness, his wonderful courage,
+and the magnitude of his work, the exactitude of his methods, the
+carefulness of his research, appeal to us as something positively heroic
+in one so handicapped by adverse fate.
+
+When many men in despair would have given in he fought on; and the sum
+of his work, the length of his years--comparatively short as these
+were--witness to the truth that _will_ can do many things. He willed to
+fight, he willed to live, he scorned to drop by the wayside, or to die
+one day before the battle was hopeless, and he fought his fight with a
+smiling face and a gay courage that was as fine a thing in its way as an
+act which has won a Victoria Cross; nay, finer, perhaps, for the
+struggle was not of minutes, or of hours, but of a lifetime, a stern
+prolonged tussle with death, in which he was never selfish, never
+peevish, always thoughtful of others, invariably merry and bright, with
+a wonderful sparkling whimsical mirth that had in it no touch of
+bitterness or of cynicism. Even the last years of life, when the need to
+work hard for an income that would sufficiently maintain his household,
+made brain work, under conditions of physical weakness, often peculiarly
+trying, were largely full of the same marvellous pluck and illumined by
+the same sunny temperament.
+
+In the years between 1873 and 1879, in the summer of which he went to
+San Francisco, he had sought health in many places with a varying degree
+of success. He had seen much of life and, as he was an excellent
+linguist, had everywhere formed friendships with men of all
+nationalities, and was thus enabled to study at his leisure continental
+life and manners. He frequently stayed at Fontainbleau, where he had a
+Stevenson cousin studying art, and the pleasant unconventional life of
+the student settlement at Brabazon was very attractive to a man of Mr
+Stevenson's temperament. His first visit to the artist colony was paid
+in 1875, and it was often repeated.
+
+His wanderings had unfortunately brought no permanent improvement to his
+health so, for that and other reasons, it occurred to him in 1879 to go
+to San Francisco to see if the Californian climate would be of benefit
+to him. Eager as ever to study life in all its phases and from every
+point of view he took his passage in an emigrant ship--where he tells us
+he posed as a mason and played his part but indifferently well!--and at
+New York resolved to continue his journey across America by emigrant
+train.
+
+In the graphic account of his experiences, in the volume of essays
+entitled _Across the Plains_, and in _The Amateur Emigrant_, he
+describes what must have been a very trying time to a man of his refined
+upbringing and frail constitution. But he looks, here as elsewhere, at
+the bright side of people and things; and even for the Chinaman, from
+whom the other emigrants hold themselves aloof, he has a good word to
+say. He keenly observed everything from his fellow-passengers, the
+character of the newsboys on the cars, and the petty oppressions of the
+railway officials to the glories of the scenery on that marvellous
+journey of which Joaquin Miller says:--
+
+
+     'We glide through golden seas of grain,
+     We shoot, a shining comet, through
+     The mountain range, against the blue,
+     And then, below the walls of snow,
+     We blow the desert dust amain,
+     We see the orange groves below,
+     We rest beneath the oaks, and we
+     Have cleft a continent in twain.'
+
+
+After the long rush across the plains, Mr Stevenson's heart bounded with
+joy when he caught a glimpse of 'a huge pine-forested ravine, a foaming
+river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.'
+
+'You will scarce believe it,' he says, 'how my heart leaped at this. It
+was like meeting one's wife. I had come home again--home from unsightly
+deserts to the green and habitable corners of the earth.'
+
+By the afternoon they had reached Sacramento, which he writes of as 'a
+city of gardens in a plain of corn,' and before the dawn of the next day
+the train was drawn up at the Oaklands side of San Francisco Bay. The
+day broke as they crossed the ferry, and he says:
+
+'The fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was
+perfect, not a ripple, scarce a stain upon its blue expanse, everything
+was waiting breathless for the sun.
+
+'A spot of gold first lit upon the head of Talampais and then widened
+downwards on its shapely shoulder' ... and by-and-bye
+
+
+     'The tall hills Titan discovered,'
+
+
+'and the city of San Francisco and the bay of gold and corn were lit
+from end to end with summer daylight.'
+
+In _The Old Pacific Capital_ he writes delightfully of San Francisco and
+the surge of its 'toss'd and tumbled sea,' that echoes forever around
+Monterey and its woods of oaks and pines and cedars. He has much that is
+interesting to tell of the curious contrast between San Francisco,
+modern and American, and Monterey, the 'Old Pacific Capital,' so full of
+a pathetic and a half-forgotten history. He has a deep sympathy with its
+refined and impoverished Spanish gentle-folk and their unpractical ideas
+of what is honourable; and he predicts that the people who do not
+consider it etiquette to look through an important paper before signing
+it are, in spite of America's assertions that they are well able to take
+care of themselves, little likely to survive long in a world of Yankee
+sharpness and smartness.
+
+He revelled in the beautiful woods so often devastated by forest fires.
+On one occasion, he says, he came perilously near lynching, for he
+applied a match to the dry moss which clings to the bark of the trees to
+see if it were so peculiarly ignitable as to be an important factor in
+the rapid spread of a fire. In a moment flames broke out all over the
+tree, and he found to his horror that he had started a fresh fire of his
+own very difficult to put out, and exceedingly likely to arouse the
+indignation of the men who were struggling to beat out the existing
+conflagration, to the point of lynching the too officious stranger.
+
+The solemn boom of the Pacific was a constant delight to him, and he
+gloried in the ever-changing lights and shadows on the sea. If he did
+not attain to permanent good health while at San Francisco and Monterey
+he at least found there something else which made for the lasting
+happiness of his life, as it was there that he married his wife.
+
+After spending about seven years of married life at Bournemouth he
+again, in 1887, tried a visit to America. His health, however, did not
+improve, and, during the winter of 1887 and 1888, when he was at Saranac
+Lake, he speaks of himself, in _The Vailima Letters_, as having been--in
+the graphic Scots words--'far through'; and the idea occurred to him of
+chartering a yacht and going for a voyage in the South Seas. His mother
+on this occasion accompanied the family party, and between 1888 and
+1890 they sailed about among the lovely islands of the South Sea,
+visiting Honolulu, and finally touching at Apia in Samoa, where they
+promptly fell in love with the beauty of the scenery and the charm of
+the climate.
+
+On this voyage, as always, Mr Stevenson made friends wherever he went,
+and had much pleasant intercourse with wandering Europeans, missionaries
+and natives.
+
+On her return to Edinburgh, after this cruise with him, his mother used
+to give most entertaining accounts of the feasts given in their honour
+by the native kings and chiefs, and of the quaint gifts bestowed on
+them. At an afternoon tea-party at 17 Heriot Row, shortly before the
+home there was finally broken up, she put on for our benefit the
+wreath--still wonderfully green--that had been given to her to wear at
+one of those island festivities. She had promised the sable majesty who
+gave it to her to be photographed with it on, and to send him one of the
+copies. One of these photographs is beside me now, and is an excellent
+likeness. Close to it is the graceful one of her son, taken at
+Bournemouth, wearing his hair long, and one of the velvet coats that he
+loved, and it is a most curious contrast to the sturdy Scotsman, his
+father, who looks out at it from his frame, in conventional broadcloth
+and with the earnest gravity so characteristic of his face in repose.
+
+Innumerable photographs, pictures, and busts, were taken of Robert Louis
+Stevenson, but not one of them has ever been a very real or a very
+satisfying likeness. In recent years one rarely sees an Academy
+Exhibition without one or more representations of the mobile face, the
+expression of which has, alas! eluded the grasp of even the best of
+artists.
+
+The Stevenson party had been so charmed with Samoa, that, as the climate
+suited Louis admirably, they resolved to give up the Bournemouth home,
+buy some ground in Samoa, and finally settle there. So sometime about
+1890 Vailima was bought, and building and reclaiming operations were
+begun, and, save for occasional visits to Sydney or Honolulu, Mr
+Stevenson and his household gave up personal communication with the busy
+and civilised world, and happily settled themselves in a peaceful life
+among the palms and the sunshine of the tropics and the friendly Samoan
+natives, who grew to be so deeply attached to them, and so proud of
+'Tusitala.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+HIS MARRIAGE AND FRIENDSHIPS
+
+
+      ... 'What we seek is but our other self
+     Other and higher, neither wholly like
+     Nor wholly different, the half life the gods
+     Retained when half was given--one the man
+     And one the woman.'...--_Epic of Hades_.
+                                          L. MORRIS.
+
+
+     'Old friends are best, old coats that fit.'
+                                --ROBERT RICHARDSON.
+
+
+It was naturally to be supposed that a man of Mr Stevenson's
+temperament, before whose eyes from his earliest childhood there had
+been present a woman good enough to give him the very highest ideal of
+womanhood, would not easily or lightly give his heart away. He knew that
+he longed for the best, and to nothing less than the best could he give
+his soul's worship. That he did not find his ideal in the beaten track
+of everyday social life, or among the gay and agreeable girls whom he
+met in his young manhood, is not surprising.
+
+The element of romance, as well as the longing for what was noblest in
+womanhood, was in him; and romance for him was not embodied in a pretty
+young woman in a ball gown. Possibly he considered that the amusing
+advice as to matrimony which he gives in _Virginibus Puerisque_, was as
+applicable to a man as to a woman, and that 'the bright' girl of Society
+was as apt to be a wearisome and an exacting helpmate as her brother,
+'the bright boy of fiction,' against whom as a husband his essay warns
+the woman in search of marriage to whom he recommends, as a more
+comfortable partner, the man old enough to have loved before, and to
+have undergone something of an apprenticeship in devotion. Very
+pertinent also is his advice to men in the same essay, that kindred
+tastes are more likely to ensure lasting happiness than a fair face or
+an acceptable dowry.
+
+Beneath the easy brightness of thought and style that make the essay so
+amusing and so readable, one sees that its writer knows his world well,
+and has given graver thought to matters matrimonial than at a first
+reading one is inclined to believe.
+
+Holding firmly the faith that 'all things come to him who knows how to
+wait,' Mr Stevenson was in no hurry to realise his ideal, and it was not
+until he was between twenty-seven and thirty that he met the woman whom
+he chose for his wife. That there was an element of romance in their
+acquaintance altogether removed from everyday love stories made it all
+the more fitting an ending to that watchful waiting for what fate had to
+give him.
+
+When Mr Stevenson arrived in San Francisco in 1879, there was living
+with her sister, at Monterey, Mrs Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne of
+Indiana. Mrs Osbourne had been married when very young, and her domestic
+experience was so unhappy that she had to obtain a divorce from her
+husband. She had, with her son and daughter, lived for some time in
+that student colony at Fontainbleau which Mr Stevenson knew and loved so
+well, and in after years they must have had in common many pleasant
+memories of people and places dear to both, so that his ideal of
+matrimony described in _Virginibus Puerisque_ was realised, and he and
+his wife had 'many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor
+custom stale.'
+
+At a party at San Francisco Mr Stevenson much admired Mrs Osbourne and
+her daughter Belle, who married a Mr Strong, and who afterwards, in the
+Vailima days, became her step-father's secretary. The young girl he
+found very fresh and sweet with the gay brightness of youth, but of her
+mother his impression was much deeper, and he always spoke and wrote of
+her as the most beautiful and the most charming woman whom he had ever
+seen. Although she was several years his senior she was then in the very
+prime of a womanly beauty which, to judge from the photographs taken at
+Vailima more than ten years later, was only at its ripest when other
+women are beginning to think of growing old. No one who had even once
+looked into her dark eyes could fail to endorse Mr Stevenson's verdict,
+to realise her charm of person, or doubt for a moment the loveliness of
+nature and the nobility of soul to which these strange deep eyes were
+the index. She was indeed charming, and it was no wonder that such a
+nature as Mr Stevenson's found in her that 'other half of the old
+Platonic tradition, the fortunate finding of which can alone make a
+marriage perfect.
+
+The romantic and the unusual in the story comes in when, at the request
+of his doctor, Mrs Osbourne gave willingly of her kindness and her
+skill in nursing to the young man who was lying at point of death alone
+in a far land. The child of the people with whom he was boarding had
+been very ill, and when other folk left the house of sickness, Mr
+Stevenson, who had liked his little playfellow, remained to help the
+parents with the nursing, and wore himself out in their service as only
+a man of his rare human sympathy and tenderness of heart would have
+done. The child recovered, and long years afterwards when the monument
+to his memory was erected at San Francisco, the mother laid a wreath at
+its base in remembrance of that unforgotten kindness. Unfortunately,
+already far from well and suffering much from the effects of the journey
+by emigrant ship and train and the stern experience of 'roughing it'
+which that had entailed, Mr Stevenson was quite unfit for the fatigue of
+nursing and he became so ill that the doctor despaired of his life. This
+doctor, who then and afterwards proved a very real friend, was greatly
+distressed about his patient, especially as the danger of his illness
+was greatly increased by the lack of that skilled nursing which was
+there very difficult to obtain. In such a case the physician could do
+much, but a good nurse could do far more, so the doctor, in his anxiety,
+recollected that Mrs Osbourne was, like himself, interested in the
+talented young Scotsman, and was also possessed of a rare and womanly
+gift of nursing, and he begged her to do what she could for his patient.
+She responded to his appeal, and with her sister showed the invalid a
+kindness so great that it did more to help his recovery than the best of
+drugs could have done. He was restored to a certain measure of health,
+and it may thus be said that he owed his life to his future wife, but
+he owed her much more for her unselfish devotion in his time of weakness
+and loneliness, as a stranger in a strange land, glorified to him all
+womanhood in her person, and the man who knew what it was to have an
+ideal mother was so peculiarly fortunate as to find an ideal wife also.
+Two such natures as theirs were inevitably attracted to each other, and
+it is not surprising that their friendship deepened into love, or that
+in later years he says of her:
+
+
+     'Teacher, tender comrade, wife,
+     A fellow-farer true through life,
+     Heart-whole and soul-free,
+     The august Father
+         Gave to me.'
+
+
+At San Francisco, on the 19th of May 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson and
+Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne were married, and there began for them that
+perfect life together which anxiety and illness could not cloud, and
+which found its earthly termination when in that awful and sudden moment
+in December 1894 Mr Stevenson entered into 'the Rest Eternal.'
+
+Belle Osbourne became Mrs Strong, and by-and-bye she and her little boy
+Austin joined the Stevensons in their home life. 'Sam,' as Mr Lloyd
+Osbourne was called in those days, accompanied them to England when they
+made their home at Bournemouth. He was a bright, eager boy when he used
+to appear in Edinburgh, and one who was very welcome to the elder
+Stevensons at Heriot Row. By-and-bye he went to the Edinburgh University
+and there he was full of life and interest, keen on pleasures, keen on
+friendships, interested in classes, and even then there was something
+of the same earnestness, the same humour and brightness in him that
+characterised his stepfather and which made him, by-and-bye, with no
+small measure of the same gifts, his collaborator and friend. A
+friendship that was begun in very early days when the two told each
+other stories and issued romances from a toy printing-press, and when
+the junior received that delightful dedication of _Treasure Island_ in
+which he is described as 'a young American gentleman' to whose taste the
+tale appeals.
+
+Shortly after their marriage Mr and Mrs R. L. Stevenson had had the
+quaint experience of housekeeping so charmingly described in _Silvarado
+Squatters_, but their first real home was at Skerryvore, and Bournemouth
+was the headquarters of the household until the necessities of Mr
+Stevenson's health again made them wanderers; and that move in 1887
+finally ended in the purchase of Vailima, and the pitching of their camp
+in far Samoa.
+
+The curtest mention of their Bournemouth life would be incomplete
+without some notice of the many friends who found it so easy to reach
+from London and so pleasant to visit, and who, themselves well known in
+the literary world, so greatly appreciated the genius of Mr Stevenson.
+Among old Edinburgh friends of long standing were his many Balfour and
+Stevenson cousins and his old comrades of early days, and among the
+latter Mr Charles Baxter and the late Sir Walter G. Simpson held a
+principal place in his regard. Mr Sydney Colvin he had first met in
+1873, Mr Henley he first knew in Edinburgh about the end of 1874, and Mr
+Edmund Gosse was another much valued friend of long standing. Mr Colvin
+was to the last one of the friends highest in his regard, and to him
+were written _The Vailima Letters_.
+
+His wonderful attire, at the Savile Club and elsewhere in orthodox
+London, at first astonished and somewhat repelled literary men
+accustomed to a more conventional garb than the velvet coats, the long
+loose hair, and the marvellous ties Mr Stevenson delighted in; but very
+soon they found out the charm of the personality that lay behind a
+certain eccentricity of appearance, and Mr Leslie Stephen, Mr James
+Payn, Dr Appleton, Professor Clifford, Mr Cosmo Monkhouse, and Mr George
+Meredith, whom he met in 1878 and whose work he so much admired, were
+numbered among his life-long friends. Mr Henley's description of him in
+these days is better than any picture:
+
+
+     'Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably,
+     Neat-footed, weak-fingered, in his face,--
+     Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race,
+     Bold-lipped, rich tinted, mutable as the sea,
+     The brown eyes radiant with vivacity,--
+     There shines a brilliant and romantic grace,
+     A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace
+     Of passion, impudence, and energy.'
+
+
+Another friend of those days, Mr Andrew Lang, also lets his friendship
+run into rhyme, and sends across the seas to the author of _The Master
+of Ballantrae_ a quaint greeting in the best of Southland Doric:
+
+
+     'Whan Suthern winds gar spindrift flee
+     Abune the clachan, faddumes hie,
+     Whan for the cluds I canna see
+           The bonny lift,
+     I'd fain indite an odd to thee
+           Had I the gift!...
+
+     ... 'O Louis, you that writes in Scots,
+     Ye're far awa' frae stirks and stots,
+     Wi' drookit herdies, tails in knots,
+           An unco way!
+     My mirth's like thorns aneth the pots
+           In Ballantrae!'
+
+
+To this Mr Stevenson promptly replied in equally fine Doric, and with a
+playful allusion to the early 'grizzelled' hair which gives to Mr Andrew
+Lang an appearance venerable beyond his years.
+
+Mr Crockett, in the delightful dedication to _The Stickit Minister_,
+celebrates his friendship with Mr Stevenson; and among the younger
+school of writers, for whose work he had so generous an appreciation, he
+had many friends as well as admirers. Mr Barrie, Mr Rudyard Kipling, Mr
+Le Galliene, and a host of others loved him as a friend, as well as
+looked up to him as a literary leader. To many of them he wrote charming
+letters, although in several cases no actual meeting had ever taken
+place. It was a keen disappointment to both men that circumstances
+prevented Mr Rudyard Kipling from paying a visit to Samoa.
+
+In his island home he was not forgetful of his 'own romantic town,' nor
+of the interests of one, at least, of its publishing firms, whose
+travellers and agents he introduced to new fields of usefulness in India
+and the South Seas. One of his own favourite books was _Coral Island_,
+by Mr R. M. Ballantyne, published by the Messrs Nelson.
+
+But Stevenson, whose charm of personality was even greater than his
+fame, had other friends, whose friendship is not measured by the
+intellect but by the heart. Little children and young folk everywhere
+loved the man whose _Child's Garden of Verses_ shows such a marvellous
+insight into the hearts of children.
+
+The ass Modestine, the Samoan horse Jack, well knew that the indignant
+flow of language meant nothing, and that their master's heart was
+altogether in the right place, although, when they were too provoking,
+his words might be very unparliamentary.
+
+For dogs he had as great an attraction as they had for him, and the
+master of Coolin the wise, and Woggs, or Bogue, the gallant, discourses
+as few men could do about canine thoughts and feelings in his essay _The
+Character of Dogs_.
+
+No fear of his being among the foolish people who remark that 'they like
+dogs in their proper place,' and, as he stingingly adds, say, '"Poo'
+fellow! Poo' fellow!" and are themselves far poorer!' He knew, because
+he had taken the trouble to study him, that 'to the dog of gentlemanly
+feelings, theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+HIS ESSAYS AND POEMS
+
+
+     'Golden thoughts that ever will resound,
+     And be re-echoed to the utmost parts of land and sea.'
+                                              --R. S. MUTCH.
+
+
+Mr Stevenson inherited both from the Stevenson and Balfour families some
+measure of literary talent. His father and his grandfather had written
+with considerable acceptance on the subject of their profession. His
+father also wrote on religious matters, and at least one of these
+pamphlets was believed to be of lasting value by competent judges. On
+scientific and engineering subjects his work was thought so excellent,
+and was so well known, that R. L. Stevenson tells, with some amusement,
+that he was surprised to find in the New World it was his father and not
+himself who was considered the important author. _The Life of Robert
+Stevenson_, of Bell Rock fame, written by David Stevenson, is a very
+interesting book.
+
+Among his mother's relatives the gift of fluent and graceful expression
+is also widely diffused, and in common with Mrs Thomas Stevenson and her
+son, not a few of the Balfour connection have been very charming letter
+writers, in the days when letters were worth receiving, and not the
+hurried and uncharacteristic scraps which do duty for present-day
+correspondence.
+
+He himself considered that he inherited his literary talent largely
+from his father's family, but there is interesting proof that even in
+his grandfather's day it was inherent also in his Balfour ancestors. The
+minister of Colinton wrote verses in his youth, and a sonnet preserved
+by his surviving son and daughter is interesting as a proof of his
+earnest mind and his literary skill. It was written on the fly-leaf of a
+folio copy of _Pearson on the Creed_, presented to him by his friend,
+the Reverend Patrick Macfarlane, who became, about 1832, minister of the
+West Church at Greenock, and is dated 18th May 1801.
+
+
+     'My friend, my Patrick, let me boast the name,
+     For my breast glows with no inferior flame,
+     This gift was thine, expressive of thy love,
+     Which spurning earthborn joys for those above
+     Would teach my friend in sacred lore to grow,
+     And feel the truths impressive as they flow.
+     While with our faith our kindred bosoms glow,
+     And love to God directs our life below,
+     One view of things now seen, and things to come,
+     But pilgrims here, a future state our home,
+     Nor time, nor death, our friendship shall impair,
+     Begun below, but rendered perfect there.'
+
+
+More than one of the old gentleman's family inherited his talent for
+graceful and forcible writing. His son, Dr George W. Balfour, has
+written two well-known medical books which have brought to him a large
+measure of fame. These are _Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Heart_,
+and the even more popular _The Senile Heart_. About the latter he tells
+an excellent story. A well-known literary critic, seeing the book lying
+on the table, thought it a work of fiction with an admirable and unique
+title, carried it off for review, and found to his disgust it was a
+learned medical treatise. Dr John Balfour, an elder son of the manse,
+wrote papers in _The Indian Annals_ and _The Edinburgh Medical Journal_,
+which were very highly esteemed.
+
+In the younger generation, a cousin of Mr R. L. Stevenson, Mrs Beckwith
+Sitwell, has written much and pleasantly, principally for young people.
+Another cousin, Mrs Marie Clothilde Balfour, whose father was a son of
+the Colinton manse, who died young, and who is married to her cousin--a
+son of Dr G. W. Balfour, who can also, like his father, write acceptably
+on medical and other subjects--has already gained for herself no
+inconsiderable repute as a novelist, her third book, _The Fall of the
+Sparrow_, having been considered by competent critics one of the notable
+books of last year.
+
+It is not surprising, therefore, that the bent towards literature which
+appears in both families should in Robert Louis Stevenson have been
+developed into that rare gift which men call genius. While he was still
+a careless student of twenty, his papers in _The Edinburgh University
+Magazine_ possessed a peculiar attraction, and appealed to cultured
+minds with a charm not often found in the work of so young a writer.
+
+_An Old Gardener_ and _A Pastoral_ especially had much of the depth of
+thought and the finish of style which so largely characterised Mr
+Stevenson's later work. Interesting and delightful as he is as a
+story-teller, there is in his essays a graceful fascination which makes
+them for many of his readers infinitely more satisfying than the most
+brilliant of his tales. In the essays you seem to meet the man face to
+face, to listen to his spoken thoughts, to see the grave and the gay
+reflections of his mind, to enjoy with him 'the feast of reason and the
+flow of soul' provided by the writers into whose company he takes you,
+or to return with him to his boyhood, and, in _The Old Manse_ and
+_Random Memories_ see familiar places and people touched by the light of
+genius, and made as wonderful to your own commonplace understanding as
+to the intense and high-souled boy who wandered about among them,
+hearing and seeing the everyday things of life as only the romancist and
+the poet can hear and see them.
+
+His style, too--strong and virile as it is in his tales--attains, one
+almost fancies, its full perfection in his essays. The thoughts, both
+grave and gay, are presented in a dainty dress that is peculiarly fitted
+to do them justice. There is room in this quiet writing, disturbed by no
+exigencies of plot, to give perfect scope to the grace and the leisure
+which are the great charms of Mr Stevenson's work. One can take up a
+volume of the essays or a slim book of verses at any time and dip into
+it as one would into some clear and cold mountain well, full of
+refreshment for the weary wayfarer, and, like the well, it is sure to
+give one an invigorating sense of keen enjoyment, to take one far from
+the dusty highways of life and plunge one into the depth and coolness of
+the wide silence of nature, or to fill one's mind with strong and worthy
+thoughts gleaned from the world of men and books.
+
+In his _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_, published, in one volume,
+by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1882, with a charming dedication to his
+father, Mr Stevenson gives in the preface a most interesting account of
+his own fuller point of view regarding the studies which had originally
+appeared in the _New Quarterly_, _Macmillan_, and _Cornhill_. The essays
+deal with such well-known men as Knox, Burns, Thoreau, Charles of
+Orleans, Samuel Pepys, and others, and are always fresh and agreeable
+reading. The papers on Knox and Burns have an especial interest for Mr
+Stevenson's fellow-countrymen who naturally appreciate the judgment of a
+later day genius on the character and work of the two men who have had
+so wide an influence on Scottish life and feeling.
+
+To John Knox Scotland largely owes her reformed religion, her rigid
+presbyterianism, and it is, to many people, a new and an interesting
+phase of the character of the great Reformer--who so enjoyed
+brow-beating Queen Mary--that Mr Stevenson shows, when he depicts Knox
+as the confidential friend of the religious women of his day, writing
+letters to them, comforting them in domestic trials, even shedding tears
+with them, and keeping up, through a harassed and busy life, these
+friendships which seem to have been as great a source of pleasure to the
+Reformer as to the ladies.
+
+Of Robert Burns, the peasant poet, whose songs did as much to bring back
+the sunshine into everyday Scotch life as the Reformer's homilies did to
+banish it, Mr Stevenson writes with sympathy and tenderness. For the
+work he is full of admiration; for the man, whose circumstances and
+temperament made his whole life a difficult walking in slippery places
+where the best of men could hardly have refrained from falling, he has a
+gentle understanding, a manly pity. There was much in the poet's life
+and temperament repellent to a nature like Mr Stevenson's, but there was
+far more where the human feeling of man to man and of soul to soul could
+touch with comprehension, so that in his paper, and more especially in
+his preface, we find him giving to Scotland's national bard an
+ungrudging admiration in his struggles after the right, and no petty
+condemnation when he lapsed and fell from his own higher ideals.
+
+Of Walt Whitman and Thoreau, both most interesting studies in the
+volume, he has much that is stimulating to say; and many readers, who
+may not have time or opportunity for deep personal research, will find
+his essays on _Villon_, _Victor Hugo's Romances_, _Samuel Pepys_,
+_Yoshida Torajiro_ and _Charles of Orleans_ a very pleasant means of
+obtaining a great deal of information in a very limited space.
+
+In the early essays, republished in volume form in 1881 by Messrs Chatto
+& Windus, under the title _Virginibus Puerisque_, Mr Stevenson
+discourses delightfully on many things, touching, for instance, with a
+light hand but a wise heart on matrimony and love-making, and the little
+things, so small in themselves, so large as they bulk for happiness or
+misery, that go to make peace or discord in married life. It is all done
+with a pointed pen and a smiling face; but its lightness covers wisdom,
+and it is full of sound counsel and makes wiser reading for young men
+and maidens than many books of more apparent gravity.
+
+That pathos always lay close behind his playful mockeries and was never
+far away from the man whose paper on _Ordered South_ is like the bravely
+repressed cry of all his fellow-sufferers the companion paper on _El
+Dorado_ proves convincingly. Under its graceful phrases there lies deep
+and strong sympathy for toil, for hope deferred and longed for, for the
+disappointment of attainment, for the labour that after all has so often
+to be its own reward.
+
+Between 1880 and 1885 Mr Stevenson collaborated with Mr Henley in the
+writing of four plays which were privately printed, _Deacon Brodie_ in
+1880, _Beau Austin_ in 1884, _Admiral Guinea_ in 1884, and _Robert
+Macaire_ in 1885--the whole being finally published in volume form in an
+edition limited to 250 copies, in 1896. _Beau Austin_ was acted in 1890
+at The Haymarket, and quite recently _Admiral Guinea_ has been played
+with Mr Sydney Valentine in the part of David Pew, but in spite of the
+literary distinction of the collaborators the plays have not been a
+great success on the stage.
+
+In the later papers, 'A Christmas Sermon,' 'A Letter to a Young
+Gentleman,' and 'Pulvis et Umbra,' in the volume of collected essays
+called _Across the Plains_, the note of pathos which appears now and
+then in _Virginibus Puerisque_ is even more forcibly struck. The writer
+is older, he has known more of life and of suffering, he has more than
+once looked death closely in the face, and, though his splendid courage
+is there all the time, the sadness of humanity is more apparent than in
+most of his work. The other essays in this volume are very pleasant
+reading, and _Across the Plains_ and _The Old and New Pacific Capitals_
+give most graphic descriptions of the life and scenery on the shore of
+the Pacific, and of the journey to get there.
+
+In 'Random Memories' in the same volume, he goes back to his boyhood,
+and we meet him at home beside the 'Scottish Sea,' under grey Edinburgh
+skies, larking with his fellow-boys in their autumn holidays, touring
+with his father in _The Pharos_ round the coast of Fife, and later
+inspecting harbours at Anstruther, and on the bleak shores of Caithness,
+an apprentice engineer, for whom, apart from the open air and the
+romance of a harbour or a light tower, his profession had no charms.
+
+Not the least pleasant of his volumes of _Essays_ is that called
+_Memories and Portraits_, published by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1887,
+and dedicated to his mother, whom his father's death in the May of that
+year had so recently made a widow. In it there is a most interesting
+paper entitled 'Thomas Stevenson,' in which he writes very
+appreciatively of that father who was so great a man in the profession
+which the son admired although he could not follow it. Here, too, are
+papers on 'The Manse,' that old home of his grandfather at Colinton
+which he when a child loved so well; on the old gardener at Swanston,
+who so lovingly tended the vegetables of which he remarked to his
+mistress, when told to send in something choice for the pot, that 'it
+was mair blessed to give than to receive,' but gave her of his best all
+the same, and who loved the old-fashioned flowers, and gave a place to
+
+
+     'Gardener's garters, shepherd's purse,
+     Batchelors' buttons, lady's smock,
+         And the Lady Hollyhock.'
+
+
+In this book also are 'A Pastoral,' in which we learn to know John Todd,
+that typical shepherd of the Pentlands, and his dogs; the charming paper
+on 'The Character of Dogs,' and four literary essays beginning with an
+account of his early purchases in the old book shop in Leith Walk, and
+ending in 'A Humble Remonstrance,' with a summary of his views on
+romance writing, and what it really ought to be.
+
+Somewhat of the nature too of essays or sketches is that delightful
+volume, made up of different chapters in a most ideal life, _The
+Silvarado Squatters_, published in 1883, in which Mr Stevenson gives a
+brilliant description of the very primitive existence he and his wife
+with Mr Lloyd Osbourne, then a very small boy indeed, led shortly after
+their marriage, in a disused miner's house--if one can by courtesy call
+a _house_ the three-roomed shed, into which sunlight and air poured
+through the gaping boards and the shattered windows!--on the slope of
+Mount Saint Helena, where once had been the Silvarado silver mine.
+
+Primitive in the extreme, the life must nevertheless have been
+delightful; and, given congenial companionship and the perfect climate
+of a Californian summer, one can imagine no more blissful experience
+than 'roughing it' in that sheltered canon on the mountain side with
+the ravine close below, and the most marvellous stretch of earth, and
+sea, and sky, hill and plain, spread out like an ever-changing picture
+before the eyes, while to the ears there came no sound more harsh than
+the shrill notes of the woodland birds. There came also the noise of the
+rattlesnake very often, Mr Stevenson says, but they did not realise its
+sinister significance until almost the end of their sojourn there, when
+their attention was drawn to it, and certainly no evil befell them.
+
+_Silvarado Squatters_, like _The Vailima Letters_, shows to perfection
+how simple and how busy, with the most primitive household details, the
+Stevensons often were on their wanderings, and how supremely happy
+people, whose tastes and habits suit each other, can be without the
+artificial surroundings and luxuries of society and civilisation that
+most folk consider well-nigh necessary to their salvation.
+
+One of the most beautiful descriptions of nature in all Mr Stevenson's
+books, is that of the sea mist rising from the Pacific, and seen from
+above, like a vast white billowy ocean, by the squatters on their
+mountain ledge. Bret Harte, for whom and for whose works Mr Stevenson
+had a sincere admiration, also alludes graphically to the curious scenic
+effects of the mist rising from the Pacific. Very interesting, too, are
+the papers on wine and wine-growers, and the two vineyards on the
+mountain side; and Scotch hearts, warm even to the Scotch tramp who
+looked in at the door, and to the various fellow-countrymen who arrived
+to shake hands with Mr Stevenson because he was a Scot and like
+themselves, an alien from the grey skies and the clanging church bells
+of home.
+
+
+     'From the dim sheiling on the misty island
+     Mountains divide us and a world of seas,
+     Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,'
+
+
+he quotes and adds--
+
+
+     'And Highland and Lowland all our hearts are Scotch.'[5]
+
+
+One last notice of his prose is connected with Edinburgh, and very
+probably with a church charity, for to help some such sale as churches
+patronise he wrote _The Charity Bazaar: a Dialogue_, which was given to
+me by its author at 17 Heriot Row one day very long ago, and which,
+rather frayed and yellow, is still safely pasted in my Everyday Book
+with the initials 'R. L. S.' in strong black writing at the end of it.
+
+Mr Stevenson has done so much in prose that the general reader is very
+prone to forget those four thin volumes of verse which alone would have
+done much to establish his fame as an author. The first published in
+1885 was _The Child's Garden of Verses_, and anything more dainty than
+the style and the composition of that really wonderful little book
+cannot be imagined, nor has there ever been written anything, in prose
+or in verse, more true to the thoughts and the feelings of an
+imaginative child.
+
+_Ballads_, published in 1890 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, the firm who
+have published all the essays, is a collection of very interesting
+narrative poems. The first two, 'Rahero, a Legend of Tahiti' and 'The
+Feast of Famine, Marquesan Manners,' deal with native life in the sunny
+islands of the tropics, and show, with the same graphic and powerful
+touch as his South Sea tales do, that human life, love, hatred, and
+revenge are as fierce and as terrible there as in the sterner north.
+With the north are associated the old and curious Scotch legends,
+_Ticonderoga_ and _Heather Ale_. The first gives in easily flowing lines
+a Highland slaying, the rather mean appeal of the slayer for protection
+to the dead man's brother and the honourable fashion in which the
+living Cameron elects to stand by his oath to the stranger in spite of
+the three times repeated complaint and curse of his dead brother. The
+spectre tells him that he will die at a place called Ticonderoga, but
+such a word is known to no man, and yet, when Pitt sends a Highland
+regiment, in which Captain Cameron is an officer, to the East, the
+doomed man sees his own wraith look at him from the water, and knows,
+when he hears the place is Ticonderoga, he will be the first to fall in
+battle there.
+
+The _Heather Ale_ is a Galloway legend which tells how the last Pict on
+the Galloway moors prefers to see his son drowned and to die himself
+rather than sell his honour and betray his secret to the King.
+
+_Christmas at Sea_ is a sad little tale of how, when all men are glad on
+board the labouring ship--that stormy Christmas Day--that she has at
+last cleared the dangerous headland and is safely out at sea, the lad
+who has left the old folk to run away to be a sailor can only see the
+lighted home behind the coastguard's house,
+
+
+     'The pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
+     My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair ...
+     ... And oh the wicked fool I seemed in every kind of way
+     To be here hauling frozen ropes on Blessed Christmas Day ...
+     ... They heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
+     As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea.
+     But all that I could think of in the darkness and the cold
+     Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.'
+
+
+_Underwoods_ was published by the same firm in 1887, and is most
+touchingly dedicated to all the many doctors of whose skill and kindness
+Mr Stevenson had had such frequent need. The verses in it were written
+at different times and in different places, and while many of them are
+full of the early freshness of youth some of them give as pleasantly and
+quaintly the riper wisdom of manhood.
+
+Several of the verses are written to friends or relatives, some very
+charming lines are to his father.
+
+Eight lines called 'The Requiem' seem the very perfection of his own
+idea of a last resting-place, and are almost prophetic of that lone
+hill-top where he lies.
+
+Book II. of _Underwoods_ is 'In Scots,' very forcible and graphic Scots
+too, but as to the dialect Mr Stevenson himself disarms criticism. He
+find his words, he says, in all localities; he spells them, he allows,
+sometimes with a compromise.
+
+'I have stuck for the most part to the proper spelling,' he writes; and
+again--
+
+'To some the situation is exhilarating; as for me I give one bubbling
+cry and sink. The compromise at which I have arrived is indefensible,
+and I have no thought of trying to defend it.'
+
+And indeed he has no need of it; it is good, forcible 'Scots' after all,
+and the thoughts he clothes in it are as 'hame-ower' and as pithy as the
+words.
+
+_The Maker to Posterity_, _Ille Terrarum, A Blast_, _A Counterblast_,
+and _The Counterblast Ironical_, are all excellent; and one can point to
+no prettier picture of a Scottish Sunday than _A Lowden Sabbath Morn_,
+which has recently been published alone in book form very nicely
+illustrated, while he pokes some, not undeserved, fun at our Scottish
+good opinion of ourselves and our religious privileges in _Embro, her
+Kirk_, and _The Scotsman's Return from Abroad_. Surely nowhere is there
+Scots more musical or lines more true to the sad experience which life
+brings to us all than these with which the book ends:
+
+
+     'It's an owercome sooth for age and youth,
+       And it brooks wi' nae denial,
+     That the dearest friends are the auldest friends
+       And the young are just on trial.
+
+     'There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld,
+       And it's him that has bereft me,
+     For the surest friends are the auldest friends
+       And the maist o' mine hae left me.'...
+
+
+The last volume of verses, _Songs of Travel_, has a pathos all its own,
+for, like _St Ives_ and _Weir of Hermiston_, the author never saw it in
+print. The verses were sent home shortly before his death, and in the
+note appended to them Mr Sydney Colvin says they were to be finally
+printed as Book III. of _Underwoods_, but meantime were given to the
+world in their present form in 1896.
+
+They were written at different periods, and they show their author in
+varying moods; but they incline rather to the sadder spirit of the last
+two years of his life, and have left something if not of the courage for
+the fight, at least of the gaiety of living behind them. Two of them are
+written to his wife, many of them to friends; some of them have the lilt
+and the brightness of songs, others, like _If this were Faith_ and _The
+Woodman_, are filled with the gravity of life and the bitterness of the
+whole world's struggle for existence.
+
+In _The Vagabond_ he is still in love with the open air life and the
+freedom of the tramp. In his exile he longs to rest at last beside those
+he loves; he feels the weariness of life, he writes--
+
+
+     'I have trod the upward and the downward slope;
+     I have endured and done in days before;
+     I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope;
+     And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.'
+
+
+After that one feels no surprise that he is waiting for the final
+summons, and one has only a sense of the eternal fitness of things when
+in the last words of the book he says--
+
+
+     'I hear the signal, Lord,--I understand
+     The night at Thy command
+     Comes. I will eat and sleep, and will not question more.'
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[5] Mr Stevenson was very fond of this quotation, which appeals
+so truly to Caledonia's sons and daughters. He found it in an old volume
+of _Good Words_, and never knew its source. Like many other people he
+quoted it incorrectly. According to information kindly supplied by Mr W.
+Keith Leask, the lines, which have an interesting history, stand thus in
+the original--
+
+
+     'From the lone sheiling on the misty island
+       Mountains divide us and a waste of seas,
+     Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
+       And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.'
+
+
+In _Tait's Magazine_ for 1849 it is given as 'Canadian Boat Song, from
+the Gaelic.' The author of the English version was Burns' 'Sodger Hugh,'
+the 12th Earl of Eglinton, who was M.P. for Ayrshire from 1784 to 1789,
+and was the great-grandfather of the present Earl. When in Canada the
+author is said to have heard a song of lament sung by evicted Hebridean
+crofters in Manitoba, which gave him the idea for his verses--the first
+four lines, and chorus, of which are--
+
+
+           'Listen to me as when we heard our father
+             Sing long ago the song of other shores;
+           Listen to me, and then in chorus gather
+             All your deep voices as ye pull your oars.
+     _Chorus_--Fair the broad meads, these hoary woods are grand,
+             But we are exiles from our fathers' land.'
+
+
+Professor Mackinnon believes that the Gaelic version, known in the
+Highlands to this day, is founded upon the Earl of Eglinton's lines, and
+is not, as might be supposed, an earlier form of the poem which is known
+and loved by Scotch folk all the world over.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+HIS STORIES
+
+
+     '... Thy genius mingles strength with grace,
+     ... 'Neath thy spell the world grows fair;
+     Our hearts revive, our inmost souls are stirred,
+     And all our English race awaits thy latest word.'
+                              --Sir L. MORRIS'
+                  Birthday Ode to the late Lord Tennyson.
+
+
+Beginning his literary career as a writer of such quaint books of travel
+as _An Inland Voyage_ and _Through the Cevennes with a Donkey_, such
+charming essays as _Roads_, _Ordered South_, _El Dorado_, and many
+others, Mr Stevenson was not long in entering the arena as a
+story-teller. His first printed stories were _A Lodging for the Night_,
+which appeared in _Temple Bar_ in October 1877; _The Sire de Maletroit's
+Door_, in the same magazine in January 1878; and _Will o' the Mill_, in
+_Cornhill_, also in January 1878.
+
+In _Cornhill_, in 1876 had appeared the series of essays republished as
+_Virginibus Puerisque_, and in 1877 and 1878 those afterwards collected
+under the title _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_. There also began,
+now and then, to be short stories from his pen in _Cornhill_,
+_Macmillan_, _Longmans_, Mr H. Norman's _Christmas Annual_, _The Court
+and Society Review,_ and other magazines. These, as they added
+originality and a certain weirdness of plot to his already recognised
+beauty of style, still further attracted that cultured public which had
+at once accepted his earlier work as that of a master of English. As
+already stated, it was _Will o' the Mill_, a charmingly written story of
+still life, with a quiet philosophy all its own, that Mr Hamerton had
+pronounced a masterpiece of style. _Markheim_ was a graphic, but very
+unpleasant, story of a murder; _Olalla_, a horrible, but powerfully
+written, sketch of hereditary insanity, with a beautiful setting of
+Italian scenery to relieve the gloomy picture.
+
+_Thrawn Janet_ which, with most of the tales in _The Merry Men_, was
+written at Pitlochry, appeared in _Cornhill_ in 1880. Mr Stevenson
+himself considered it one of his best stories, and thought it an
+excellent piece of dialect writing. It is weird and impressive in the
+extreme, and no one who has read it is likely to forget the minister of
+Balweary in the vale of Dull, and his terrible experiences in the matter
+of a housekeeper; the 'het lowin' wind' and the coppery sky of that day
+on which he met the black man coming down by Dull water, and knew that
+he had spoken with the enemy of souls himself; or the awful storm, in
+which Satan finally came for all that was left of Thrawn Janet. Into
+this story of a few pages are condensed a power of forcible expression
+and a weirdness of theme which have not been surpassed in any of the
+larger books.
+
+_The Merry Men_ is a story of wreck and wickedness on a desolate West
+Highland island where the rocks called 'the Merry Men,' as the tides
+boil and foam among them, make, as it were, an undercurrent of mad
+laughter that forms a fitting accompaniment to the hideous passions of
+greed and murder and the dead level of human misery that are the
+prevailing atmosphere of the tale. It is one of the best of the stories
+forming the volume, to which it gives its name, published by Messrs
+Chatto & Windus in 1887.
+
+In another collection of short tales Mr Stevenson also deals with the
+seamy side of life, and _The New Arabian Nights_ published in 1882, and
+which contains the reprint of such stories as _The Suicide Club_, _The
+Rajah's Diamond_, _The Sire de Maletroit's Door_, and _The Pavilion on
+the Links_, is quite as gruesome and by no means less interesting than
+_The Merry Men_.
+
+_The Sire de Maletroit's Door_ and _The Pavilion on the Links_, are most
+graphically written, especially the latter with its splendid description
+of the dreary sea and the wide and wind-swept stretch of drearier links
+where the curious characters play their mysterious parts. It is
+interesting to know that Mr Stevenson wrote _The Pavilion on the Links_
+while he was very ill in California. All the stories in the two volumes
+are favourites, and many readers give a preference to _The Suicide
+Club_, _The Rajah's Diamond_, or _Prince Florizel_.
+
+_Providence and the Guitar_ is also one of his best stories. _Prince
+Otto_, the first draft of which was written at Monterey, is the peculiar
+but very beautifully written story of a prince with no fancy for
+princedom and no talent for governing, who leaves his vain young wife
+and his unscrupulous prime minister in power and goes roaming among his
+subjects only to hear some far from complimentary opinions of himself.
+In the end both prince and princess learn love and wisdom and find
+happiness in spite of the revolution that drives them from their tiny
+kingdom. It is a fanciful tale, the charm of which lies less in the
+rather vague characters, who have the haziness of motive and of
+personality of the figures in some old play, than in the absolute
+perfection of style and of description that make it a book to read and
+re-read with infinite pleasure.
+
+Mr Stevenson says, in its dedicatory preface, that he meant to make of
+it a masterpiece; if he did not succeed in doing so, as a story, he
+certainly gave in it a picture of the woods so true to nature and so
+exquisite in style and in expression that it will live as among his best
+work.
+
+Good as this earlier writing was he had not yet found in it his full
+inspiration, and it hardly appealed to so wide a public as the fresh and
+delightful stories of adventure to which he finally turned his
+attention. In connection with Mr Stevenson's fiction, it is interesting
+to note that in his boyhood he greatly enjoyed the stories of a novelist
+called Smythe, who at that time contributed to the _London Journal_, and
+whose work had its influence on the boy's future tales. Smythe's novels
+were full of stirring adventures, and many lads of that day, besides the
+aspiring novelist, were much impressed by them, and can even now recall
+incidents in them read so long ago as 1868!
+
+He had applied for work to Mr Henderson, the Scotch editor of _Young
+Folks_, and to the acceptance of this application the world owes
+_Treasure Island_ and the charming stories which followed it. The editor
+of _Young Folks_, who offered to take a story from him, showed him a
+treasure-hunting tale by Mr Peace, and asked him to give him something
+on the same lines. The result was _The Sea Cook_, which appeared in the
+paper in the autumn of 1881, and was not very highly paid for. It was
+written under the nom-de-plume of Captain North to give the idea the
+author was a sailor; it was not given a very important place in the
+paper and it had no very marked success as a serial. It was, with very
+little alteration, published by Messrs Cassell & Co. in 1883, under the
+name of _Treasure Island_, and it had an instant and well-deserved
+success. It is an excellent book for boys, full of stirring adventure,
+in the old-time fashion of fifty years ago, but it is much more; it is a
+book that grown-up folk, whose taste is still fresh enough to enjoy a
+good tale of the sea, delight in as heartily as the juniors. It was
+written while the Stevenson family were staying for a time at Braemar,
+and Mr Thomas Stevenson gave his son valuable help in it from his own
+experiences at sea while on his cruises of inspection round the coasts.
+
+_The Black Arrow_ also appeared in _Young Folks_ during 1883 as by
+Captain North; it is said to have been very successful as a serial, but
+it has not been a great favourite in book form, and is one of the least
+interesting of his stories.
+
+_Kidnapped_ came out in 1886 in the same paper and was the first to be
+signed as by Robert Louis Stevenson. In its serial form it was not
+highly paid for but it had, when Messrs Cassell & Co. published it as a
+book, a large and an immediate success. It forms the first instalment of
+the delightful experiences of David Balfour, that somewhat pawky young
+Scot who, from the moment he leaves 'The Hawes Inn' at Queensferry and
+embarks on his adventures with Alan Breck and other strange worthies in
+Appin and elsewhere till we finally bid him good-bye on the last page of
+_Catriona_, never fails at odd times and places to remind one of Mr
+Stevenson himself at David's age and of what he might have been and done
+had David Balfour's fate been his in those early days of plot and
+turmoil in which his part is played.
+
+_Catriona_, which is a continuation of _Kidnapped_, at first appeared in
+_Atalanta_, and was published in book form by Messrs Cassell & Co. in
+1893. In the recent edition of 1898 both volumes are brought out as _The
+History of David Balfour_, and are beautifully illustrated. _Catriona_
+is a charming book, full of life and action, and the breezy, outdoor
+existence, in the picturing of which its author excels. The Edinburgh of
+the last half of the eighteenth century, with its quaint closes, and
+quainter manners, is admirably portrayed, and the old lady with whom
+Catriona lives, and Lord Prestongrange and his daughters, are very
+clever pictures from a bygone day. Indeed, Miss Grant is one of the best
+drawn women in all Mr Stevenson's books; she has life and reality in a
+greater degree than most of his female characters. She is true to
+feminine human nature in any age, and as she makes eyes at David Balfour
+from under her plumed hat, and flirts with him across the narrow close,
+she is very woman, and alive enough to be some later day judge's
+daughter of modern Edinburgh, coquetting with Mr Stevenson himself,
+while she playfully adjusts her becoming head-gear, and lets her long
+feathers droop to the best advantage.
+
+She and the two Kirsties in the unfinished _Weir of Hermiston_ stand out
+alone among all the heroines in Mr Stevenson's books as real breathing,
+living women. They are natural, they are possible, they have life and
+interest; all the rest are more or less lay figures put in because a
+heroine is necessary--the more's the pity evidently from the author's
+point of view!--and drawn somewhat perfunctorily by their creator, with
+but a limited knowledge of the virtues, the faults, the failings, and,
+above all, the 'little ways,' which go to make up the ordinary woman.
+
+The women are undoubtedly a weakness in the author's work. It looks as
+if he had known intimately only exceptional women,--who, possibly, had
+left behind them, before he knew them well, most of a young girl's
+faults and follies, and some of her attractions also,--and had never
+found other women worth studying deeply, so that the girls in his books
+do not read _real_ enough to interest one greatly, and it is almost a
+relief to take up _Treasure Island_, _The Wrecker_, or _The Ebb Tide_,
+in which there is very little about them. Lady Violet Greville, in a
+recent article, expresses much the same opinion. She says, 'The late
+Robert Louis Stevenson had no opinion of women writers, he said they
+were incapable of grasping the essential facts of life. He was a great
+master of style, but I doubt if he had much knowledge of feminine
+character'--a dictum in which many women will agree with her. She goes
+on to say that there is some truth in what he says of women writers,
+because women and men regard as essential quite different facts in life;
+and she explains it by saying that it is the difference of personality
+and of point of view. Certainly Mr Stevenson's point of view in regard
+to his heroines is not a satisfying one to most women.
+
+Many men have drawn excellent female characters, just as a few women
+have given us life-like heroes. These exceptions, one imagines, must
+have been to some extent better able to appreciate the other sex
+thoroughly than most writers; but it strikes one as odd that Mr
+Stevenson, who had in himself so much of gentleness and of the
+essentially feminine, should have so continually failed to give a living
+interest to his heroines. Possibly had he lived longer, and had the
+maturing of his powers, so evident in _Weir of Hermiston_, been
+accompanied by a measure of improved health, the women of his later
+books might all have been as powerful creations as the two Kirsties
+promised to be.
+
+His heroes are all that heart can desire, manly, brave, and natural; his
+villains make villainy interesting; so it may be forgiven him that
+scarcely one of his feminine characters lives in the reader's memory.
+
+One of the most widely known of his books is that curious story,
+published in 1886, called _The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_,
+the popularity of which, especially in America, was immense. It deals
+with man's dual nature, and while Dr Jekyll embodies the good side of
+it, Mr Hyde, with whom he is compelled continually to exchange bodies,
+as well as souls, is the evil side, and commits crimes so atrocious,
+that the miserable doctor is well-nigh driven to despair. It is a
+powerful subject, powerfully treated, and contains in its small compass
+more moral teaching than a hundred sermons. It has, particularly in
+America, been used by many clergymen as the foundation of their
+homilies.
+
+_The Master of Ballantrae_, a weird and striking tale of the times of
+'the forty-five,' is extraordinarily graphic both in its descriptions of
+places and of people. The gloomy house of Durrisdeer, with its stately
+panelled hall, the fine grounds so carefully laid out, the thick
+shrubberies, the spot where the duel was fought on the hard, frozen
+ground by the light of the flickering candles in the tall silver
+candlesticks, the wave-beaten point where the smuggling luggers land
+goods and passengers, and finally the awful journey through the
+uncleared woods of America, make a fit setting, in our memories, for the
+splendidly drawn pictures of the three Duries, the old father, the
+unappreciated Henry, the mocking master, their faithful land-steward,
+Mackellar, and the more shadowy personalities of the Frenchman, the
+lady, and the children. The tale is one of unrelieved horror, but it is
+a masterpiece nevertheless, and it has had a very large sale.
+
+With his wife Mr Stevenson in _More New Arabian Nights_ and _The
+Dynamiter_ did some work of considerable interest, and with his stepson,
+Mr Lloyd Osbourne, he wrote that quaint tale, _The Wrong Box_. In
+collaboration also with Mr Lloyd Osbourne he wrote _The Wrecker_ and
+_The Ebb Tide_.
+
+_The Wrecker_ is a wild and interesting story which had a large success.
+It originally appeared in _Scribner's Magazine_ from August 1891 to July
+1892, and was republished in book form by Messrs Cassell & Co. The scene
+is constantly changing in it, and the hero visits Edinburgh, stays in
+the students' quarter in Paris, personally conducts speculative picnics
+at San Francisco, distinguishes himself at the wreck on the lonely reef
+in mid-ocean, and finally, after appearing in England and Fontainbleau,
+tells his wonderful story to a friendly trader in the south seas. There
+is plenty of life and of action in the tale, and there are also some
+delightful descriptions of the Pacific and of the wonderful glamour
+lagoons and palm trees throw over the spirit of the man who learns to
+know and to love the beautiful South Sea islands.
+
+_The Ebb Tide_, originally published in Mr Jerome K. Jerome's magazine
+_To-day_ from November 1893 to February 1894, was republished in book
+form by Mr W. Heinemann in 1894. Like _Treasure Island_ it is a tale
+without a heroine, almost, indeed, without the mention of a woman except
+Attwater's statuesque native servant and the shadowy personalities of
+Herrick's mother and fiancee in London, and Captain Davis's wife and his
+little girl, who died before she got the doll he had so carefully bought
+for her, and the memory of whom is the one soft spot in his dark soul.
+They are merely mentioned, however, and take no actual part in the
+story. It is not a pleasant tale, everyone in it is more or less bad;
+more by preference rather than less!--and for no one in it can one feel
+the slightest sympathy. There are villains and villains in fiction, and
+for some of them, for instance, Bret Harte's Jack Hamlin, or even the
+Master himself in _The Master of Ballantrae_, one can feel a sincere
+affection or at least have a grudging sort of admiration, but it is not
+possible to even faintly like or hesitatingly pity a cowardly Robert
+Herrick, whose self-pity is so strong, and who from first to last is, as
+his creator intended him to be, a thorough inefficient. Half-hearted in
+his wickedness, self-saving in his repentance, he somehow fails to
+interest one; and even his lower-class associates, the horrible Huish
+and the American captain, are almost less detestable. Huish is quite
+diabolical, but he, at least, has the courage of his iniquities.
+Attwater is not attractive either as villain or as religious enthusiast,
+but he is a fairly possible character and at least a degree less
+unpleasant than the American captain after his conversion. Captain
+Davis's effort to save Herrick's soul, given in the last paragraph of
+the book, is disagreeably profane in its familiarity with things sacred.
+Altogether it is not an attractive book, although it is an undoubtedly
+clever one; it has some redeeming features in the really lovely
+descriptions of the island and the lagoon; and the appearance of the
+divers in full working costume remind one of Mr Stevenson's own early
+experience in a diver's dress.
+
+Without collaboration Mr Stevenson wrote the three pretty little tales
+of South Sea life reprinted, as _Island Nights' Entertainments_, in book
+form about 1893. _The Beach of Falesa_ was published in _The Illustrated
+London News_ from July 2nd to August 6th, 1892. _The Bottle Imp_
+appeared in _Black and White_ from March 28th to April 4th, 1891, and
+_The Isle of Voices_ was in _The National Observer_ between 4th and 25th
+February of 1893.
+
+They are charming stories, rich in local colour, and in all of them one
+sees that Mr Stevenson's quick eye for the essential in life has shown
+to him that among these simple islanders are to be found just the same
+elements of romance as among more highly civilised peoples, the same
+motives make and influence character there as elsewhere. So in
+Wiltshire and his relations with the islanders, in the curious stories
+of _The Bottle Imp_ and _The Isle of Voices_, we are interested in a new
+set of people in fresh surroundings, and can in a large measure
+sympathise with the pleasure that the Samoans had in reading these tales
+of island life in their own tongue. _The Bottle Imp_ was the first story
+ever read by the Samoans in their native language, and it raised their
+affection for 'Tusitala, the Teller of Stories' to positive enthusiasm.
+
+_St Ives_ is a bright story of adventure which Mr Stevenson had almost
+completed, and which Mr Quiller Couch was enabled very skilfully to
+finish with the assistance of the author's step-daughter, Mrs Strong,
+who had, besides being its amanuensis, helped Mr Stevenson with this
+story and been much in his confidence regarding it. It appeared first in
+_The Windsor Magazine_ where it was received with favour. It is the
+history of a French prisoner in Edinburgh Castle during the wars of the
+great Napoleon. He makes, like the other prisoners, little carved
+ornaments for sale, and Flora, the heroine, has so touched him while
+buying these that he falls in love with her and presents her with a
+carved lion. She returns his sentiment of admiration, and after his
+escape she and her brother, a natural gentlemanly lad, hide Mr St Ives
+in the henhouse at Swanston Cottage where they live with a stern old
+aunt. The aunt is a well-drawn type of old-fashioned Scotchwoman,
+infinitely more natural and more interesting than the niece. In
+Edinburgh and round Mr Stevenson's own country home Swanston, the
+interest at first largely centres, and the writer gives a very graphic
+description of the home garden and the cottage and its outhouses,
+
+
+     'Marvellous places though handy to home.'
+
+
+One imagines the tales of John Todd the shepherd must have helped much
+in his splendid description of the escape into England with the drovers
+by the solitary drove roads, at one point of which the escaping prisoner
+has the honour of meeting and conversing with 'The Shirra,' so well
+loved on Tweed side and elsewhere. After many and marvellous adventures,
+Mr St Ives returns a free and pardoned man to sue, not in vain, for the
+hand of Flora.
+
+Last, but, if one may judge by its powerful beginning, which is, alas!
+all that the master-hand had left of it, certainly best of Mr
+Stevenson's work is _Weir of Hermiston_. In the few perfectly finished
+chapters there is a fulness of power and a perfection of style that
+promised great things. As one read the description of the fierce old
+judge, his gentle artistic son, the cunning dandified friend, the two
+Kirsties, and the four black Elliot brothers, one felt that here indeed
+was congenial matter; and that in the tragedy of fierce human passion
+about to be played out amid wild moorland surroundings, Mr Stevenson
+would rise to a greater perfection and a nobler success than he had yet
+attained to.... It was not to be, the busy brain stopped
+instantaneously, the pen that had worked so happily all the morning was
+laid by for ever; and the world is infinitely the poorer for the sudden
+catastrophe of that sad December evening which left the home at Vailima
+desolate.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The beautiful _Edinburgh Edition_ of Mr Stevenson's works--which his
+friends Mr Colvin and Mr Baxter have been seeing through the press--is
+almost completed; one, or at most, two volumes only being now
+unpublished. It consists of an edition of 1035 copies, and includes the
+plays and everything of interest that he has written, and it will number
+twenty-seven or perhaps twenty-eight volumes. While this book has been
+passing through the press, volume twenty-seventh has been issued. It
+contains _St Ives_, and practically completes the edition; but Mr
+Stevenson's widow and Mr Sydney Colvin, who are acting as his executor
+and his editor, have gratuitously given to the subscribers to this
+_Edinburgh Edition_ a twenty-eighth volume, consisting of various odds
+and ends not hitherto made public. Of this, 'A New Form of Intermittent
+Light for Lighthouses' and 'The Thermal Influence of Forests,' recall
+the period of his engineering and scientific training; and the
+interesting facsimile reproductions of the quaint 'Moral Emblems,'
+written by him at Davos in 1880 and 1882, and printed with illustrations
+on a toy printing press by the then very youthful Mr Lloyd Osbourne, are
+yet another proof that even in his time of acute invalidism he was
+busily and cheerily employed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+HIS LIFE IN SAMOA
+
+
+     'Sometimes I am hopeful as the spring,
+     And up my fluttering heart is borne aloft
+     As high and gladsome as the lark at sunrise,
+     And then as though some fowler's shaft had pierced it
+     It comes plumb down in such a dead, dead fall.'
+                               --FROM _Philip Van Artevelde_.
+
+
+Mr Thomas Stevenson died early in May 1887, having lived long enough to
+see his son's fame as an author firmly established. Not very long
+afterwards Mrs Thomas Stevenson joined her son and his wife and with
+them went to America, and on that yachting tour among the South Sea
+islands, which finally resulted in the purchase, by Robert Louis, of the
+little property on the slope of the Vaea mountain, above the town of
+Apia, in Samoa, which he called by the musical name of Vailima, and
+where, in 1890, he finally made his home.
+
+His mother returned to Scotland for some months in 1889, arriving in the
+June of that year and remaining till the October of 1890, when she
+joined her son and his wife in their Samoan home. In 1893 she again
+visited Edinburgh to see her relatives there, and to arrange for the
+breaking up of the home at 17 Heriot Row, the sale of the house and of
+such things as she did not care to keep or to take with her to that new
+home which she also intended to make her headquarters. She remained on
+this occasion almost a year, and left for London, en route for Samoa, on
+the 5th of March 1894, promising her relatives and her friends, who so
+greatly grudged her to her son and his household, that she would pay a
+visit to Scotland once every five years.
+
+Alas! in less than one year her son had followed his father into the
+Life Eternal, and she was left that most desolate of all mourners 'a
+widow and childless.' She remained for a little time with her
+daughter-in-law and the sorrow-stricken Vailima household, and on 1st
+June 1895 she arrived in Edinburgh to make her home with her sister,
+Miss Balfour, as that sister so touchingly expresses it, 'a desolate
+woman.'
+
+Much was left to her in the love of relatives and friends, and in her
+own bright spirit, which, while it recalled the happiness of the past,
+never repined at the emptiness of the present; but so much of her heart
+lay buried in her two graves that one dared not murmur, nay, one could
+hardly fail to rejoice for her, when, early in May 1897, she too passed
+into her rest, most deeply mourned by all who had so dearly loved her,
+and not least by the little children who had held so warm a place in her
+affections, and whose spontaneous offering of flowers so touched and
+comforted the sad hearts of her sorrowing relatives.
+
+In his mother's letters to her sister and to other members of her
+family--so often kindly read to friends--one had almost as graphic an
+account of Mr Stevenson's Samoan home as in the delightful volume of
+_Vailima Letters_ itself. Gifted also with a fluent pen and a keen
+interest in the details which make up life, the mother like the son
+wrote charmingly; and one laughed, as one does in _The Vailima Letters_,
+over such misfortunes as the raid of the little pigs among the young
+corn; the more or less serious peccadilloes of the childlike Samoan
+servants; and that crowning catastrophe, so comically described by Mr
+Stevenson, when the carpenter's horse put its foot into a nest of
+fourteen eggs, and 'made an omelette of all their hopes'!
+
+Nothing could have, been more delightful or more amusing than that
+unconventional sunny life to people who like the Stevensons were
+perfectly happy among themselves, and, in spite of the often serious
+anxieties and worries incident on their settling in the new home,
+absolutely contented with their surroundings. The out-of-door existence,
+the free, untrammelled life, was dear to all of them, and especially
+good for Mr Stevenson; and far from the hurry and bustle of towns they
+found, under the unclouded blue of the Samoan sky, the rest and the
+peace their souls had longed for.
+
+The climate worked wonders for Mr Stevenson, and it seemed hardly
+possible to believe that the pale shadow of the Bournemouth days was the
+active owner of Vailima, who himself worked untiringly in clearing the
+scrub, and making the rank, tropical bush give place to the ordered
+beauties of civilisation. Not only he but his wife cheerfully took a
+turn in weeding, and, hot, tired, and with skins blistered by the
+poisonous plants with which war had to be waged by hand, they themselves
+did as much as, if not more than, their Samoan assistants to eradicate
+the noxious growths and make the precious blades of grass spring up in
+their place. Yet glad as they were to welcome the grass, Mr Stevenson,
+as he pulled the weeds up, hated to cause their death, and felt that
+they were victims in the great war of life against life of which the
+world is full.
+
+Existence at Vailima was simple and patriarchal in the extreme. The
+Samoans, who found in its owner so kind and so staunch a friend, had the
+warm hearts, the natural good qualities of children, but they had some
+of the vices of untrained children also, and petty thefts and tiresome
+acts of disobedience, gave their master and mistress abundant trouble,
+and often necessitated a species of impromptu court of justice, in which
+Mr Stevenson distributed reproofs and meted out punishments to the
+offenders in the midst of a full gathering of the domestic staff, both
+indoor and out, who all looked up to him much as one fancies the desert
+herdsmen did to Abraham, or as in later days the Highland clansmen
+feared and yet worshipped their chief, whose word was law.
+
+His wife's ready wit on at least one occasion showed itself by utilising
+the native superstition to bring home the enormity of the offence to the
+possible stealer of a young pig. The fear of an 'Aitu,' or wicked
+woman-spirit of the woods, and the general dread of devils, has far more
+effect on the Samoan conscience than more civilised methods of warning
+and reproof. So when Mrs Stevenson, by a clever imitation of native
+conjuring, made Lafaele believe that 'her devil,' or divining spirit,
+would tell her where the missing pig was, it is probable that Lafaele,
+even if innocent himself, shared the feast with his friends with
+trembling.
+
+The master and mistress had the kindest interest in all their native
+servants, and it is a quaint thing to read of the great writer, for
+whose books publishers and public impatiently waited, not only giving Mr
+Strong's little boy, Austin, history lessons, but spending hours over
+teaching Henry, the Samoan chief, who was his native overseer. Very
+strange, too, it is to realise that he carried his interest in missions
+and missionaries to so practical a point as for a time at least to teach
+Sunday school himself. His stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, shared to the
+full his interest in these things, and both of them must have been very
+comforting to the missionaries in Samoa, one of whom especially, Mr
+Clark, was so valued a friend of the whole Vailima household. The Roman
+Catholic priests, many of whom are doing devoted work in the islands,
+were also welcome visitors at Vailima.
+
+Never bound by creeds or forms, Mr Stevenson had a thoroughly practical
+religion, calculated to do infinitely more good in the world than all
+the theological disputes and hair splittings that ever were penned in
+ponderous volumes or thundered solemnly from orthodox pulpits.
+
+Of his political work in Samoa, his earnestness for the good government
+of its people, his anxiety that they should have a just control and a
+due freedom, it is unnecessary to speak fully here, as his letters in
+the home press at the time and the volume _Footnotes to History_ brought
+the knowledge of his views and actions within reach of all. Nothing
+could have been more unselfish than the attitude of the writer, to whom
+politics were abhorrent, who, nevertheless, from sheer humanity entered,
+at some personal risk, into the petty struggle with excellent results
+for the Samoans. And certainly nothing more courageous can be imagined
+than the man, whose tender heart winced at the sight of suffering and
+bloodshed, going down into the hospitals during the brief war, and
+himself helping to tend and comfort the wounded and the dying. In his
+interest in native affairs he had, as in all else that made up life for
+him, the thorough sympathy of his wife, and also of the other members of
+his most united household.
+
+It was a very happy party in spite of some misfortunes and anxieties,
+occasional visits of the influenza, and the dread of ruin from rain or
+hurricane; and after their first difficulties as to house-building were
+over, it was to a very spacious and pleasant house that they welcomed
+the elder Mrs Stevenson when she returned to Samoa in 1893. The scrub
+still, however, required much clearing, and we find in _The Vailima
+Letters_ Mr Stevenson dividing his day into so many hours of literary
+work and so many hours of weeding!
+
+The day began early, and Mr Stevenson, after the first breakfast, did
+his literary work, until the sound of a conch summoned the family to a
+lunch, or second breakfast, about eleven o'clock. After this there was
+rest and music till four, and then outdoor work or play, lawn-tennis
+being a very favourite pastime, and in the evening they had more music,
+and a game at cards. It was a simple, natural life, and one that made
+far more for health, mental and physical, to those whose constitutions
+suited the climate, than the bustle and the clamour of cities. Visitors,
+too, often came up the hill to Vailima, sometimes the residents in Apia,
+sometimes home friends or distinguished strangers, who were glad to
+visit the much-loved author in his distant retreat, and to all was
+given the same cordial welcome, to all there remains the memory of
+delightful hours in the company of those who knew so well how to make
+time pass bewitchingly.
+
+The household by this time consisted of Mr Stevenson, his wife, his
+mother, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, his sister, Mrs Strong, who acted as her
+stepfather's amanuensis, her little boy, Austin, who went to school in
+California in 1892, and Mr Graham Balfour, a cousin of Mr Stevenson's.
+
+Until he left for school, Mr Stevenson gave Austin his lessons, and, as
+his uncle Lloyd had done, the boy considered the teacher only a larger
+playfellow.
+
+A very pretty picture of the home life is given in a note-book of Mrs
+Thomas Stevenson's, in which she describes a birthday feast in her
+honour, at which little Austin Strong recited some verses made for the
+occasion by her son. Very amusing the verses are, and in them the small
+scholar repeats with pride what strides in knowledge he had made under
+the able tuition of his step-grandfather. It is not a little comic to
+think that Mr Stevenson had at this time a well-grown step-grandchild,
+and had, indeed, held the honourable and venerable position of a
+step-grandparent shortly after he was thirty.
+
+Very amusing features of the letters that Mrs Thomas Stevenson sent home
+were the funny illustrations of daily life enclosed in them, and which
+were drawn by a clever pencil in the household. Like the old plays in
+the Leith Walk shop the youthful Louis once so frequently visited, they
+were _A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured_. Sometimes they were mere
+outlines of domestic processions, sometimes they were gay with paint in
+shades of brown and green and blue. In them all the members of the
+family were represented, and now and then there appeared the dusky
+semblance of a Samoan domestic Faauma, 'the bronze candlestick,' or
+Lafaele, the amiable and the willing. As one recalls them one sees again
+a verandah, with long chairs and lazy loungers, Mr Stevenson pretending
+to play his flageolet, but too comfortable actually to begin; the rest
+in attitudes more or less suggestive of that warmth and satisfaction
+which we in colder climes can only dream of; or in another a few bold
+strokes pictured the ladies of the family on household cares intent,
+domestic service of the humblest, cooking, dusting, bed-making, and all
+the trivial daily doings that were so mirthfully treated both by pen and
+pencil.
+
+Mr Stevenson and his wife took a keen interest in their garden, which
+stood so high above sea-level, that they could have the pleasure of
+trying to grow in it some British flowers, fruits, and vegetables, as
+well as those native to the tropics. This endeavour to naturalise the
+products of the old home in the new one was a great pleasure to Mrs
+Stevenson, and one fully shared by her husband, who was so often, in
+spite of his delight in the soft airs, the blue skies, heart-sick for
+the cold grey ones of the old country, and who was reminded on a fresh
+wet morning after a storm, of the West Highlands, near Callander, and
+
+
+     'The smell of bog, myrtle and peat,'
+
+
+by the rain dashing on the roof, and trickling down the window panes, of
+far-off misty Scotland, where
+
+
+     'On the moors the whaups are calling.'
+
+
+The Samoan days were very full of work, and much was done, and still
+more was planned in them by Mr Stevenson's busy brain and untiring
+activity. Here was written _Catriona_, _The Master of Ballantrae_, a
+part of those annals of the Stevenson family which he hoped to give to
+the public, _The Beach of Falesa_, _The Bottle Imp_, and _The Isle of
+Voices_; and with Mr Lloyd Osbourne was completed _The Ebb Tide_ and
+_The Wrecker_, the ideas for which had occurred to them when at sea.
+
+_Father Damien_, _An Open letter_, had been already written, but here
+was composed _A Footnote to History_, and both show to perfection their
+writer's interest in suffering humanity. Here, saddest of all, were
+planned many works never to be accomplished--among them that powerful
+fragment _Weir of Hermiston_ and _St Ives_--the latter finished all but
+the last portion, which Mrs Strong, who had helped much with this story,
+could supply to Mr Quiller Couch, so that he was enabled to complete it.
+Mr Stevenson, like his father, found his relaxation in a change of work,
+so to this period also belong the fugitive verses collected under the
+title, _Songs of Travel_, published after his death.
+
+In spite of the apparent improvement in his health, Mr Stevenson had
+had, especially when for a short time at Sydney and Honolulu, serious
+returns of illness, and after one attack of influenza, the old foe
+hemorrhage briefly reappeared. Not yet, however, would he own himself
+beaten, and in spite of some anxiety on the part of his doctors, he
+assured his friends he was very well. His friends' fears were not so
+easily silenced. In the last year of his life his bright mood varied,
+and his letters often caused grave anxiety to those at home. He had
+times of despondency and of undue distress as to his monetary future and
+his literary success, which were scarcely justified by the facts.
+Although always gentle and gay with his own family circle, the little
+strain of worry showed itself repeatedly in his correspondence with his
+friends and caused them a keen foreboding of evil, so unlike was it to
+the old, sunny, cheery spirit with which he had fought bad health, and
+gained for himself so high a place in the world of letters and so warm a
+niche in the heart of his public.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+HIS DEATH
+
+
+     'Gone to thy rest--no doubt, no fear, no strife;
+     Men whispering call it death--God calls it life.'
+                                    ROBERT RICHARDSON.
+
+
+As the months of 1894 slipped away, the unusual despondency and worry,
+noticeable so especially in Mr Stevenson's correspondence, increased,
+while it seemed that his literary work, which had hitherto been his
+greatest pleasure, had now become a strain and a weariness to him.
+
+By fits and starts the joy of working still visited him it is true.
+_Weir of Hermiston_ he felt to be his very best--St Ives now and then
+went gaily. But the dark moods were only dormant not dead, and anxiety
+for the future of his family, and a longing to be able to cease working
+for daily bread, grew upon him greatly.
+
+That, for a time after the settlement in Samoa, monetary anxieties may
+have been somewhat pressing, is not only possible, but probable. No
+moving of 'the household gods,' however small, or for however short a
+distance, can be managed without considerable cost and trouble, and the
+expense invariably exceeds the estimate made, for unforeseen outlays and
+difficulties crop up that entail added expenditure with its consequent
+anxiety.
+
+If this is so in ordinary cases, how much more would it be so when the
+pulling up of stakes meant a move to the antipodes and the change of
+home included the purchase of uncleared land in Samoa, the building of a
+house and the laying out of an estate, which its owner felt certain
+could not repay the money spent upon it for at least five or six years.
+
+All great changes and large undertakings are fraught with difficulty,
+and the Vailima venture was no exception to the rule. The Samoan home
+meant much pleasure to its owner, but it entailed keen anxiety also.
+
+Nevertheless the mental worry of those later months was by no means
+justified by the facts. Mr Stevenson's literary work had long been paid
+according to its merits, so that each book brought him in a satisfactory
+sum; while the future of the _Edinburgh Edition_ of his works gave cause
+for sincere satisfaction to the friends who were seeing it through the
+press, and whose letters gave assurance of its success. The cloud was
+therefore due to internal, not to external causes, and in the state of
+Mr Stevenson's health was, alas! to be found the explanation of this sad
+change from the gay bravery with which he had hitherto faced the world.
+Suspected by his doctors, feared by his friends, but unknown to himself,
+for at this time he constantly wrote of his improved health, a new
+development in his illness was nearing its fatal crisis, and these
+symptoms of mental distress and irritation were only the foreshadowing
+of the end.
+
+In these last days his life had many pleasures; he was enjoying the
+Samoan climate and the free unconventional existence to the full; he was
+surrounded by all his loved home circle; and in the October of 1894, two
+months before his death, the Samoan chiefs, in whose imprisonment he had
+proved his friendship to them, gave him a tribute of their love and
+gratitude which was peculiarly pleasing and valuable to him. An account
+of this and of the very beautiful speech he made in return appeared in
+the home papers at the time, and are to be found in an appendix to _The
+Vailima Letters_. The chiefs, who knew how much store he set by
+road-making as a civilising element in Samoa, as elsewhere, themselves
+went to him and offered their services to make a road to join his
+property to the main highway. They, as well as their young men, worked
+at it with picks and spades, and when it was finished they presented it
+to their beloved 'Tusitala' as an abiding remembrance of their grateful
+regard. It was a noble tribute to a noble nature, and one the value of
+which can only be fully appreciated by those who realise what the
+personal manual labour meant to these proud island chiefs so wholly
+unaccustomed to exertion of any kind, and so imbued with the idea that
+all labour was derogatory to their dignity. Their loving service touched
+Mr Stevenson and all his family very deeply, and this bright memory
+gladdened the last weeks of his life, and must be a very pleasant one to
+recall for those of the Vailima household who still survive him.
+
+At the celebration of his birthday on 13th November he had received
+also a tribute of kindly appreciation from the European and American
+residents in Apia. On the occasion of a 'Thanksgiving' feast in that
+same November, he made a speech, in which he said he had always liked
+_that_ day, for he felt that he had had so much for which to be
+thankful. He especially mentioned the pleasure he had in his mother
+being with him, and said that to America--where he had married his
+wife--he owed the chief blessing of his life.
+
+In spite of his assurances that he was very well, he was exceedingly
+thin and wasted in those days, and later Samoan photographs show a
+melancholy change in him. On the morning of the 3rd December, however,
+he felt particularly well and wrote for several hours. It is very
+pleasant to know, from _A Letter to Mr Stevenson's Friends_, sent to the
+_Times_ after his stepfather's death by Mr Lloyd Osbourne as an
+acknowledgment of the vast amount of sympathy expressed, and so
+impossible to be otherwise answered, that he had enjoyed his work on
+_Weir of Hermiston_, and felt all the buoyancy of successful effort on
+that last morning of his life.
+
+Letters for the mail were due to be written in the afternoon, and he
+spent his time penning long and kindly greetings to absent friends.
+
+'At sunset,' Mr Osbourne says, 'he came downstairs, rallied his wife
+about the forebodings she could not shake off; talked of a lecturing
+tour in America he was eager to make, "as he was so well," and played a
+game of cards with her to drive away her melancholy.'
+
+By-and-bye he said that he was hungry, and proposed a little feast, for
+which he produced a bottle of old Burgundy, and went to help her to
+prepare a salad, talking gaily all the while. As they were on the
+verandah, he suddenly cried out, 'What is that?' put his hands to his
+head, and asked, 'Do I look strange?' In a moment he had fallen down
+beside her.
+
+His wife called for help, and she and his body-servant Sosima carried
+him into the great hall, where he had known so much happiness, and
+placed him in the old arm-chair which had been his grandfather's.
+Medical aid was quickly obtained, but he had already lost consciousness,
+and, in spite of every effort, he never regained it. His mother's
+letters written after his death touchingly describe how, although called
+at once, she yet reached the hall too late to find him conscious, as by
+that time he was leaning back in his chair breathing heavily. The
+family, with an agony of grief, quickly realised that there was no hope.
+
+A little bed was brought, and he was placed on it in the middle of the
+hall, and there, with those he loved close about him, and his faithful
+Samoan servants seated round him on the floor, he quietly passed away.
+The deep breaths came at ever longer intervals, the sleep of
+unconsciousness was never broken, and as his loved and valued friend,
+the Reverend Mr Clark, prayed beside him, his spirit took its flight
+into eternity. He died as he had wished, quickly and well-nigh
+painlessly. He had known so much of lingering illness, he dreaded _that_
+greatly, but of death he had no fear, and peacefully and suddenly he
+passed into the Unseen.
+
+His death took place at a little past eight o'clock on the evening of
+the 3rd December at the early age of forty-four.
+
+When the news was cabled to England, it was received by many people with
+grave doubts. His relatives and friends dreaded its truth, but could not
+at first believe it. Many exaggerated newspaper reports, copied
+especially from the more sensational American press, had from time to
+time caused needless distress and anxiety to those who loved him, so
+that it was possible to allow oneself the shadow of a hope, particularly
+as his uncle, Dr George W. Balfour, who had at first received the news
+somewhat vaguely worded, doubted it also, and wrote to the _Scotsman_
+expressing his unbelief.
+
+Too soon, unfortunately, all such hopes were proved false, and eager
+eyes scanning the morning papers on the 23d December 1894 read this sad
+corroboration of the news that had been posted in London on the 17th of
+the same month.
+
+
+     'SAN FRANCISCO (no date).
+             BALFOUR, 17 Walker Street, Edinburgh.
+     LOUIS died suddenly third. Tell friends.
+                                              STEVENSON.'
+
+
+The telegram was from his mother in answer to one from his uncle asking
+for true particulars as to the earlier report, and on its receipt and
+publication relatives and friends knew that hope was dead, and there
+remained only a sad waiting for further particulars. These by-and-bye
+came in letters from his mother to her relatives and friends in
+Scotland, in letters to his literary friends and in that 'Letter' to the
+_Times_ from his friend and stepson Mr Lloyd Osbourne to the vast mass
+of acquaintances and readers who all claimed him as a loved personal
+friend.
+
+From all these sources the manner of his death, and the touching final
+tragedy of his pathetic funeral became known to the world of
+English-speaking people everywhere, who each and all mourned
+individually for the loved and lost author as one near and dear in their
+personal regard.
+
+He had always expressed a wish to be buried on the Vaea mountain which
+rises immediately behind Vailima, and the summit of which commands a
+wide prospect of land and sea and sky. In the spring of 1894, he had
+suggested the making of a road, and the planting of the spot which he
+had chosen for his resting-place, but, as the idea was painful to his
+family, nothing was done in the matter. As soon as he had passed away,
+those whom he loved hastened to give effect to his wishes, and Mr Lloyd
+Osbourne planned and courageously carried out in an incredibly short
+time the forming of a road which made it possible to carry him to the
+summit of Vaea, and lay him on the spot that he had chosen. Forty
+Samoans with knives and axes cut a path up the mountain side, and Mr
+Lloyd Osbourne, with a few specially chosen dependents, dug the grave in
+which he was to lie.
+
+Meantime, his body covered with the Union Jack rested in the Samoan home
+that he had loved so well, surrounded by the furniture of the old Scotch
+home around which his childish feet had played, and on which his
+father, and possibly his father's fathers, had daily looked, for his
+mother had taken with her to Vailima all that had most of memory and of
+family tradition from the house in Heriot Row.
+
+His family lingered in the dear presence, the heartbroken Samoans knelt
+and kissed his hands, and at the request of his favourite servant,
+Sosima, who was a Romanist, the solemn and touching prayers of the
+Church of Rome were, with a certain fitness, repeated over the man who
+had been the champion of Father Damien, and among whose friends were
+numbered the earnest and faithful Roman Catholic missionary priests of
+the South Sea Islands.
+
+On his coffin was laid the 'Red Ensign' that had floated from his mast
+on many a cruise, and he was carried up the steep path by those who
+loved him. Europeans as well as Samoans toiled up that difficult ascent
+to place him with reverent hands in that grave which was so fitting a
+resting-place for the man who had loved, above all things, the freedom
+of the open air, the glory of the sea and the sky, the sighing of God's
+winds among the trees, and the silent companionship of the stars.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Life for those who remained in the Samoan home became an impossible
+thing without him, and so Mrs Stevenson, with her son and daughter,
+by-and-bye left Vailima, and the home of so much happiness is now
+falling into ruin, the cleared ground lapsing back to the bush. And
+perhaps it is best so; without him Vailima is like a body without a
+soul; and he who so dearly loved nature would hardly have regretted that
+the place he loved should return to the mother heart of the earth and
+become once more a solitude--a green place of birds and trees.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+HIS LIFE-WORK
+
+
+     'Art's life, and when we live we suffer and toil.'
+                               --MRS BARRETT BROWNING.
+
+
+     'A healthful hunger for the great idea,
+     The beauty and the blessedness of life.'
+                                    --JEAN INGELOW.
+
+
+It is perhaps impossible for those who knew Mr Stevenson and came under
+the influence of the rare attraction of his charming personality, to
+assign to him and to his work a suitable place in the world of letters.
+Probably it is still too early for anyone to say what rank will in the
+future be held by the man who in his life-time assuredly stood among the
+masters of his craft. Fame, while he lived, was his, and, better than
+fame, such love as is seldom given by the public to the writer whose
+books delight it.
+
+Deservedly popular as the books are, the man was still more popular; and
+the personality that to his friends was so unique and so delightful,
+made friends of his readers also. He was so frank, so human, in his
+relations with his public.
+
+His dedications not only gave pleasure to the members of his family, or
+to the many friends to whom he wrote them, they, as it were, took his
+readers into his confidence also, and let them share in the warmth of
+his heart. His prefaces are delightfully autobiographical, and are
+valuable in proportion to the glimpses they give of one of the most
+amiable and most widely sympathetic natures imaginable.
+
+His methods of work were singularly conscientious; even in the days
+when, as a truant lad, he carried in his pocket one book to read, and
+another to write in, he was slowly perfecting that style which was to
+give to his literary work a distinction all its own. He spared himself
+no trouble in ensuring the accuracy of all that he wrote.
+
+It may be interesting to recall in this connection the letters written
+by two of his readers to the _Scotsman_ expressing some doubt as to
+there having been shops in Princes Street at the date of his story _St
+Ives_--Mr Stevenson mentions shops in _St Ives_. In reply to the letters
+of enquiry, his uncle, Dr G. W. Balfour, wrote to the _Scotsman_ on 26th
+November 1897:--
+
+
+     'Sir,--It may interest your correspondents "J. W. G." and "J. C.
+     P." to know that Louis Stevenson always took care to verify his
+     statements before making them, and that his correspondent, to whom
+     he applied for information as to the existence of shops in Princes
+     Street at the early date referred to, took the only legitimate
+     means open to him of ascertaining this by consulting the
+     directories of the date.'
+
+
+And, as a matter of fact, it was conclusively proved that Mr Stevenson
+was correct, by the name and number of at least one well-known shop, of
+that date, being given by another correspondent in the paper very
+shortly afterwards.
+
+No minute observation was too trying for Mr Stevenson, no careful
+research too tedious for him; no historical fact apparently too
+insignificant or obscure for him to verify. He was never weary of
+reading books dealing with the periods in which the action of his
+stories takes place.
+
+Costume, dialect, scenery, were all thoroughly studied, and when himself
+distant from the scenes of his tales, he is to be found constantly
+writing from Vailima to friends in London or in Edinburgh for the books
+and the information he required. In the period between 1745 and 1816, in
+which the plots of _Kidnapped_, _Catriona_, _The Master of Ballantrae_,
+_Weir of Hermiston_, and _St Ives_ are laid, he is especially at home,
+and old record rolls, books on manners and on costume, are all
+laboriously studied to give to his stories that accuracy and truth to
+life which he considered to be absolutely necessary. To such good effect
+did he study volumes of old Parliament House trials, that the dress of
+Alan Breck, in _Kidnapped_, is literally transcribed from that of a
+prisoner of Alan's period, whose trial he had perused.
+
+Nor did his conscientiousness stop here; he wrote and re-wrote
+everything, sometimes as often as five times, and no page ever left his
+hands which had not been elaborately pruned and polished. No wonder,
+therefore, that his work was welcome to his publishers, and that he was
+never among the complaining authors who think themselves underpaid and
+unappreciated by the firms with whom they deal.
+
+He gave of his best, good honest hard work, and he received in return
+not only money but regard and consideration; and his own verdict was
+that it was difficult to choose among his publishers which should have
+a new book, for all of them were so good to him. A pleasant state of
+matters that goes far to prove that, where work is conscientious and
+author and publisher honourable and sensible, there need be little or no
+friction between them. In this, as in the care which he bestowed on his
+work, the long and earnest apprenticeship he served to the profession of
+letters, he sets an example to his fellow-authors quite as impressive as
+that which he showed to his fellow-men in the patience with which he
+bore his heavy burden of bad health, and the courage with which he rose
+above his sufferings and looked the world in the face smiling.
+
+In an age when a realism so strong as to be unpleasant has tinged too
+much of latter-day fiction Mr Stevenson stood altogether apart from the
+school of the realists. His nature, fresh and boyish to the end,
+troubled itself not at all with social questions, so he dipped his pen
+into the wells of old romance and painted for us characters so alive
+with strength and with humour that they live with us as friends and
+comrades when the creations of the problem novelists have died out of
+our memories with the problems they propound and worry over.
+
+His books are bright, breezy, cheerful, rich in idealism, full of
+chivalry, and they have in them a glamour of genius, a power of
+imagination, and a spirit of purity, which makes them peculiarly
+valuable in an age when these things are too often conspicuous by their
+absence from the novel of the day.
+
+His essays are full of a quaint, delightful humour, his verses have a
+dainty charm, and in his tales he has given us a little picture gallery
+of characters and landscapes which have a fascination all their own.
+Like Sir Walter Scott he had to contend with the disadvantages of a
+delicate childhood which interfered with settled work; and yet, in both
+cases, one is tempted to think that that enforced early leisure was of
+far more ultimate benefit to the life-work than years of dutiful
+attendance at school and college. Like Sir Walter Scott, also, he has
+drawn much of his inspiration from 'Caledonia, stern and wild'; and none
+of her literary sons, save Burns and 'The Wizard of the North' himself,
+has Caledonia loved so well or mourned so deeply.
+
+Cosmopolite in culture, in breadth of view, in openness of mind, Mr
+Stevenson was yet before all things a Scotsman, and one to whom Scotland
+and his native Edinburgh were peculiarly dear. Condemned by his delicate
+and uncertain health to make his dwelling-place far from the grey skies
+and the biting east winds of his boyhood's home, these grey Scotch
+skies, these bitter winds, still haunt him and appear in his books with
+the strange charm they have for the sons and daughters of the north who,
+even while they revile them, love them, and in far lands long for them
+with a heart-hunger that no cloudless sky, no gentle zephyr, no
+unshadowed sunshine of the alien shore can appease.[6]
+
+In all his wanderings his heart turned fondly to the old home, to the
+noble profession of his fathers, and on smiling seas and amid sunny
+islands he never forgot the bleak coasts of Scotland, that his
+ancestors' hands had lighted from headland to headland, and his heart
+
+
+     'In dreams (beheld) the Hebrides.'
+
+
+A Scot of whom Edinburgh and Scotland are justly proud, he was a man
+whose life and faith did credit to the stern religion and the old
+traditions of his covenanting forefathers, and although, like so many
+men and women of earnest minds and broad culture in the present day, he
+early left behind him much of the narrowness of churches and of creeds,
+he held closely to 'the one thing needful,' a humble and a trusting
+belief in God that filled all his soul with strength and patience, and
+gave to him that marvellous sympathy with humanity which made him a
+power among men, whether they were the learned and the cultured, or
+simple children of nature like the Samoans, who so truly understood and
+loved him.
+
+The books undoubtedly are great, but the man is greater; and it is not
+only as a writer of no small renown that he will be revered and
+remembered but as a man among men whose patience and courage gave to his
+too short life a pathos and a value. Among his friends he was beloved in
+a manner quite unique, he had a peculiar place of his own in their
+regard. By the younger school of writers, whose work he so fully and so
+generously appreciated, he was regarded as a master; and one of the
+pleasures to be enjoyed on the publication of that _Life_, which Mr
+Sydney Colvin presently has in preparation, will be to learn more about
+his agreeable relations with his literary juniors.
+
+Of his sacred home life no outsider can speak; but it is the truest test
+of perfect manhood when the man who is not unknown in the great world
+shows himself at his best in the smaller world of home, and has a
+brighter and a sweeter side of his nature to display to wife and mother
+and close fireside circle than he has to his admiring public. Mr
+Stevenson never despised the trivial things of life, and the everyday
+courtesies, the little unselfishnesses--which are often so much more
+difficult to practise than the great virtues--were never forgotten all
+through the years in which so much of pain and of weariness might have
+made occasional repining, occasional forgetfulness of others, almost
+pardonable.
+
+Eager in his own work, untiring in his literary activity, he was equally
+eager to toil in the great vineyard, to do something for God and for
+man, to make his faith active and not passive. This was his attitude
+through life; he would always have 'tholed his paiks' that the poor
+might 'enjoy their play,' the imprisoned go free; and the position which
+he took up in regard to Samoan troubles was a practical proof that he
+was, as he called himself, 'a ready soldier,' willing to spend and be
+spent for others. Of one whose position was that of 'the ready soldier,'
+no more fitting concluding words can be said than those in his mother's
+note-book, and written to her by the wife of the Rev. Mr Clark, his
+Samoan friend, in November 1895:--
+
+... 'So few knew your dear son's best side--his Christian character. Of
+course, men don't write often on that subject, and to many he was the
+author, and they only knew him as such. To me his lovely character was
+one of the wonderful things, so full of love and the desire to do good.
+I love to think of him.' ...
+
+That the man and his work are appreciated is amply proved by the
+monument already erected to his memory in San Francisco by the zeal of
+the American Committee, and by the enthusiastic meeting in his own
+Edinburgh, presided over by Lord Rosebery, in the autumn of 1896, at
+which Mr J. M. Barrie made an interesting and an appreciative speech;
+and by the equally enthusiastic gathering in Dundee in the spring of
+1897.
+
+At these meetings it was proposed to receive subscriptions, and to erect
+a Stevenson memorial in some form to be afterwards decided on. The
+suggestion was largely responded to, but it is probable the response
+would have been even more cordial had it been determined that the
+memorial should take a practical rather than an ornamental form.
+Monuments are cold things whereby to perpetuate love and admiration; an
+'arbour of Corinthian columns,' which one paper recently suggested,
+would have appealed to Mr Stevenson himself only as an atrocity in
+stone. His sole sympathy with stone was when it served the noble purpose
+to which his father had put it, and, as lighthouse or harbour,
+contributed to the service of man. If the memorial might have been too
+costly in the form of a small shore-light, a lifeboat seemed a thing
+that would have been dear to his own heart. And as, in years to come,
+men read of rescues by the _Robert Louis Stevenson_, on some
+wreck-strewn, rock-bound corner of our coasts, the memory of the man
+who loved the sea, and of the race who toiled to save life in its
+storms, would have been handed down to future generations in a fitting
+fashion.
+
+The memorial is to take the form of a mural monument with a medallion
+portrait of his head in high relief. It is to be placed in the Moray
+Aisle of St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh, which it is thought might be a
+suitable 'Poets' Corner' for Scotland. If there is sufficient money, and
+if the necessary permission is obtained, a stone seat may also be
+erected on the Calton Hill at the point from which Mr Stevenson so
+greatly admired the view. The medallion is to be entrusted to Mr A.
+Saint Gaudens, an American sculptor of repute, who studied in France,
+and who had the great advantage of personally knowing Mr Stevenson in
+America in 1887 and 1888, and at that time getting him to sit for a
+medallion, which is considered by his widow and family to be the best
+likeness of him that they have seen. It is satisfactory that at last
+someone has been found who can do justice to the quaint, mobile face,
+and give to the memorial some of the living charm of the man. It is also
+pleasant to know that Mrs Stevenson and her family have expressed
+themselves perfectly satisfied with the choice of a sculptor.
+
+The San Francisco monument is in the form of a sixteenth century ship,
+of thirty guns, careening to the west, with golden sails full spread,
+and with a figure of Pallas, looking towards the setting sun, in its
+prow. The ship is about five feet high, and behind it, on a simple
+granite plinth, is engraved the famous passage from his Christmas
+sermon:--'To be honest, to be kind; to earn a little, to spend a little
+less; to keep a few friends, and these without capitulations.'
+
+On one surface of the plinth is a spigot and a cup, and underneath a
+drip-stone, where thirsty dogs can drink. The drinking place is
+assuredly a part of the monument that would have commended itself to the
+man who loved his canine friends and all other animals so truly.
+
+Even if a monument has about it something of the commonplace, it is well
+that the memory of the man and of his work should be perpetuated; but of
+all memorials of him, the Samoan 'Road of Gratitude' is likely to be for
+ever remembered as the most suitable and the most perfect.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[6] It is on record that Mr Stevenson, who always talked to a
+compatriot when he could, was, _a propos_ of his home in Samoa, told by
+a sailor with whom he was having a chat, that he 'would rather gang hame
+an' be hanged in auld Scotland than come an' live in this ---- hole.' No
+doubt, Mr Stevenson appreciated the sturdy mariner's patriotism,
+although it was expressed in language more forcible than polite!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Robert Louis Stevenson, by Margaret Moyes Black
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