As captured February 6, 2025

20 files changed, 5032 insertions, 2918 deletions

diff --git a/53165-0.txt b/53165-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7d24d5a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/53165-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,755 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 53165 ***
+
+[Illustration: Cover art]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Robert Louis Stevenson]
+
+
+
+
+_Painting by W. Hatherell._
+
+  "Took down the folds of her hair--shook it
+  round her face and the pool repeated her
+  thus veiled."
+
+_Prince Otto._
+
+[Illustration: _Prince Otto_]
+
+
+
+
+  A DAY WITH
+  ROBERT LOUIS
+  STEVENSON
+
+
+  BY MAURICE CLARE
+
+
+
+  LONDON
+  HODDER & STOUGHTON
+  1910
+
+
+
+
+  _In the same Series.
+    Dickens.
+    Thackeray._
+
+
+
+
+A DAY WITH STEVENSON.
+
+
+Supposing that in the month of April, 1886, you had arrived, a guest
+foreseen, at the pleasant ivy-muffled dwelling in Bournemouth, which
+had recently adopted the name of Skerryvore, and that you had been
+permitted to enter its doors--you might account yourself a somewhat
+favoured person.  For the master of the house, "that rickety and
+cloistered spectre," as he termed himself, the "pallid brute who lived
+in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit," might be invisible for the
+nonce--shut upstairs, forbidden even to speak for fear of inducing
+hemorrhage.  Or again, you might yourself be afflicted with an obvious
+cold: in which case you would not be admitted into his presence, lest
+you left contagion of that cold.
+
+But if fate befriended you, you would chance upon the most remarkable
+personality, it might be, that you had yet encountered.  A lean, long
+flat-chested man, gracefully emphatic of gesture--pacing up and down
+the room as he talked--burning with hectic energy--a man of rich brown
+tints in hair and eyes and skin: mutable, mirthful, brilliant--above
+all "vital," as he had described himself, "wholly vital with a buoyance
+of life" which had upborne him hitherto over the crest of most
+tumultuous distresses.
+
+Robert Louis Stevenson was now thirty-six years old: and ever since his
+sixth year, when, as his mother recorded in her diary, he dreamed that
+he "heard the noise of pens writing," his aim had been set unswervingly
+toward the one goal.  Born of a strong and strenuous family, the great
+lighthouse builders of the north, he was not, like them, intent upon
+the subjugation of obstinate stone, the ordering and ordaining of rocks
+and seas.  Dhu Heartach and the Bell Rock and Skerryvore he could
+admire at a distance: but the material which cried aloud to him for
+mastery, was much more plastic,--yet, to him, no less stubborn.  "I
+imagine," he declared, "nobody ever had such pains to learn a trade as
+I had; but I slogged at it day in and day out."  His fastidious soul
+refused to be contented with a facile and slipshod utterance.  A
+passionate quest: after _le mot propre_, which had led him, in his own
+phrase, to "play the sedulus ape" to all the great prose writers of the
+past--and a sense of style such as no man had ever so anxiously and
+assiduously developed in himself--these had achieved their own reward.
+"'Thanks to my dire industry," said Stevenson, "I have done more with
+smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world."
+
+And this was a just pride: for there was no branch of literature in
+which he could not admirably acquit himself.  So many years a struggler
+in obscurity, with small hopes, few successes, little
+encouragement--battling with continuous and crippling maladies,--this
+indomitable artist, by sheer dint of "dire industry," now suddenly
+stood forth in full blaze of public recognition.  The author of
+_Virginibus Puerisque_, _Treasure Island_, _Prince Otto_, _The Child's
+Garden of Verse_, and _Dr. Jekyll_, was very much a man to be reckoned
+with.
+
+Probably few modern books have met with such instantaneous and
+triumphant success as _Treasure Island_ and _Dr. Jekyll_.  The first,
+after running its course, unannounced and comparatively unrecognized,
+the serial of an obscure author, in _Young Folks' Paper_, was published
+in book form,--and Stevenson, like Byron, "awoke to find himself
+famous."  The honours which he had failed to obtain with all the dainty
+humour, all the valiant fatalism, of _Virginibus Puerisque_, had been
+accorded without stint to _Treasure Island_.  It was a tense and
+stimulating piece of pure adventure.  The authentic air of the
+eighteenth century breathed through every sentence of it: and its fine
+flavour of dare-devil romance kindled even sober statesmen, such as Mr.
+Gladstone, to a very furore of avidity in devouring its breathless
+pages.
+
+As for _Dr. Jekyll_, that gruesome work--literally the product of a
+nightmare--had been quoted in pulpits, discussed in newspapers, read by
+everybody,--it had taken the world by storm.  Yet Stevenson's head was
+not turned by his tardily-won success: with his customary _sang froid_,
+he took things as they came, failures and triumphs, and met each alike
+with smiling gallantry.
+
+The motives which had led him into authorship--or rather forced him,
+despite all stress and hindrance of froward circumstances,--were as
+curiously varied as his own nature; and it was these motives which
+still drove him hard and incessantly.  To fame he was perhaps not
+wholly indifferent.  No author sits so austerely aloft as to disdain
+popular applause altogether.  Yet a born stylist and a conscious
+artist, like Stevenson, knew that his most finished work was above and
+beyond the appreciation of the general public.  For money,--though it
+was a necessity of life to him, and although, with all his recent
+triumphs, he was not at present earning more than £400 a year,--for
+money he did not care, except as a means to an end.  "Wealth is only
+useful for two things," he said, "a yacht and a string quartet.  Except
+for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as a man can possibly
+want."  Still, in declaring, "I do not write for the public," he added
+with engaging candour, "I do write for money, a nobler deity," and
+this, to a certain extent was true.  It was for money only, no doubt,
+that he was now undertaking, against the grain, that "romance of
+tushery," _The Black Arrow_, a tale with a mediæval setting in which he
+felt himself ill at ease.  But "most of all," he allowed, "I write for
+myself; not perhaps any more noble, but both more intelligent and
+nearer home."
+
+And that a man in such difficulties of health and finance, and so
+precarious a position, should have the courage of his own determined
+artistry, was in itself sufficiently remarkable: but the result more
+than justified his choice.
+
+All the morning, Stevenson had been upstairs writing: probably after a
+bad night; very likely in what any other man would term a totally unfit
+condition.  Under any and all circumstances, he continued to write
+unflinchingly; racked by coughing, reeling with weakness, with his
+right arm in a sling, and his left hand holding the pen,--sitting up in
+bed with a clinical thermometer in his mouth; and yet, as he declared,
+"I like my life all the same ... I should bear false witness if I did
+not declare life happy." ... He was, in his own words, "made for a
+contest, and the powers have so willed that my battlefield should be
+this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle."
+
+"To declare life happy," became, in fact, his literary mission,--the
+condensed philosophy of his gay, inveterate courage.  "I believe that
+literature should give joy," was his maxim, "one dank, dispirited word
+is harmful,--a crime of _lèse-humanité_."  This brave and cheerful
+outlook is evident in all his essays,--it is, so to speak, a glorified
+and artistic Mark-Tapleyism, all-pervading, unimpugnable, ready to
+survive the most malevolent accidents of life, the crowning tragedy of
+death itself.  And so you find the "chronic sickist," as he termed
+himself, still ready, in all but body, for great risks and inspiriting
+adventures, and--through a mist of pain--leading forlorn hopes with a
+waving sword of flame.  You hear him proclaiming that:
+
+"All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good
+work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it.
+Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful
+impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
+And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in
+mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous
+foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful
+language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced; is there not
+something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life
+go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice,
+than miserable struggling to an end in sandy deltas?"  (_Virginibus
+Puerisque_.)
+
+And to him, above all, applied his own triumphant lines, those which he
+addressed to W. E. Henley, another writer, a man of like courageous
+outlook, who, like himself, "in the fell grip of circumstances, had not
+winced nor cried aloud:
+
+  "... Small the pipe; but oh! do thou,
+  Peak-faced and suffering piper, blow therein
+  The dirge of heroes dead; and to these sick,
+  These dying, sound the triumph over death.
+  Behold! each greatly breathes; each tastes a joy
+  Unknown before in dying; for each knows
+  A hero dies with him--though unfulfilled,
+  Yet conquering truly--and not dies in vain."
+
+
+At present he was engaged upon _Kidnapped_, that admirable piece of
+fiction which he had begun, "partly as a lark and partly as a
+pot-boiler."  It was a relief, after the concentrated horror of _Dr.
+Jekyll_, to escape into the Scottish heather-scent and to feel the salt
+sea-wind whistling through the cordage of _Kidnapped_.
+
+
+_Painting by W. Hatherell._
+
+  "She stood on the bulwarks and held on by a
+  stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats.
+
+_Catriona._
+
+[Illustration: _Catriona_]
+
+
+Stevenson was desirous to "get free of this prison-yard of the
+abominably ugly, where I take my daily exercise with my
+contemporaries."  Possibly he recognised that the amazing popularity of
+_Jekyll_ had been due to the morbid attractiveness of its subject,
+rather than to its merits of craftsmanship; for, as he had averred, "I
+know that good work sometimes hits; but, with my hand on my heart, I
+think it is an accident."  But now he was at liberty to give play to
+his infinite variety upon a true boys' book,--a story to satisfy the
+inveterate boyishness of his own heart.  "Of the romance of boyhood and
+adolescence, it has been said, he is an unsurpassed master ... the
+philosophy of life developed in both his essays and romances is that
+rather of a gifted boy than a mature man."  (J. W. Mackail.)  And even
+the girls of Stevenson's imagination have been accused of being "boys
+in petticoats."  The phrase has reason.  "I have never admired a girl,"
+he wrote, and again, "I have never pleased myself with any women of
+mine."  The other sex remained for him, throughout, a mystery which he
+hardly cared to solve,--a sealed book which he was not desirous to
+open.  "Of the two eternal factors in the destiny of man, warfare and
+love," although he allowed that "to love is the great amulet which
+makes the world a garden," he preferred to deal almost exclusively with
+the warfare.
+
+And yet one women had played a very important part in Stevenson's life:
+and it was practically with his marriage that the tide of his fortunes
+had changed.  His wife,--"trusty, dusky, vivid, true," was his very
+_alter ego_: with "a character" (to quote Mr. Sidney Colvin) "as
+strong, interesting, and romantic almost as his own: an inseparable
+sharer of all his thoughts, the most shrewd and stimulating of critics:
+and in sickness, despite her own precarious health, the most devoted
+and most efficient of nurses."  To while away the weary hours of
+illness, Mrs. Stevenson made up stories to amuse him,--and subsequently
+the husband and wife would write them out together.  She, with her
+"eyes of gold and bramble-dew," was literally all-in-all to him as
+companion, helpmate, friend;--and far--how infinitely far!--above the
+ideal wife whom he had described so adroitly,--in his bachelor
+days,--that woman who should have "a fine touch for the affections,"
+and who should at least be sufficiently talented to avoid boring her
+life-long comrade.  The character of the ideal wife, as there
+indicated,--apt at gracious compromises, possessor of a cheerful fluent
+tongue,--was very obviously set forth by a man who had never yet been
+stirred by the sharp throbs of an imperative emotion.  And now that
+Stevenson realised what love in its depth and breadth might mean, it
+held a certain sanctity for him,--he was loth to speak of it, as to
+write of it.  It was a marvel that had befallen him personally: but for
+other people, it might still perhaps, be no more than that gentle
+domesticated affection which he had portrayed with such amiable humour.
+But there was one point in which he, consciously or unconsciously
+insisted, in his _desiderata_ of the female character.
+
+"It always warms a man," he had declared, "to see a woman brave," and
+he saw it daily in his wife.  Therefore it came about, that, unversed
+in women--as Stevenson unquestionably was, he was able to endow his
+heroines with a touch of gallant boyishness, a hint of the heroic--and
+if they failed in flesh-and-blood-_vraisemblance_, they had that
+"steel-true, blade-straight" quality which he adored in the women he
+had chosen.
+
+You will notice this courageous virtue in all of them, rich and poor;
+from _Catriona_, that "tall, pretty, tender figure of a maiden, when,
+having assured her father's escape from prison by a bold stratagem, she
+arrives a fugitive and an exile at Helvoetsluys, and lands from the
+staggering side of the _Rose_ into the little boat below;--when, in
+David Balfour's words:
+
+"I began to think I had made a fool's bargain, that it was merely
+impossible Catriona should be got on board to me, and that I stood to
+be set ashore in Helvoet all by myself ... But this was to reckon
+without the lass's courage ... Up she stood on the bulwarks and held by
+a stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats, which made the enterprise
+more dangerous, and gave us rather more a view of her stockings than
+would be thought genteel in cities"--(_Catriona._)
+
+to Seraphina in _Prince Otto_, still inherently valorous in that
+desperate flight through the forest: where:
+
+"At length when she was well weary, she came upon a wide and shallow
+pool.  Stones stood in it, like islands; bulrushes fringed the coast;
+the floor was paved with pine needles; and the pines themselves, whose
+roots made promontories, looked down silently on their green images.
+She crept to the margin and beheld herself with wonder, a hollow and
+bright-eyed phantom, in the ruins of her palace robe ... She addressed
+herself to make a toilette by that forest mirror, washed herself pure
+from all the stains of her adventure, took off her jewels and wrapped
+them in her handkerchief, re-arranged the tatters of her dress, and
+took down the folds of her hair.  She shook it round her face, and the
+pool repeated her thus veiled."  (_Prince Otto._)
+
+Clara Huddlestone, in the _Pavilion on the Links_, repeats the same
+undauntable note: Olalla is inexorable in moral courage of
+renunciation, even the weeping Blanche, in the _Sieur de Malétroit's
+Door_, has the mettle of some small creature at bay.
+
+The charm of Stevenson's heroines is, in short, a cold charm; nor does
+he often accord them the assistance of a personal description.  But
+they are finely tempered, of the best Toledo steel, and owing to their
+boyish character, there is no very obvious gap in those novels where
+they are conspicuously absent, such as _The Ebb Tide_, _The Wreckers_,
+and _The Master of Ballantrae_.  In the latter, indeed, there is a
+slight "female interest," but a stronger personality in the heroine
+must inevitably have changed or coloured the whole course of the book:
+and one cannot but detect a certain vacuum, where at least some emotion
+might have lifted a haggard head, in the character of Mrs. Henry,--even
+in that scene, surcharged with hidden explosive possibilities, when the
+author describes how:
+
+"The Master played upon that little ballad, and upon those who heard
+him, like an instrument, and seemed now upon the point of failing, and
+now to conquer his distress, so that the words and music seemed to pour
+out of his own heart and his own past, and to be aimed directly at Mrs.
+Henry....  When it came to an end we all sat silent for a time: he had
+chosen the dusk of the afternoon, so that none could see his
+neighbour's face: but it seemed as if we held our breathing: only my
+old lord cleared his throat.  The first to move was the singer, who got
+to his feet suddenly and softly, and went and walked softly to and fro
+in the low end of the hall."  (_The Master of Ballantrae._)
+
+
+But Mrs. Henry plays a very minor part in the marring or making, here,
+of two men's lives: it is a rôle of _vis inertiæ_ at best.  And,
+indeed, when all is said, what shall a petticoat be if not irrelevant,
+among the clash of steel and smoke of pistols, in an atmosphere
+permeated by Spanish doubloons or illicit piratical treasure?
+Stevenson's infallible artistic instinct led him to keep the
+adventure-story pendant upon the deeds of men, and the eager mistakes
+of boys; and a certain curious penchant for the squalid, the submerged,
+the picturesque, brought him by choice into such company as no heroine
+should enter--that of Villon, for instance, and John Silver, and
+Herrick the cockney vagabond.  "The spice of life is battle," he said;
+and his life, and his books, were brimful of battles with foes or with
+fortune.
+
+
+_Painting by W. Hatherell._
+
+  "'The words and music seemed to pour out of
+  his own heart and his own past and to be
+  aimed directly at Mrs. Henry."
+
+_Master of Ballantrae._
+
+[Illustration: _Master of Ballantrae_]
+
+
+The open-air life which he had perforce abandoned, the joy of physical
+strength and hair-breadth 'scape, could still be his by proxy.  He
+revelled in delineating his ideal man:
+
+"Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and
+spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any
+other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch
+the goal.  'A peerage or Westminster Abbey!' cried Nelson in his
+bright, boyish, heroic manner.  These are great incentives; not for any
+of these, but for the plain satisfaction of living, of being about
+their business in some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of
+every nation tread down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all
+the stumbling-blocks of prudence."  (_Virginibus Puerisque._)
+
+
+The tramp of horse-hoofs, the clank of the capstan, the door ajar--a
+thousand sights and sounds were but symbolisms to him of some
+mysterious by-way of adventure to be followed up, quick with latent
+possibilities of romance; and from one word, one name, he could evolve
+a whole intricate plot.  With the simplest of sentences, he could
+electrify the startled reader, as when in _The Wrecker_, where the
+desperate castaways sit gambling on the desert island, and one suddenly
+cries aloud, "Sail ho!"
+
+"All turned at the cry,--and there, in the wild light of the morning,
+heading straight for Midway Reef, was the brig _Flying Scud_ of Hull."
+(_The Wrecker._)
+
+
+On that moment the whole tale hangs as on a pivot.  All its involution
+and evolution, all its intricate and tangled clues, lead--backwards or
+forwards--to this one swift breathless sight.
+
+His morning's work accomplished, the tall gaunt man came downstairs,
+literally to play awhile.  After weeks, it might be, of enforced
+seclusion in his room, his eye rested pleasurably upon the various
+attractive objects which almost seemed like new to him.
+Stevenson,--the avowed evader of personal property, the rolling-stone
+that had so long refused to gather moss,--was now, under a woman's
+tender surveillance, surrounded with charm and comfort.  "Our drawing
+room," he maintained, "is a place so beautiful that it's like eating to
+sit down in it.  No other room is so lovely in the world ... I blush
+for the figure I cut in such a bower."  The garden, Mrs. Stevenson's
+special pleasure, but one in which her husband did not share, was very
+lovely, with a lawn, and heather-bank, and a half-acre of land, where a
+little stream ran down a "chine" full of rhododendrons.  A large
+dovecot figured in the garden; and there also "Boguey," the Stevensons'
+dog, was buried, to whom no other dog had ever been deemed a worthy
+successor.
+
+Stevenson, his clothes hanging loosely on his emaciated figure, and his
+hands--"wonderful hands--long and fragile, like those in the early
+portraits of Velasquez," lingered lovingly over the keys.  For a while
+he amused himself by picking out, note by note, the old-world dance
+measures of Lully and Rameau; those gavottes, rigadoons and minuets,
+which conveyed to him the indefinable _pot-pourri_-like, flavour of his
+favourite eighteenth century, embued with a certain stately dignity,
+"the periwig feeling," he called it, as of lords and ladies treading
+courtly measures.  Stevenson was passionately fond of classical music,
+but he had never attained to any facility of execution.  And when he
+grew tired with his efforts as an interpreter of Lully, he turned to
+"pickling," as he called it--composing, that is to say, after a
+fashion, with "the manly and melodious forefinger."  The fact that he
+had invariably failed to master the rudiments of theory, in no wise
+deterred him; on the contrary, difficulties rather enhanced his
+delight.  "Books are of no use," he avowed, "they tell you how to write
+in four parts, and that cannot be done by man."  So he continued to
+"pickle" with a light heart, and to enjoy consecutive fifths and other
+theoretical delinquencies with an enthusiasm worthy of the most modern
+composer.
+
+Nothing but the lunch hour brought his musical experiments to a close.
+Stevenson, who had, in his own words, "been obliged to strip himself,
+one after another, of all the pleasures that he had chosen, except
+smoking" (and indeed, he was smoking cigarettes all day long) by no
+means disdained the pleasures of the table.  Not, perhaps, in the role
+of a gourmet--but as an artist in the more recondite delicacies of
+taste and smell.  "To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece
+of human perfection than to find beauty in the colours of a sunset," he
+observed; he coupled the flavour of wine with the beauty of the dawn,
+and declared that we do not recognise at its full value the great part
+in life that is played by eating and drinking.  "There is a romance
+about the matter after all," he observed.  "Probably the table has more
+devotees than love; and I am sure food is more generally entertaining
+than scenery."  It was the "romance of the matter" that appealed to
+him; especially the colour, and savour, and poetical tradition of wine.
+"Books, and tobacco jars, and some old Burgundy as red as a November
+sunset, and as fragrant as a violet in April"--these, he thought,
+should suffice the most luxurious.
+
+After lunch, if he anticipated an exhausting evening, he went to
+sleep--at a moment's notice--and after a short, sound repose, was as
+eager as ever to resume his pianoforte amusements; which he continued
+until friends arrived.
+
+At the age of four-and-twenty, Stevenson had noted down his three chief
+wishes.  "First, good health: secondly, a small competence: thirdly, _O
+Du lieber Gott!_ friends."  The first: wish was irrevocably denied: the
+second was only just beginning to be granted, the guerdon of unresting
+toil: the third petition had been abundantly answered.  Never was a man
+more happy in his friends; or one who made them so instantaneously and
+without effort.  "He had only to speak," said one friend, "in order to
+be recognised in the first minute for a witty and charming gentleman,
+and in the second, for a man of genius."  Some, indeed, like Mr. Edmund
+Gosse, came home dazzled and astounded, saying, as Constance does of
+Arthur, "Was ever such a gracious creature born?"  His expression, of
+mingled tenderness and mirth, his "scholarly and eclectic
+presence"--together with his picturesque, velvet-coated appearance, and
+his flashing flow of words, combined to make a man so attractive and so
+unique as could command all love at will.  And the friends were very
+many and very notable, who haunted Skerryvore.  First and foremost was
+"Bob," Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, the poet's first cousin, the brilliant
+art critic: "the man likest and most unlike to me," as R.L.S. described
+him.  "Bob's" sister, Mrs. de Mattos, and her child were frequent
+visitors; then there were celebrities from London: such as Sargent the
+painter, William Archer, Sidney Colvin, W. E. Henley, Henry James; and
+again friends residing in the neighbourhood of Bournemouth; the poet
+Sir Henry Taylor, and his family; Sir Percy Shelley and his wife.
+These latter, indeed, regarded Stevenson almost in the light of a son.
+He struck them as bearing an extraordinary resemblance to Percy Bysshe
+Shelley; less, perhaps, in lineaments than in figure and in mind; and
+in consequence of this similarity, they held him very dear.
+
+But to all he was the same bewildering charming host, the man who
+variously displayed, to quote W. E. Henley:
+
+  "A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
+  Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,--"
+
+And combined with these curiously versatile fruits, "something of the
+Shorter Catechist."
+
+Generous in criticism, kind in praise, grave and humorous in rapid
+transition, the amazing scope and variety of Stevenson's writings were
+excelled by the scope and variety of his talk.  "There was no part of
+the writer that was not visibly present in the man."  (Graham Balfour.)
+He had laid down his opinion that "there can be no fairer ambition than
+to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome."  But
+none save those who were privileged to hear him, as with quick,
+impetuous gestures, like a Southern foreigner, he emphasised his
+phrases, could realise the power, the versatility, the inexpressible,
+irrepressible charm with which the author could fulfil his "fair
+ambition."
+
+When the visitors had severally taken their departure, the strong
+resonant voice, with its Scottish accent and rich, full tones still
+ringing in their ears,--Stevenson had suffered no abatement in the
+stream of his exuberant mental vitality.  The excitement of
+conversation had, if anything, keyed him up; and presently, for the
+writing of a few unavoidable letters, he betook himself to his study;
+"the study where a smiling God beholds each day my stage of labour
+trod," and sate himself down there with reluctance.
+
+
+_Painting by W. Hatherell._
+
+  "All turned at the cry, and there in the wild
+  light of the morning heaving straight for
+  midway reef was the brig _Flying Scud_ of
+  Hull."
+
+_The Wrecker._
+
+[Illustration: _The Wrecker_]
+
+
+Correspondence, as a rule, he found but an irksome affair; unless
+conducted upon his own whimsical lines.  "I deny that letters should
+contain news--I mean mine--those of other people should," was his
+theory; and he boasted himself of a "willingness to pour forth
+unmitigated rot, which constitutes in me the true spirit of
+correspondence."  For all that, his letters, grave or gay, remain among
+the most delightful reading in existence; flavoured with his quaintest
+conceits, endowed with his most delicate turns of phrase, and often
+tempered with that "something of the Shorter Catechist" to which Henley
+had alluded.
+
+For, undoubtedly, as time went on, although Stevenson continued to
+"combine the face of a boy with the distinguished bearing of a man of
+the world," he was gradually exchanging the "streak of Puck" and the
+capricious unconventions of the born Bohemian, for something graver and
+more mature,--a tendency almost towards the didactic.  "'Tis a strange
+world indeed," he had commented, "but there is a manifest God for those
+who care to look for Him."  And now, "with the passing of years," he
+observed, "there grows more and more upon me that belief in the
+kindness of this scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God,
+which is an excellent and pacifying compensation."  He was suffering,
+and in all probability would perpetually suffer, from "that sharp
+ferule of calamity under which we are all God's scholars till we die":
+but his patience was impregnable, and his desire to leave a brave
+example bore him constant company.  "To suffer," said he, "sets a keen
+edge on what remains of the agreeable," and he prepared to enjoy with
+equal zest all pleasures which were still permitted to him.
+
+As he put away his writing materials, and descended once more to his
+beloved piano, his father and mother came in.  They were living in
+Bournemouth to be near their only son.  The old lighthouse engineer,
+whose father had built the Bell Rock, who had served under his brother
+Alan in the building of Skerryvore, "the noblest of all extant
+sea-lights," who had himself erected Dhu Heartach, was now palpably
+failing.  The spectacle of a stern and honest man slowly evacuating all
+that he had held of personal strength, was, to his son Louis, a
+poignantly pathetic one.  Their disagreements had been very many and
+deep-rooted, dating from even before that "dreadful evening walk" in
+Stevenson's youth, when, "on being tightly cross-questioned," the lad
+who had been trained for a civil engineer, and had "worked in a
+carpenter's shop and had a brass foundry, and hung about wood-yards and
+the like," confessed that he cared for nothing but literature,--"no
+profession!" as his father contemptuously replied.  They had differed
+on almost every conceivable topic open to their discussion,--yet here,
+in the fulness of time, they were at peace together,--the austere old
+man in his second childhood, and the chronic invalid who "must live as
+though he were walking on eggs."  Innumerable ineffaceable traits of
+similarity bound one to the other; at bottom of all the bygone angers
+lay a permanent bedrock of mutual love.  And perhaps the nearing vision
+of death which terminated all vistas for both of them, exercised its
+usual effect, of calm, and _laisser-faire_, and the equalisation of
+things: for it is probable that no man has a just sense of
+proportionate values until he stands in the presence of death.
+
+Stevenson had often alluded, as a matter of personal knowledge, to his
+constant prescience of mortality, and how it affected a man's thoughts
+of life.  Very seldom has the view of the confirmed invalid, the doomed
+consumptive, been put forth to the world with the frankness with which
+Stevenson invested it.  He has been sometimes charged with a certain
+lack of reticence: but in this matter, unquestionably, his candour was
+to the benefitting of mankind: to whom these close views of the
+inevitable end are rarely possible under such deliberate and
+clear-headed conditions.
+
+There is nothing maudlin, nothing hypochondriacal, about Stevenson's
+treatment of this subject: the same cheerful philosophy bears him up,
+the same vitality of joy.  It is hardly to be wondered at, that some
+critics handled him seriously, on account of his lightheartedness in
+the august shadow of the last enemy,--and his inveterate optimism in
+the face of all calamities.  "He jests at scars who never felt a
+wound," they practically told him,--and could hardly be persuaded to
+credit the paradox that the man who preached in season and out of
+season, the gospel of that "cheery old Pagan, Hope," was not a denizen
+of the open-air,--healthy, athletic, vigorous, incapable of realising
+the maladies incident to man,--instead of an emaciated, bed-ridden
+creature, whose smallest pleasures must be measured, so to speak, in a
+medicine-glass.  But, "It is something after all," he has said, "to
+leave a brave example": and in that he triumphantly succeeded.  For the
+opportunities of meteoric heroisms are few and far between; but every
+hour beholds the need of those obscurer braveries which may be born of
+pain and suffering....
+
+In _Ordered South_ and other well-known essays, he shows the gradual
+relaxation of the ties which bind a man to terrestrial things,--and the
+curiously significant alteration in his regard for the facts of
+life,--from the sower in the dank spring furrows, to the sight of
+little children with their long possibilities before them.
+
+Stevenson had no children of his own.  His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne,
+then at school in Bournemouth, was destined to become his friend and
+collaborator: but it is doubtful that he cared for children as such.
+The average small folk, "dragged about in a pleasing stupor by nurses,"
+were very far remote from that superabundant vitality nursed in an
+attenuated physique, which had sat up with a shawl over its shoulders,
+so many tedious months in childhood, when its principal _habitat_ was
+"The Land of Counterpane" and other regions mapped out in the great and
+glorious world of Make-Believe.
+
+
+_Painting by W. Hatherell._
+
+ST. IVES DESCENDS FROM EDINBURGH CASTLE.
+
+  "The whole forces of my mind were so consumed
+  with losing hold and getting it again, that I
+  could scarce have told whether I was going up
+  or coming down."
+
+_St. Ives._
+
+[Illustration: _St. Ives_]
+
+
+For this reason, the _Child's Garden of Verses_ is not, in any real
+sense of the word, a child's book at all.  It contains the exquisite
+imaginations of childhood as the grown-up man remembers them: to him
+they have the charm of the vanished past, they are the utterances of
+one who has also lived in Arcadia.  But to the child, they are the very
+commonplaces of existence.  To sway to and fro in a swing, "the
+pleasantest thing a child can do,"--to bring home treasures from field
+and wood, nuts and wooden whistles, and some all-precious
+unidentifiable stone, "though father denies it, I'm sure it is
+gold,"--these are everyday affairs to the country-child,--just as
+watching the lamplighter is to the town child.  To read verses about
+them is but a waste of time, when one might be actively engaged in
+similar avocations.  But to the grown-man who can never play with
+wooden soldiers in the garden, never be a pirate any more,--these
+reminiscences of Stevenson's are a delight unfailing.  No one else has
+ever worded them quite so accurately, quite so simply: and, taken all
+for all, they are in themselves a summing-up of that most excellent
+philosophy of this author, "The world is so full of a number of things,
+I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings!"  The world was indeed
+full of a number of things to R.L.S. and,--passed through the crucible
+of his own astonishing personality,--they were all, bad or good,
+transmogrified into things that make for joy.
+
+After eight o'clock dinner was over, the old folks bade
+good-night,--the father, with touching affection, kissing Louis as
+though he were a child, and murmuring, "You'll see me in the morning,
+dearie," as if still addressing that little feeble creature who had
+been kept alive with such difficulty in the old days at Edinburgh.
+
+The younger man returned to the piano-forte; it drew him like a magnet.
+For a short time he indulged in his desultory music-making, relishing
+to the uttermost every success of sound which he achieved: and the
+happiness, which was his theory of life, radiated in warm abundance
+from his richly-tinted face and glowing eyes.  "It's a fine life," he
+exclaimed.
+
+At last the day's supply of energy succumbed before the imperious
+demands of this "fiery threadpaper of a man," and in deference to his
+wife's suggestion he betook himself to bed.  Not necessarily to rest;
+for even in his dreams his busy brain was working, and his "Brownies,"
+as he termed them, bringing him fresh material for plots.  _Dr. Jekyll_
+had been thus evolved from three scenes dreamed successively in detail,
+from which the dreamer waked with cries of horror.
+
+But he did not flinch before the coming night, and anything that it
+might bring of sickness or unrest.  He thought alone upon the past
+delightful day, fraught with strenuous work and simple pleasures; and
+he petitioned, in his own words:
+
+  "If I have faltered more or less
+  In my great task of happiness;
+  If I have moved along my race
+  And shown no glorious morning face;
+  If beams from happy human eyes
+  Have moved me not; if morning skies,
+  Books, and my food, and summer rain
+  Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:--
+  Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take
+  And stab my spirit broad awake!"
+                          (_Underwoods._)
+
+
+His wife hovered around him with gentle ministrations, as suddenly
+out-wearied, Robert Louis Stevenson extended his long, lean form to a
+possible repose.  There was not, perhaps, a cheerfuller man that night
+in England.
+
+The sea hummed at the foot of the chine, with that soft and dove-like
+purring of the South-coast sea; the doves made answer with a vibrant
+cooing in the middle distance of the twilight garden.  Spring buds of
+pear-trees and cherry-trees globed themselves stealthily into blossom;
+a delicate latent energy was consciously present in the air--the rising
+of sap and revivification of seed, all the mysterious hidden progresses
+of April.  And the man whose ways were set in a perpetual convergence
+towards the doors of death, waved, so to speak, a blithe recognition to
+the myriad hosts of life.
+
+"O toiling hands of mortals!  O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not
+whither!  Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some
+conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting
+sun, descry the spires of El Dorado.  Little do ye know your own
+blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,
+and the true success is labour."  (_Virginibus Puerisque._)
+
+
+
+The author desires to acknowledge the kindness of Messrs. Cassell &
+Co., in allowing short extracts to be made from _The Master of
+Ballantrae_, _The Wrecker_, and _Catriona_; also to thank Mr. William
+Heinemann for a similar courtesy with regard to _St. Ives_, and Messrs.
+Chatto & Windus for their permission to include various quotations from
+_Virginibus Puerisque_, _Underwoods_, and _Prince Otto_.
+
+
+
+  Printed by The Bushey Colour Press (André & Sleigh, Ltd.),
+  Bushey, Herts., England.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Rear cover]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson, by Maurice Clare
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 53165 ***
diff --git a/53165-h/53165-h.htm b/53165-h/53165-h.htm
index a0a3ca7..315d016 100644
--- a/53165-h/53165-h.htm
+++ b/53165-h/53165-h.htm
@@ -1,1772 +1,1359 @@
-<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"

-   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

-

-<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">

-

-<head>

-

-<link rel="coverpage" href="images/img-cover-f.jpg" />

-

-<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

-

-<title>

-The Project Gutenberg E-text of A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson,

-by Maurice Clare

-</title>

-

-<style type="text/css">

-body { color: black;

-       background: white;

-       margin-right: 10%;

-       margin-left: 10%;

-       font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;

-       text-align: justify }

-

-p {text-indent: 4% }

-

-p.noindent {text-indent: 0% }

-

-p.t1 {text-indent: 0% ;

-      font-size: 200%;

-      text-align: center }

-

-p.t2 {text-indent: 0% ;

-      font-size: 150%;

-      text-align: center }

-

-p.t2b {text-indent: 0% ;

-      font-size: 150%;

-      font-weight: bold;

-      text-align: center }

-

-p.t3 {text-indent: 0% ;

-      font-size: 100%;

-      text-align: center }

-

-p.t3b {text-indent: 0% ;

-      font-size: 100%;

-      font-weight: bold;

-      text-align: center }

-

-p.t4 {text-indent: 0% ;

-      font-size: 80%;

-      text-align: center }

-

-p.t4b {text-indent: 0% ;

-      font-size: 80%;

-      font-weight: bold;

-      text-align: center }

-

-p.t5 {text-indent: 0% ;

-      font-size: 60%;

-      text-align: center }

-

-h1 { text-align: center }

-h2 { text-align: center }

-h3 { text-align: center }

-h4 { text-align: center }

-h5 { text-align: center }

-

-p.poem {text-indent: 0%;

-        margin-left: 10%; }

-

-p.thought {text-indent: 0% ;

-           letter-spacing: 4em ;

-           text-align: center }

-

-p.letter {text-indent: 0%;

-          margin-left: 10% ;

-          margin-right: 10% }

-

-p.footnote {text-indent: 0% ;

-            font-size: 80%;

-            margin-left: 10% ;

-            margin-right: 10% }

-

-p.dedication {text-indent: 0%;

-              margin-left: 15%;

-              text-align: justify }

-

-p.quote {text-indent: 4% ;

-         margin-left: 0% ;

-         margin-right: 0% }

-

-p.finis { font-size: larger ;

-          text-align: center ;

-          text-indent: 0% ;

-          margin-left: 0% ;

-          margin-right: 0% }

-

-p.capcenter { margin-left: 0;

-              margin-right: 0 ;

-              margin-bottom: .5% ;

-              margin-top: 0;

-              font-weight: bold;

-              float: none ;

-              clear: both ;

-              text-indent: 0%;

-              text-align: center  }

-

-img.imgcenter { margin-left: auto;

-                margin-bottom: 0;

-                margin-top: 1%;

-                margin-right: auto; }

-

-</style>

-

-</head>

-

-<body>

-

-

-<pre>

-

-Project Gutenberg's A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson, by Maurice Clare

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most

-other parts of the world 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.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have

-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.

-

-Title: A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson

-

-Author: Maurice Clare

-

-Release Date: September 28, 2016 [EBook #53165]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

-

-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DAY WITH ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ***

-

-

-

-

-Produced by Al Haines

-

-

-

-

-

-</pre>

-

-

-<p><br /><br /></p>

-

-<p class="capcenter">

-<a id="img-cover-f"></a>

-<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-cover-f.jpg" alt="Cover art" />

-<br />

-Cover art

-</p>

-

-<p><br /><br /></p>

-

-<p class="capcenter">

-<a id="img-000"></a>

-<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-000.jpg" alt="Robert Louis Stevenson" />

-<br />

-Robert Louis Stevenson

-</p>

-

-<p><br /><br /></p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>

-</p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-"Took down the folds of her hair&mdash;shook it<br />

-round her face and the pool repeated her<br />

-thus veiled."

-</p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-<i>Prince Otto.</i>

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p class="capcenter">

-<a id="img-front-t"></a>

-<a href="images/img-front.jpg">

-<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-front-t.jpg" alt="Prince Otto" />

-</a>

-<br />

-<i>Prince Otto</i>

-</p>

-

-<h1>

-<br /><br />

-  A DAY WITH<br />

-  ROBERT LOUIS<br />

-  STEVENSON<br />

-</h1>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p class="t2b">

-  BY MAURICE CLARE<br />

-</p>

-

-<p><br /><br /></p>

-

-<p class="t2">

-  LONDON<br />

-  HODDER &amp; STOUGHTON<br />

-  1910<br />

-</p>

-

-<p><br /><br /><br /></p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-  <i>In the same Series.<br />

-  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Dickens.<br />

-  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thackeray.</i><br />

-</p>

-

-<p><br /><br /><br /></p>

-

-<p><a id="chap01"></a></p>

-

-<h3>

-A DAY WITH STEVENSON.

-</h3>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p>

-Supposing that in the month

-of April, 1886, you had arrived,

-a guest foreseen, at the pleasant

-ivy-muffled dwelling in Bournemouth,

-which had recently adopted

-the name of Skerryvore, and

-that you had been permitted to

-enter its doors&mdash;you might account yourself a

-somewhat favoured person.  For the master

-of the house, "that rickety and cloistered

-spectre," as he termed himself, the "pallid

-brute who lived in Skerryvore like a weevil

-in a biscuit," might be invisible for the

-nonce&mdash;shut upstairs, forbidden even to speak for

-fear of inducing hemorrhage.  Or again, you

-might yourself be afflicted with an obvious

-cold: in which case you would not be admitted

-into his presence, lest you left contagion of

-that cold.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-But if fate befriended you, you would

-chance upon the most remarkable personality,

-it might be, that you had yet encountered.  A

-lean, long flat-chested man, gracefully emphatic

-of gesture&mdash;pacing up and down the room as he

-talked&mdash;burning with hectic energy&mdash;a man of

-rich brown tints in hair and eyes and skin:

-mutable, mirthful, brilliant&mdash;above all "vital,"

-as he had described himself, "wholly vital with

-a buoyance of life" which had upborne him

-hitherto over the crest of most tumultuous distresses.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-Robert Louis Stevenson was now thirty-six

-years old: and ever since his sixth year, when,

-as his mother recorded in her diary, he dreamed

-that he "heard the noise of pens writing," his

-aim had been set unswervingly toward the one

-goal.  Born of a strong and strenuous family,

-the great lighthouse builders of the north, he

-was not, like them, intent upon the subjugation

-of obstinate stone, the ordering and ordaining

-of rocks and seas.  Dhu Heartach and the Bell

-Rock and Skerryvore he could admire at a

-distance: but the material which cried aloud to

-him for mastery, was much more plastic,&mdash;yet,

-to him, no less stubborn.  "I imagine," he

-declared, "nobody ever had such pains to learn

-a trade as I had; but I slogged at it day in and

-day out."  His fastidious soul refused to be

-contented with a facile and slipshod utterance.

-A passionate quest: after <i>le mot propre</i>, which had

-led him, in his own phrase, to "play the sedulus

-ape" to all the great prose writers of the

-past&mdash;and a sense of style such as no man had ever so

-anxiously and assiduously developed in

-himself&mdash;these had achieved their own reward.

-"'Thanks to my dire industry," said Stevenson,

-"I have done more with smaller gifts than

-almost any man of letters in the world."

-</p>

-

-<p>

-And this was a just pride: for there was

-no branch of literature in which he could not

-admirably acquit himself.  So many years a

-struggler in obscurity, with small hopes, few

-successes, little encouragement&mdash;battling with

-continuous and crippling maladies,&mdash;this

-indomitable artist, by sheer dint of "dire industry,"

-now suddenly stood forth in full blaze of

-public recognition.  The author of <i>Virginibus

-Puerisque</i>, <i>Treasure Island</i>, <i>Prince Otto</i>, <i>The Child's

-Garden of Verse</i>, and <i>Dr. Jekyll</i>, was very much

-a man to be reckoned with.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-Probably few modern books have met with

-such instantaneous and triumphant success as

-<i>Treasure Island</i> and <i>Dr. Jekyll</i>.  The first, after

-running its course, unannounced and comparatively

-unrecognized, the serial of an obscure

-author, in <i>Young Folks' Paper</i>, was published

-in book form,&mdash;and Stevenson, like Byron,

-"awoke to find himself famous."  The honours

-which he had failed to obtain with all the

-dainty humour, all the valiant fatalism, of

-<i>Virginibus Puerisque</i>, had been accorded

-without stint to <i>Treasure Island</i>.  It was a tense

-and stimulating piece of pure adventure.  The

-authentic air of the eighteenth century breathed

-through every sentence of it: and its fine

-flavour of dare-devil romance kindled even

-sober statesmen, such as Mr. Gladstone, to a

-very furore of avidity in devouring its

-breathless pages.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-As for <i>Dr. Jekyll</i>, that gruesome

-work&mdash;literally the product of a nightmare&mdash;had been

-quoted in pulpits, discussed in newspapers, read

-by everybody,&mdash;it had taken the world by

-storm.  Yet Stevenson's head was not turned

-by his tardily-won success: with his customary

-<i>sang froid</i>, he took things as they came, failures

-and triumphs, and met each alike with smiling gallantry.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-The motives which had led him into authorship&mdash;or

-rather forced him, despite all stress

-and hindrance of froward circumstances,&mdash;were

-as curiously varied as his own nature; and it

-was these motives which still drove him hard

-and incessantly.  To fame he was perhaps not

-wholly indifferent.  No author sits so austerely

-aloft as to disdain popular applause altogether.

-Yet a born stylist and a conscious artist, like

-Stevenson, knew that his most finished work

-was above and beyond the appreciation of the

-general public.  For money,&mdash;though it was a

-necessity of life to him, and although, with all

-his recent triumphs, he was not at present

-earning more than £400 a year,&mdash;for money he

-did not care, except as a means to an end.

-"Wealth is only useful for two things," he

-said, "a yacht and a string quartet.  Except

-for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as

-a man can possibly want."  Still, in declaring,

-"I do not write for the public," he added with

-engaging candour, "I do write for money, a

-nobler deity," and this, to a certain extent was

-true.  It was for money only, no doubt, that he

-was now undertaking, against the grain, that

-"romance of tushery," <i>The Black Arrow</i>, a tale

-with a mediæval setting in which he felt himself

-ill at ease.  But "most of all," he allowed, "I

-write for myself; not perhaps any more noble,

-but both more intelligent and nearer home."

-</p>

-

-<p>

-And that a man in such difficulties of health

-and finance, and so precarious a position, should

-have the courage of his own determined artistry,

-was in itself sufficiently remarkable: but the

-result more than justified his choice.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-All the morning, Stevenson had been

-upstairs writing: probably after a bad night;

-very likely in what any other man would term

-a totally unfit condition.  Under any and all

-circumstances, he continued to write unflinchingly;

-racked by coughing, reeling with weakness,

-with his right arm in a sling, and his left

-hand holding the pen,&mdash;sitting up in bed with

-a clinical thermometer in his mouth; and yet,

-as he declared, "I like my life all the same

-... I should bear false witness if I did not

-declare life happy." ... He was, in his own

-words, "made for a contest, and the powers

-have so willed that my battlefield should be

-this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the

-physic bottle."

-</p>

-

-<p>

-"To declare life happy," became, in fact,

-his literary mission,&mdash;the condensed philosophy

-of his gay, inveterate courage.  "I believe that

-literature should give joy," was his maxim,

-"one dank, dispirited word is harmful,&mdash;a

-crime of <i>lèse-humanité</i>."  This brave and cheerful

-outlook is evident in all his essays,&mdash;it is,

-so to speak, a glorified and artistic

-Mark-Tapleyism, all-pervading, unimpugnable, ready

-to survive the most malevolent accidents of

-life, the crowning tragedy of death itself.  And

-so you find the "chronic sickist," as he termed

-himself, still ready, in all but body, for great

-risks and inspiriting adventures, and&mdash;through

-a mist of pain&mdash;leading forlorn hopes with a

-waving sword of flame.  You hear him

-proclaiming that:

-</p>

-

-<p>

-"All who have meant good work with their

-whole hearts, have done good work, although

-they may die before they have the time to sign

-it.  Every heart that has beat strong and

-cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it

-in the world, and bettered the tradition of

-mankind.  And even if death catch people,

-like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying

-out vast projects, and planning monstrous

-foundations, flushed with hope, and their

-mouths full of boastful language, they should

-be at once tripped up and silenced; is there

-not something brave and spirited in such a

-termination? and does not life go down with

-a better grace, foaming in full body over a

-precipice, than miserable struggling to an end

-in sandy deltas?"  (<i>Virginibus Puerisque</i>.)

-</p>

-

-<p>

-And to him, above all, applied his own

-triumphant lines, those which he addressed to

-W. E. Henley, another writer, a man of like

-courageous outlook, who, like himself, "in the

-fell grip of circumstances, had not winced nor

-cried aloud:

-</p>

-

-<p class="poem">

-  "... Small the pipe; but oh! do thou,<br />

-  Peak-faced and suffering piper, blow therein<br />

-  The dirge of heroes dead; and to these sick,<br />

-  These dying, sound the triumph over death.<br />

-  Behold! each greatly breathes; each tastes a joy<br />

-  Unknown before in dying; for each knows<br />

-  A hero dies with him&mdash;though unfulfilled,<br />

-  Yet conquering truly&mdash;and not dies in vain."<br />

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p>

-At present he was engaged upon <i>Kidnapped</i>,

-that admirable piece of fiction which he had

-begun, "partly as a lark and partly as a

-pot-boiler."  It was a relief, after the concentrated

-horror of <i>Dr. Jekyll</i>, to escape into the Scottish

-heather-scent and to feel the salt sea-wind

-whistling through the cordage of <i>Kidnapped</i>.

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>

-</p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-"She stood on the bulwarks and held on by a<br />

-stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats.

-</p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-<i>Catriona.</i>

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p class="capcenter">

-<a id="img-012-t"></a>

-<a href="images/img-012.jpg">

-<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-012-t.jpg" alt="Catriona" />

-</a>

-<br />

-<i>Catriona</i>

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p>

-Stevenson was desirous to "get free of this

-prison-yard of the abominably ugly, where I

-take my daily exercise with my contemporaries."  Possibly

-he recognised that the amazing

-popularity of <i>Jekyll</i> had been due to the morbid

-attractiveness of its subject, rather than to its

-merits of craftsmanship; for, as he had averred,

-"I know that good work sometimes hits; but,

-with my hand on my heart, I think it is an

-accident."  But now he was at liberty to give

-play to his infinite variety upon a true boys'

-book,&mdash;a story to satisfy the inveterate

-boyishness of his own heart.  "Of the romance of

-boyhood and adolescence, it has been said, he

-is an unsurpassed master ... the philosophy

-of life developed in both his essays and romances

-is that rather of a gifted boy than a mature

-man."  (J. W. Mackail.)  And even the girls

-of Stevenson's imagination have been accused

-of being "boys in petticoats."  The phrase has

-reason.  "I have never admired a girl," he

-wrote, and again, "I have never pleased

-myself with any women of mine."  The other sex

-remained for him, throughout, a mystery which

-he hardly cared to solve,&mdash;a sealed book which

-he was not desirous to open.  "Of the two

-eternal factors in the destiny of man, warfare

-and love," although he allowed that "to love

-is the great amulet which makes the world a

-garden," he preferred to deal almost exclusively

-with the warfare.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-And yet one women had played a very

-important part in Stevenson's life: and it was

-practically with his marriage that the tide of

-his fortunes had changed.  His wife,&mdash;"trusty,

-dusky, vivid, true," was his very <i>alter ego</i>: with

-"a character" (to quote Mr. Sidney Colvin)

-"as strong, interesting, and romantic almost

-as his own: an inseparable sharer of all his

-thoughts, the most shrewd and stimulating of

-critics: and in sickness, despite her own

-precarious health, the most devoted and most

-efficient of nurses."  To while away the weary

-hours of illness, Mrs. Stevenson made up

-stories to amuse him,&mdash;and subsequently the

-husband and wife would write them out

-together.  She, with her "eyes of gold and

-bramble-dew," was literally all-in-all to him as

-companion, helpmate, friend;&mdash;and far&mdash;how

-infinitely far!&mdash;above the ideal wife whom he

-had described so adroitly,&mdash;in his bachelor

-days,&mdash;that woman who should have "a fine

-touch for the affections," and who should at

-least be sufficiently talented to avoid boring her

-life-long comrade.  The character of the ideal

-wife, as there indicated,&mdash;apt at gracious

-compromises, possessor of a cheerful fluent

-tongue,&mdash;was very obviously set forth by a man who

-had never yet been stirred by the sharp throbs

-of an imperative emotion.  And now that

-Stevenson realised what love in its depth and

-breadth might mean, it held a certain sanctity

-for him,&mdash;he was loth to speak of it, as to write

-of it.  It was a marvel that had befallen him

-personally: but for other people, it might still

-perhaps, be no more than that gentle domesticated

-affection which he had portrayed with

-such amiable humour.  But there was one

-point in which he, consciously or unconsciously

-insisted, in his <i>desiderata</i> of the female

-character.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-"It always warms a man," he had declared,

-"to see a woman brave," and he saw it daily

-in his wife.  Therefore it came about, that,

-unversed in women&mdash;as Stevenson unquestionably

-was, he was able to endow his heroines

-with a touch of gallant boyishness, a hint of

-the heroic&mdash;and if they failed in

-flesh-and-blood-<i>vraisemblance</i>,

-they had that "steel-true,

-blade-straight" quality which he adored in the

-women he had chosen.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-You will notice this courageous virtue in

-all of them, rich and poor; from <i>Catriona</i>, that

-"tall, pretty, tender figure of a maiden, when,

-having assured her father's escape from prison

-by a bold stratagem, she arrives a fugitive and

-an exile at Helvoetsluys, and lands from the

-staggering side of the <i>Rose</i> into the little boat

-below;&mdash;when, in David Balfour's words:

-</p>

-

-<p>

-"I began to think I had made a fool's

-bargain, that it was merely impossible Catriona

-should be got on board to me, and that I stood

-to be set ashore in Helvoet all by myself

-... But this was to reckon without the lass's courage

-... Up she stood on the bulwarks and held

-by a stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats,

-which made the enterprise more dangerous,

-and gave us rather more a view of her stockings

-than would be thought genteel in cities"&mdash;(<i>Catriona.</i>)

-</p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-to Seraphina in <i>Prince Otto</i>, still inherently

-valorous in that desperate flight through the

-forest: where:

-</p>

-

-<p>

-"At length when she was well weary, she

-came upon a wide and shallow pool.  Stones

-stood in it, like islands; bulrushes fringed the

-coast; the floor was paved with pine needles;

-and the pines themselves, whose roots made

-promontories, looked down silently on their

-green images.  She crept to the margin and

-beheld herself with wonder, a hollow and

-bright-eyed phantom, in the ruins of her palace

-robe ... She addressed herself to make a

-toilette by that forest mirror, washed herself

-pure from all the stains of her adventure, took

-off her jewels and wrapped them in her handkerchief,

-re-arranged the tatters of her dress, and

-took down the folds of her hair.  She shook it

-round her face, and the pool repeated her thus

-veiled."  (<i>Prince Otto.</i>)

-</p>

-

-<p>

-Clara Huddlestone, in the <i>Pavilion on the

-Links</i>, repeats the same undauntable note: Olalla

-is inexorable in moral courage of renunciation,

-even the weeping Blanche, in the <i>Sieur de

-Malétroit's Door</i>, has the mettle of some small

-creature at bay.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-The charm of Stevenson's heroines is, in

-short, a cold charm; nor does he often accord

-them the assistance of a personal description.

-But they are finely tempered, of the best Toledo

-steel, and owing to their boyish character, there

-is no very obvious gap in those novels where

-they are conspicuously absent, such as <i>The Ebb

-Tide</i>, <i>The Wreckers</i>, and <i>The Master of Ballantrae</i>.

-In the latter, indeed, there is a slight "female

-interest," but a stronger personality in the

-heroine must inevitably have changed or

-coloured the whole course of the book: and

-one cannot but detect a certain vacuum, where

-at least some emotion might have lifted a

-haggard head, in the character of Mrs. Henry,&mdash;even

-in that scene, surcharged with hidden

-explosive possibilities, when the author

-describes how:

-</p>

-

-<p>

-"The Master played upon that little ballad,

-and upon those who heard him, like an instrument,

-and seemed now upon the point of failing,

-and now to conquer his distress, so that the

-words and music seemed to pour out of his own

-heart and his own past, and to be aimed directly

-at Mrs. Henry....  When it came to an end

-we all sat silent for a time: he had chosen the

-dusk of the afternoon, so that none could see

-his neighbour's face: but it seemed as if we

-held our breathing: only my old lord cleared

-his throat.  The first to move was the singer,

-who got to his feet suddenly and softly, and

-went and walked softly to and fro in the low

-end of the hall."  (<i>The Master of Ballantrae.</i>)

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p>

-But Mrs. Henry plays a very minor part

-in the marring or making, here, of two men's

-lives: it is a rôle of <i>vis inertiæ</i> at best.  And,

-indeed, when all is said, what shall a petticoat

-be if not irrelevant, among the clash of steel

-and smoke of pistols, in an atmosphere

-permeated by Spanish doubloons or illicit piratical

-treasure?  Stevenson's infallible artistic

-instinct led him to keep the adventure-story

-pendant upon the deeds of men, and the eager

-mistakes of boys; and a certain curious

-penchant for the squalid, the submerged, the

-picturesque, brought him by choice into such

-company as no heroine should enter&mdash;that of

-Villon, for instance, and John Silver, and

-Herrick the cockney vagabond.  "The spice

-of life is battle," he said; and his life, and his

-books, were brimful of battles with foes or

-with fortune.

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>

-</p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-"'The words and music seemed to pour out of<br />

-his own heart and his own past and to be<br />

-aimed directly at Mrs. Henry."

-</p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-<i>Master of Ballantrae.</i>

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p class="capcenter">

-<a id="img-020-t"></a>

-<a href="images/img-020.jpg">

-<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-020-t.jpg" alt="Master of Ballantrae" />

-</a>

-<br />

-<i>Master of Ballantrae</i>

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p>

-The open-air life which he had perforce

-abandoned, the joy of physical strength and

-hair-breadth 'scape, could still be his by proxy.

-He revelled in delineating his ideal man:

-</p>

-

-<p>

-"Being a true lover of living, a fellow with

-something pushing and spontaneous in his inside,

-he must, like any other soldier, in any other

-stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best

-pace until he touch the goal.  'A peerage or

-Westminster Abbey!' cried Nelson in his

-bright, boyish, heroic manner.  These are great

-incentives; not for any of these, but for the

-plain satisfaction of living, of being about their

-business in some sort or other, do the brave,

-serviceable men of every nation tread down

-the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all

-the stumbling-blocks of prudence."  (<i>Virginibus

-Puerisque.</i>)

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p>

-The tramp of horse-hoofs, the clank of the

-capstan, the door ajar&mdash;a thousand sights and

-sounds were but symbolisms to him of some

-mysterious by-way of adventure to be followed

-up, quick with latent possibilities of romance;

-and from one word, one name, he could evolve

-a whole intricate plot.  With the simplest of

-sentences, he could electrify the startled reader,

-as when in <i>The Wrecker</i>, where the desperate

-castaways sit gambling on the desert island, and

-one suddenly cries aloud, "Sail ho!"

-</p>

-

-<p>

-"All turned at the cry,&mdash;and there, in the

-wild light of the morning, heading straight for

-Midway Reef, was the brig <i>Flying Scud</i> of

-Hull."  (<i>The Wrecker.</i>)

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p>

-On that moment the whole tale hangs as on

-a pivot.  All its involution and evolution, all

-its intricate and tangled clues, lead&mdash;backwards

-or forwards&mdash;to this one swift breathless sight.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-His morning's work accomplished, the tall

-gaunt man came downstairs, literally to play

-awhile.  After weeks, it might be, of enforced

-seclusion in his room, his eye rested pleasurably

-upon the various attractive objects which

-almost seemed like new to him.  Stevenson,&mdash;the

-avowed evader of personal property, the

-rolling-stone that had so long refused to gather

-moss,&mdash;was now, under a woman's tender

-surveillance, surrounded with charm and comfort.

-"Our drawing room," he maintained, "is a

-place so beautiful that it's like eating to sit

-down in it.  No other room is so lovely in the

-world ... I blush for the figure I cut in such

-a bower."  The garden, Mrs. Stevenson's

-special pleasure, but one in which her husband

-did not share, was very lovely, with a lawn,

-and heather-bank, and a half-acre of land,

-where a little stream ran down a "chine" full

-of rhododendrons.  A large dovecot figured in

-the garden; and there also "Boguey," the

-Stevensons' dog, was buried, to whom no other

-dog had ever been deemed a worthy successor.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-Stevenson, his clothes hanging loosely on

-his emaciated figure, and his hands&mdash;"wonderful

-hands&mdash;long and fragile, like those in the

-early portraits of Velasquez," lingered lovingly

-over the keys.  For a while he amused himself

-by picking out, note by note, the old-world

-dance measures of Lully and Rameau; those

-gavottes, rigadoons and minuets, which

-conveyed to him the indefinable <i>pot-pourri</i>-like,

-flavour of his favourite eighteenth century,

-embued with a certain stately dignity, "the

-periwig feeling," he called it, as of lords and

-ladies treading courtly measures.  Stevenson

-was passionately fond of classical music, but he

-had never attained to any facility of execution.

-And when he grew tired with his efforts as an

-interpreter of Lully, he turned to "pickling," as

-he called it&mdash;composing, that is to say, after a

-fashion, with "the manly and melodious

-forefinger."  The fact that he had invariably failed

-to master the rudiments of theory, in no wise

-deterred him; on the contrary, difficulties

-rather enhanced his delight.  "Books are of

-no use," he avowed, "they tell you how to

-write in four parts, and that cannot be done

-by man."  So he continued to "pickle" with

-a light heart, and to enjoy consecutive fifths

-and other theoretical delinquencies with an

-enthusiasm worthy of the most modern composer.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-Nothing but the lunch hour brought his

-musical experiments to a close.  Stevenson,

-who had, in his own words, "been obliged to

-strip himself, one after another, of all the

-pleasures that he had chosen, except smoking"

-(and indeed, he was smoking cigarettes all day

-long) by no means disdained the pleasures of

-the table.  Not, perhaps, in the role of a

-gourmet&mdash;but as an artist in the more recondite

-delicacies of taste and smell.  "To detect the

-flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human

-perfection than to find beauty in the colours of

-a sunset," he observed; he coupled the flavour

-of wine with the beauty of the dawn, and

-declared that we do not recognise at its full

-value the great part in life that is played by

-eating and drinking.  "There is a romance

-about the matter after all," he observed.

-"Probably the table has more devotees than love;

-and I am sure food is more generally

-entertaining than scenery."  It was the "romance of

-the matter" that appealed to him; especially

-the colour, and savour, and poetical tradition

-of wine.  "Books, and tobacco jars, and some

-old Burgundy as red as a November sunset,

-and as fragrant as a violet in April"&mdash;these,

-he thought, should suffice the most luxurious.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-After lunch, if he anticipated an exhausting

-evening, he went to sleep&mdash;at a moment's

-notice&mdash;and after a short, sound repose, was

-as eager as ever to resume his pianoforte

-amusements; which he continued until friends

-arrived.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-At the age of four-and-twenty, Stevenson

-had noted down his three chief wishes.  "First,

-good health: secondly, a small competence:

-thirdly, <i>O Du lieber Gott!</i> friends."  The first:

-wish was irrevocably denied: the second was

-only just beginning to be granted, the guerdon

-of unresting toil: the third petition had been

-abundantly answered.  Never was a man more

-happy in his friends; or one who made them so

-instantaneously and without effort.  "He had

-only to speak," said one friend, "in order to

-be recognised in the first minute for a witty

-and charming gentleman, and in the second,

-for a man of genius."  Some, indeed, like

-Mr. Edmund Gosse, came home dazzled and

-astounded, saying, as Constance does of Arthur,

-"Was ever such a gracious creature born?"  His

-expression, of mingled tenderness and

-mirth, his "scholarly and eclectic

-presence"&mdash;together with his picturesque, velvet-coated

-appearance, and his flashing flow of words,

-combined to make a man so attractive and so

-unique as could command all love at will.  And

-the friends were very many and very notable,

-who haunted Skerryvore.  First and foremost

-was "Bob," Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, the

-poet's first cousin, the brilliant art critic: "the

-man likest and most unlike to me," as

-R.L.S. described him.  "Bob's" sister, Mrs. de Mattos,

-and her child were frequent visitors; then there

-were celebrities from London: such as Sargent

-the painter, William Archer, Sidney Colvin,

-W. E. Henley, Henry James; and again

-friends residing in the neighbourhood of

-Bournemouth; the poet Sir Henry Taylor, and his

-family; Sir Percy Shelley and his wife.  These

-latter, indeed, regarded Stevenson almost in the

-light of a son.  He struck them as bearing an

-extraordinary resemblance to Percy Bysshe

-Shelley; less, perhaps, in lineaments than in

-figure and in mind; and in consequence of this

-similarity, they held him very dear.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-But to all he was the same bewildering

-charming host, the man who variously displayed,

-to quote W. E. Henley:

-</p>

-

-<p class="poem">

-  "A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,<br />

-  Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,&mdash;"<br />

-</p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-And combined with these curiously versatile

-fruits, "something of the Shorter Catechist."

-</p>

-

-<p>

-Generous in criticism, kind in praise, grave

-and humorous in rapid transition, the amazing

-scope and variety of Stevenson's writings were

-excelled by the scope and variety of his talk.

-"There was no part of the writer that was not

-visibly present in the man."  (Graham Balfour.)  He

-had laid down his opinion that "there can

-be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to

-be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome."  But

-none save those who were privileged to

-hear him, as with quick, impetuous gestures,

-like a Southern foreigner, he emphasised his

-phrases, could realise the power, the versatility,

-the inexpressible, irrepressible charm with

-which the author could fulfil his "fair ambition."

-</p>

-

-<p>

-When the visitors had severally taken

-their departure, the strong resonant voice,

-with its Scottish accent and rich, full tones still

-ringing in their ears,&mdash;Stevenson had suffered

-no abatement in the stream of his exuberant

-mental vitality.  The excitement of

-conversation had, if anything, keyed him up; and

-presently, for the writing of a few unavoidable

-letters, he betook himself to his study; "the

-study where a smiling God beholds each day

-my stage of labour trod," and sate himself

-down there with reluctance.

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>

-</p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-"All turned at the cry, and there in the wild<br />

-light of the morning heaving straight for<br />

-midway reef was the brig <i>Flying Scud</i> of<br />

-Hull."

-</p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-<i>The Wrecker.</i>

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p class="capcenter">

-<a id="img-030-t"></a>

-<a href="images/img-030.jpg">

-<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-030-t.jpg" alt="The Wrecker" />

-</a>

-<br />

-<i>The Wrecker</i>

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p>

-Correspondence, as a rule, he found but an

-irksome affair; unless conducted upon his own

-whimsical lines.  "I deny that letters should

-contain news&mdash;I mean mine&mdash;those of other

-people should," was his theory; and he boasted

-himself of a "willingness to pour forth unmitigated

-rot, which constitutes in me the true spirit

-of correspondence."  For all that, his letters,

-grave or gay, remain among the most delightful

-reading in existence; flavoured with his

-quaintest conceits, endowed with his most

-delicate turns of phrase, and often tempered

-with that "something of the Shorter Catechist"

-to which Henley had alluded.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-For, undoubtedly, as time went on,

-although Stevenson continued to "combine the

-face of a boy with the distinguished bearing

-of a man of the world," he was gradually

-exchanging the "streak of Puck" and

-the capricious unconventions of the born

-Bohemian, for something graver and more

-mature,&mdash;a tendency almost towards the

-didactic.  "'Tis a strange world indeed," he

-had commented, "but there is a manifest God

-for those who care to look for Him."  And

-now, "with the passing of years," he observed,

-"there grows more and more upon me that

-belief in the kindness of this scheme of things,

-and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an

-excellent and pacifying compensation."  He

-was suffering, and in all probability would

-perpetually suffer, from "that sharp ferule of

-calamity under which we are all God's scholars

-till we die": but his patience was impregnable,

-and his desire to leave a brave example bore

-him constant company.  "To suffer," said he,

-"sets a keen edge on what remains of the

-agreeable," and he prepared to enjoy with

-equal zest all pleasures which were still

-permitted to him.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-As he put away his writing materials, and

-descended once more to his beloved piano, his

-father and mother came in.  They were living

-in Bournemouth to be near their only son.

-The old lighthouse engineer, whose father had

-built the Bell Rock, who had served under his

-brother Alan in the building of Skerryvore,

-"the noblest of all extant sea-lights," who had

-himself erected Dhu Heartach, was now palpably

-failing.  The spectacle of a stern and

-honest man slowly evacuating all that he had

-held of personal strength, was, to his son Louis,

-a poignantly pathetic one.  Their disagreements

-had been very many and deep-rooted,

-dating from even before that "dreadful evening

-walk" in Stevenson's youth, when, "on being

-tightly cross-questioned," the lad who had been

-trained for a civil engineer, and had "worked

-in a carpenter's shop and had a brass foundry,

-and hung about wood-yards and the like," confessed

-that he cared for nothing but literature,&mdash;"no

-profession!" as his father contemptuously

-replied.  They had differed on almost

-every conceivable topic open to their discussion,&mdash;yet

-here, in the fulness of time, they were at

-peace together,&mdash;the austere old man in his

-second childhood, and the chronic invalid who

-"must live as though he were walking on

-eggs."  Innumerable ineffaceable traits of similarity

-bound one to the other; at bottom of all the

-bygone angers lay a permanent bedrock of

-mutual love.  And perhaps the nearing vision

-of death which terminated all vistas for both of

-them, exercised its usual effect, of calm, and

-<i>laisser-faire</i>, and the equalisation of things: for

-it is probable that no man has a just sense of

-proportionate values until he stands in the

-presence of death.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-Stevenson had often alluded, as a matter of

-personal knowledge, to his constant prescience

-of mortality, and how it affected a man's

-thoughts of life.  Very seldom has the view of

-the confirmed invalid, the doomed consumptive,

-been put forth to the world with the frankness

-with which Stevenson invested it.  He has

-been sometimes charged with a certain lack of

-reticence: but in this matter, unquestionably,

-his candour was to the benefitting of mankind:

-to whom these close views of the inevitable end

-are rarely possible under such deliberate and

-clear-headed conditions.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-There is nothing maudlin, nothing hypochondriacal,

-about Stevenson's treatment of

-this subject: the same cheerful philosophy

-bears him up, the same vitality of joy.  It is

-hardly to be wondered at, that some critics

-handled him seriously, on account of his

-lightheartedness in the august shadow of the last

-enemy,&mdash;and his inveterate optimism in the face

-of all calamities.  "He jests at scars who never

-felt a wound," they practically told him,&mdash;and

-could hardly be persuaded to credit the paradox

-that the man who preached in season and out of

-season, the gospel of that "cheery old Pagan,

-Hope," was not a denizen of the open-air,&mdash;healthy,

-athletic, vigorous, incapable of realising

-the maladies incident to man,&mdash;instead of an

-emaciated, bed-ridden creature, whose smallest

-pleasures must be measured, so to speak, in a

-medicine-glass.  But, "It is something after

-all," he has said, "to leave a brave example":

-and in that he triumphantly succeeded.  For

-the opportunities of meteoric heroisms are few

-and far between; but every hour beholds the

-need of those obscurer braveries which may be

-born of pain and suffering....

-</p>

-

-<p>

-In <i>Ordered South</i> and other well-known

-essays, he shows the gradual relaxation of the

-ties which bind a man to terrestrial things,&mdash;and

-the curiously significant alteration in his

-regard for the facts of life,&mdash;from the sower in

-the dank spring furrows, to the sight of little

-children with their long possibilities before them.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-Stevenson had no children of his own.

-His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, then at school in

-Bournemouth, was destined to become his

-friend and collaborator: but it is doubtful that

-he cared for children as such.  The average

-small folk, "dragged about in a pleasing stupor

-by nurses," were very far remote from that

-superabundant vitality nursed in an attenuated

-physique, which had sat up with a shawl over

-its shoulders, so many tedious months in

-childhood, when its principal <i>habitat</i> was "The Land

-of Counterpane" and other regions mapped

-out in the great and glorious world of Make-Believe.

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>

-</p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-ST. IVES DESCENDS FROM EDINBURGH CASTLE.

-</p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-"The whole forces of my mind were so consumed<br />

-with losing hold and getting it again, that I<br />

-could scarce have told whether I was going up<br />

-or coming down."

-</p>

-

-<p class="noindent">

-<i>St. Ives.</i>

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p class="capcenter">

-<a id="img-038-t"></a>

-<a href="images/img-038.jpg">

-<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-038-t.jpg" alt="St. Ives" />

-</a>

-<br />

-<i>St. Ives</i>

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p>

-For this reason, the <i>Child's Garden of Verses</i>

-is not, in any real sense of the word, a child's

-book at all.  It contains the exquisite

-imaginations of childhood as the grown-up man

-remembers them: to him they have the charm of

-the vanished past, they are the utterances of

-one who has also lived in Arcadia.  But to the

-child, they are the very commonplaces of

-existence.  To sway to and fro in a swing,

-"the pleasantest thing a child can do,"&mdash;to

-bring home treasures from field and wood, nuts

-and wooden whistles, and some all-precious

-unidentifiable stone, "though father denies it,

-I'm sure it is gold,"&mdash;these are everyday affairs

-to the country-child,&mdash;just as watching the

-lamplighter is to the town child.  To read

-verses about them is but a waste of time, when

-one might be actively engaged in similar

-avocations.  But to the grown-man who can never

-play with wooden soldiers in the garden, never

-be a pirate any more,&mdash;these reminiscences of

-Stevenson's are a delight unfailing.  No one

-else has ever worded them quite so accurately,

-quite so simply: and, taken all for all, they are

-in themselves a summing-up of that most

-excellent philosophy of this author, "The

-world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure

-we should all be as happy as kings!"  The

-world was indeed full of a number of things to

-R.L.S. and,&mdash;passed through the crucible of

-his own astonishing personality,&mdash;they were

-all, bad or good, transmogrified into things

-that make for joy.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-After eight o'clock dinner was over, the

-old folks bade good-night,&mdash;the father, with

-touching affection, kissing Louis as though he

-were a child, and murmuring, "You'll see me

-in the morning, dearie," as if still addressing

-that little feeble creature who had been kept

-alive with such difficulty in the old days at

-Edinburgh.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-The younger man returned to the piano-forte;

-it drew him like a magnet.  For a short

-time he indulged in his desultory music-making,

-relishing to the uttermost every success of

-sound which he achieved: and the happiness,

-which was his theory of life, radiated in warm

-abundance from his richly-tinted face and

-glowing eyes.  "It's a fine life," he exclaimed.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-At last the day's supply of energy succumbed

-before the imperious demands of this

-"fiery threadpaper of a man," and in deference

-to his wife's suggestion he betook himself to bed.

-Not necessarily to rest; for even in his dreams

-his busy brain was working, and his "Brownies,"

-as he termed them, bringing him fresh material

-for plots.  <i>Dr. Jekyll</i> had been thus evolved from

-three scenes dreamed successively in detail, from

-which the dreamer waked with cries of horror.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-But he did not flinch before the coming

-night, and anything that it might bring of

-sickness or unrest.  He thought alone upon the

-past delightful day, fraught with strenuous work

-and simple pleasures; and he petitioned, in his

-own words:

-</p>

-

-<p class="poem">

-  "If I have faltered more or less<br />

-  In my great task of happiness;<br />

-  If I have moved along my race<br />

-  And shown no glorious morning face;<br />

-  If beams from happy human eyes<br />

-  Have moved me not; if morning skies,<br />

-  Books, and my food, and summer rain<br />

-  Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:&mdash;<br />

-  Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take<br />

-  And stab my spirit broad awake!"<br />

-  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;(<i>Underwoods.</i>)<br />

-</p>

-

-<p><br /></p>

-

-<p>

-His wife hovered around him with gentle

-ministrations, as suddenly out-wearied, Robert

-Louis Stevenson extended his long, lean form

-to a possible repose.  There was not, perhaps,

-a cheerfuller man that night in England.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-The sea hummed at the foot of the chine,

-with that soft and dove-like purring of the

-South-coast sea; the doves made answer with

-a vibrant cooing in the middle distance of the

-twilight garden.  Spring buds of pear-trees and

-cherry-trees globed themselves stealthily into

-blossom; a delicate latent energy was

-consciously present in the air&mdash;the rising of sap

-and revivification of seed, all the mysterious

-hidden progresses of April.  And the man

-whose ways were set in a perpetual

-convergence towards the doors of death, waved,

-so to speak, a blithe recognition to the myriad

-hosts of life.

-</p>

-

-<p>

-"O toiling hands of mortals!  O unwearied

-feet, travelling ye know not whither!  Soon,

-soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on

-some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way

-further, against the setting sun, descry the

-spires of El Dorado.  Little do ye know your

-own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a

-better thing than to arrive, and the true success

-is labour."  (<i>Virginibus Puerisque.</i>)

-</p>

-

-<p><br /><br /><br /></p>

-

-<p>

-The author desires to acknowledge the

-kindness of Messrs. Cassell &amp; Co., in allowing

-short extracts to be made from <i>The Master of

-Ballantrae</i>, <i>The Wrecker</i>, and <i>Catriona</i>; also to

-thank Mr. William Heinemann for a similar

-courtesy with regard to <i>St. Ives</i>, and

-Messrs. Chatto &amp; Windus for their permission to

-include various quotations from <i>Virginibus

-Puerisque</i>, <i>Underwoods</i>, and <i>Prince Otto</i>.

-</p>

-

-<p><br /><br /></p>

-

-<p class="t4">

-  Printed by The Bushey Colour Press (André &amp; Sleigh, Ltd.),<br />

-  Bushey, Herts., England.<br />

-</p>

-

-<p><br /><br /></p>

-

-<p class="capcenter">

-<a id="img-cover-r"></a>

-<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-cover-r.jpg" alt="Rear cover" />

-<br />

-Rear cover

-</p>

-

-<p><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-<pre>

-

-

-

-

-

-End of Project Gutenberg's A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson, by Maurice Clare

-

-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DAY WITH ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ***

-

-***** This file should be named 53165-h.htm or 53165-h.zip *****

-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:

-        http://www.gutenberg.org/5/3/1/6/53165/

-

-Produced by Al Haines

-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will

-be renamed.

-

-Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright

-law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,

-so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United

-States without permission and without paying copyright

-royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part

-of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project

-Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm

-concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,

-and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive

-specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this

-eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook

-for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,

-performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given

-away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks

-not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the

-trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.

-

-START: FULL LICENSE

-

-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

-

-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free

-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work

-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project

-Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full

-Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at

-www.gutenberg.org/license.

-

-Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project

-Gutenberg-tm electronic works

-

-1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm

-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to

-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property

-(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all

-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or

-destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your

-possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a

-Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound

-by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the

-person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph

-1.E.8.

-

-1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be

-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who

-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few

-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works

-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See

-paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project

-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this

-agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm

-electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

-

-1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the

-Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection

-of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual

-works in the collection are in the public domain in the United

-States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the

-United States and you are located in the United States, we do not

-claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,

-displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as

-all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope

-that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting

-free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm

-works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the

-Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily

-comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the

-same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when

-you share it without charge with others.

-

-1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern

-what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are

-in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,

-check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this

-agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,

-distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any

-other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no

-representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any

-country outside the United States.

-

-1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

-

-1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

-immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear

-prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work

-on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the

-phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,

-performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

-

-  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and

-  most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the

-  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you

-  are located before using this ebook.

-

-1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is

-derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not

-contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the

-copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in

-the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are

-redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project

-Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply

-either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or

-obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm

-trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

-

-1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted

-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution

-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any

-additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms

-will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works

-posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the

-beginning of this work.

-

-1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm

-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this

-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.

-

-1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without

-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with

-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project

-Gutenberg-tm License.

-

-1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,

-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including

-any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access

-to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format

-other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official

-version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site

-(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense

-to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means

-of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain

-Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the

-full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

-

-1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works

-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

-

-1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works

-provided that

-

-* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from

-  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method

-  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed

-  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has

-  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project

-  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid

-  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are

-  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty

-  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project

-  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in

-  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg

-  Literary Archive Foundation."

-

-* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies

-  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he

-  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm

-  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all

-  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue

-  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm

-  works.

-

-* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

-  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the

-  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of

-  receipt of the work.

-

-* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free

-  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.

-

-1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project

-Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than

-are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing

-from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The

-Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm

-trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

-

-1.F.

-

-1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable

-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread

-works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project

-Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm

-electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may

-contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate

-or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other

-intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or

-other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or

-cannot be read by your equipment.

-

-1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right

-of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project

-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project

-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project

-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all

-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal

-fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT

-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE

-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE

-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE

-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR

-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH

-DAMAGE.

-

-1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a

-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can

-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a

-written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you

-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium

-with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you

-with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in

-lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person

-or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second

-opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If

-the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing

-without further opportunities to fix the problem.

-

-1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth

-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO

-OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT

-LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

-

-1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of

-damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement

-violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the

-agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or

-limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or

-unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the

-remaining provisions.

-

-1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the

-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone

-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in

-accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the

-production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm

-electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,

-including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of

-the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this

-or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or

-additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any

-Defect you cause.

-

-Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm

-

-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of

-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of

-computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It

-exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations

-from people in all walks of life.

-

-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's

-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will

-remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project

-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure

-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future

-generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary

-Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see

-Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at

-www.gutenberg.org

-

-

-

-Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

-

-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit

-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the

-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal

-Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification

-number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary

-Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by

-U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.

-

-The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the

-mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its

-volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous

-locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt

-Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to

-date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and

-official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

-

-For additional contact information:

-

-    Dr. Gregory B. Newby

-    Chief Executive and Director

-    gbnewby@pglaf.org

-

-Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg

-Literary Archive Foundation

-

-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide

-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of

-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be

-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest

-array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations

-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt

-status with the IRS.

-

-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United

-States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a

-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up

-with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations

-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND

-DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular

-state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate

-

-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we

-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition

-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who

-approach us with offers to donate.

-

-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make

-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from

-outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

-

-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation

-methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other

-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To

-donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate

-

-Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.

-

-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project

-Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be

-freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and

-distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of

-volunteer support.

-

-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed

-editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in

-the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not

-necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper

-edition.

-

-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search

-facility: www.gutenberg.org

-

-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,

-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary

-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to

-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.

-

-

-

-</pre>

-

-</body>

-

-</html>

-

+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
+
+<head>
+
+<link rel="coverpage" href="images/img-cover-f.jpg" />
+
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
+
+<title>
+The Project Gutenberg E-text of A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson,
+by Maurice Clare
+</title>
+
+<style type="text/css">
+body { color: black;
+       background: white;
+       margin-right: 10%;
+       margin-left: 10%;
+       font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;
+       text-align: justify }
+
+p {text-indent: 4% }
+
+p.noindent {text-indent: 0% }
+
+p.t1 {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 200%;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t2 {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 150%;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t2b {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 150%;
+      font-weight: bold;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t3 {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 100%;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t3b {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 100%;
+      font-weight: bold;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t4 {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 80%;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t4b {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 80%;
+      font-weight: bold;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t5 {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 60%;
+      text-align: center }
+
+h1 { text-align: center }
+h2 { text-align: center }
+h3 { text-align: center }
+h4 { text-align: center }
+h5 { text-align: center }
+
+p.poem {text-indent: 0%;
+        margin-left: 10%; }
+
+p.thought {text-indent: 0% ;
+           letter-spacing: 4em ;
+           text-align: center }
+
+p.letter {text-indent: 0%;
+          margin-left: 10% ;
+          margin-right: 10% }
+
+p.footnote {text-indent: 0% ;
+            font-size: 80%;
+            margin-left: 10% ;
+            margin-right: 10% }
+
+p.dedication {text-indent: 0%;
+              margin-left: 15%;
+              text-align: justify }
+
+p.quote {text-indent: 4% ;
+         margin-left: 0% ;
+         margin-right: 0% }
+
+p.finis { font-size: larger ;
+          text-align: center ;
+          text-indent: 0% ;
+          margin-left: 0% ;
+          margin-right: 0% }
+
+p.capcenter { margin-left: 0;
+              margin-right: 0 ;
+              margin-bottom: .5% ;
+              margin-top: 0;
+              font-weight: bold;
+              float: none ;
+              clear: both ;
+              text-indent: 0%;
+              text-align: center  }
+
+img.imgcenter { margin-left: auto;
+                margin-bottom: 0;
+                margin-top: 1%;
+                margin-right: auto; }
+
+</style>
+
+</head>
+
+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 53165 ***</div>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-cover-f"></a>
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-cover-f.jpg" alt="Cover art" />
+<br />
+Cover art
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-000"></a>
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-000.jpg" alt="Robert Louis Stevenson" />
+<br />
+Robert Louis Stevenson
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"Took down the folds of her hair&mdash;shook it<br />
+round her face and the pool repeated her<br />
+thus veiled."
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Prince Otto.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-front-t"></a>
+<a href="images/img-front.jpg">
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-front-t.jpg" alt="Prince Otto" />
+</a>
+<br />
+<i>Prince Otto</i>
+</p>
+
+<h1>
+<br /><br />
+  A DAY WITH<br />
+  ROBERT LOUIS<br />
+  STEVENSON<br />
+</h1>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="t2b">
+  BY MAURICE CLARE<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="t2">
+  LONDON<br />
+  HODDER &amp; STOUGHTON<br />
+  1910<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  <i>In the same Series.<br />
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Dickens.<br />
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thackeray.</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap01"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+A DAY WITH STEVENSON.
+</h3>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+Supposing that in the month
+of April, 1886, you had arrived,
+a guest foreseen, at the pleasant
+ivy-muffled dwelling in Bournemouth,
+which had recently adopted
+the name of Skerryvore, and
+that you had been permitted to
+enter its doors&mdash;you might account yourself a
+somewhat favoured person.  For the master
+of the house, "that rickety and cloistered
+spectre," as he termed himself, the "pallid
+brute who lived in Skerryvore like a weevil
+in a biscuit," might be invisible for the
+nonce&mdash;shut upstairs, forbidden even to speak for
+fear of inducing hemorrhage.  Or again, you
+might yourself be afflicted with an obvious
+cold: in which case you would not be admitted
+into his presence, lest you left contagion of
+that cold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if fate befriended you, you would
+chance upon the most remarkable personality,
+it might be, that you had yet encountered.  A
+lean, long flat-chested man, gracefully emphatic
+of gesture&mdash;pacing up and down the room as he
+talked&mdash;burning with hectic energy&mdash;a man of
+rich brown tints in hair and eyes and skin:
+mutable, mirthful, brilliant&mdash;above all "vital,"
+as he had described himself, "wholly vital with
+a buoyance of life" which had upborne him
+hitherto over the crest of most tumultuous distresses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert Louis Stevenson was now thirty-six
+years old: and ever since his sixth year, when,
+as his mother recorded in her diary, he dreamed
+that he "heard the noise of pens writing," his
+aim had been set unswervingly toward the one
+goal.  Born of a strong and strenuous family,
+the great lighthouse builders of the north, he
+was not, like them, intent upon the subjugation
+of obstinate stone, the ordering and ordaining
+of rocks and seas.  Dhu Heartach and the Bell
+Rock and Skerryvore he could admire at a
+distance: but the material which cried aloud to
+him for mastery, was much more plastic,&mdash;yet,
+to him, no less stubborn.  "I imagine," he
+declared, "nobody ever had such pains to learn
+a trade as I had; but I slogged at it day in and
+day out."  His fastidious soul refused to be
+contented with a facile and slipshod utterance.
+A passionate quest: after <i>le mot propre</i>, which had
+led him, in his own phrase, to "play the sedulus
+ape" to all the great prose writers of the
+past&mdash;and a sense of style such as no man had ever so
+anxiously and assiduously developed in
+himself&mdash;these had achieved their own reward.
+"'Thanks to my dire industry," said Stevenson,
+"I have done more with smaller gifts than
+almost any man of letters in the world."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this was a just pride: for there was
+no branch of literature in which he could not
+admirably acquit himself.  So many years a
+struggler in obscurity, with small hopes, few
+successes, little encouragement&mdash;battling with
+continuous and crippling maladies,&mdash;this
+indomitable artist, by sheer dint of "dire industry,"
+now suddenly stood forth in full blaze of
+public recognition.  The author of <i>Virginibus
+Puerisque</i>, <i>Treasure Island</i>, <i>Prince Otto</i>, <i>The Child's
+Garden of Verse</i>, and <i>Dr. Jekyll</i>, was very much
+a man to be reckoned with.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Probably few modern books have met with
+such instantaneous and triumphant success as
+<i>Treasure Island</i> and <i>Dr. Jekyll</i>.  The first, after
+running its course, unannounced and comparatively
+unrecognized, the serial of an obscure
+author, in <i>Young Folks' Paper</i>, was published
+in book form,&mdash;and Stevenson, like Byron,
+"awoke to find himself famous."  The honours
+which he had failed to obtain with all the
+dainty humour, all the valiant fatalism, of
+<i>Virginibus Puerisque</i>, had been accorded
+without stint to <i>Treasure Island</i>.  It was a tense
+and stimulating piece of pure adventure.  The
+authentic air of the eighteenth century breathed
+through every sentence of it: and its fine
+flavour of dare-devil romance kindled even
+sober statesmen, such as Mr. Gladstone, to a
+very furore of avidity in devouring its
+breathless pages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for <i>Dr. Jekyll</i>, that gruesome
+work&mdash;literally the product of a nightmare&mdash;had been
+quoted in pulpits, discussed in newspapers, read
+by everybody,&mdash;it had taken the world by
+storm.  Yet Stevenson's head was not turned
+by his tardily-won success: with his customary
+<i>sang froid</i>, he took things as they came, failures
+and triumphs, and met each alike with smiling gallantry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The motives which had led him into authorship&mdash;or
+rather forced him, despite all stress
+and hindrance of froward circumstances,&mdash;were
+as curiously varied as his own nature; and it
+was these motives which still drove him hard
+and incessantly.  To fame he was perhaps not
+wholly indifferent.  No author sits so austerely
+aloft as to disdain popular applause altogether.
+Yet a born stylist and a conscious artist, like
+Stevenson, knew that his most finished work
+was above and beyond the appreciation of the
+general public.  For money,&mdash;though it was a
+necessity of life to him, and although, with all
+his recent triumphs, he was not at present
+earning more than £400 a year,&mdash;for money he
+did not care, except as a means to an end.
+"Wealth is only useful for two things," he
+said, "a yacht and a string quartet.  Except
+for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as
+a man can possibly want."  Still, in declaring,
+"I do not write for the public," he added with
+engaging candour, "I do write for money, a
+nobler deity," and this, to a certain extent was
+true.  It was for money only, no doubt, that he
+was now undertaking, against the grain, that
+"romance of tushery," <i>The Black Arrow</i>, a tale
+with a mediæval setting in which he felt himself
+ill at ease.  But "most of all," he allowed, "I
+write for myself; not perhaps any more noble,
+but both more intelligent and nearer home."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And that a man in such difficulties of health
+and finance, and so precarious a position, should
+have the courage of his own determined artistry,
+was in itself sufficiently remarkable: but the
+result more than justified his choice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the morning, Stevenson had been
+upstairs writing: probably after a bad night;
+very likely in what any other man would term
+a totally unfit condition.  Under any and all
+circumstances, he continued to write unflinchingly;
+racked by coughing, reeling with weakness,
+with his right arm in a sling, and his left
+hand holding the pen,&mdash;sitting up in bed with
+a clinical thermometer in his mouth; and yet,
+as he declared, "I like my life all the same
+... I should bear false witness if I did not
+declare life happy." ... He was, in his own
+words, "made for a contest, and the powers
+have so willed that my battlefield should be
+this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the
+physic bottle."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To declare life happy," became, in fact,
+his literary mission,&mdash;the condensed philosophy
+of his gay, inveterate courage.  "I believe that
+literature should give joy," was his maxim,
+"one dank, dispirited word is harmful,&mdash;a
+crime of <i>lèse-humanité</i>."  This brave and cheerful
+outlook is evident in all his essays,&mdash;it is,
+so to speak, a glorified and artistic
+Mark-Tapleyism, all-pervading, unimpugnable, ready
+to survive the most malevolent accidents of
+life, the crowning tragedy of death itself.  And
+so you find the "chronic sickist," as he termed
+himself, still ready, in all but body, for great
+risks and inspiriting adventures, and&mdash;through
+a mist of pain&mdash;leading forlorn hopes with a
+waving sword of flame.  You hear him
+proclaiming that:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"All who have meant good work with their
+whole hearts, have done good work, although
+they may die before they have the time to sign
+it.  Every heart that has beat strong and
+cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it
+in the world, and bettered the tradition of
+mankind.  And even if death catch people,
+like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying
+out vast projects, and planning monstrous
+foundations, flushed with hope, and their
+mouths full of boastful language, they should
+be at once tripped up and silenced; is there
+not something brave and spirited in such a
+termination? and does not life go down with
+a better grace, foaming in full body over a
+precipice, than miserable struggling to an end
+in sandy deltas?"  (<i>Virginibus Puerisque</i>.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And to him, above all, applied his own
+triumphant lines, those which he addressed to
+W. E. Henley, another writer, a man of like
+courageous outlook, who, like himself, "in the
+fell grip of circumstances, had not winced nor
+cried aloud:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "... Small the pipe; but oh! do thou,<br />
+  Peak-faced and suffering piper, blow therein<br />
+  The dirge of heroes dead; and to these sick,<br />
+  These dying, sound the triumph over death.<br />
+  Behold! each greatly breathes; each tastes a joy<br />
+  Unknown before in dying; for each knows<br />
+  A hero dies with him&mdash;though unfulfilled,<br />
+  Yet conquering truly&mdash;and not dies in vain."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+At present he was engaged upon <i>Kidnapped</i>,
+that admirable piece of fiction which he had
+begun, "partly as a lark and partly as a
+pot-boiler."  It was a relief, after the concentrated
+horror of <i>Dr. Jekyll</i>, to escape into the Scottish
+heather-scent and to feel the salt sea-wind
+whistling through the cordage of <i>Kidnapped</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"She stood on the bulwarks and held on by a<br />
+stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Catriona.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-012-t"></a>
+<a href="images/img-012.jpg">
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-012-t.jpg" alt="Catriona" />
+</a>
+<br />
+<i>Catriona</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+Stevenson was desirous to "get free of this
+prison-yard of the abominably ugly, where I
+take my daily exercise with my contemporaries."  Possibly
+he recognised that the amazing
+popularity of <i>Jekyll</i> had been due to the morbid
+attractiveness of its subject, rather than to its
+merits of craftsmanship; for, as he had averred,
+"I know that good work sometimes hits; but,
+with my hand on my heart, I think it is an
+accident."  But now he was at liberty to give
+play to his infinite variety upon a true boys'
+book,&mdash;a story to satisfy the inveterate
+boyishness of his own heart.  "Of the romance of
+boyhood and adolescence, it has been said, he
+is an unsurpassed master ... the philosophy
+of life developed in both his essays and romances
+is that rather of a gifted boy than a mature
+man."  (J. W. Mackail.)  And even the girls
+of Stevenson's imagination have been accused
+of being "boys in petticoats."  The phrase has
+reason.  "I have never admired a girl," he
+wrote, and again, "I have never pleased
+myself with any women of mine."  The other sex
+remained for him, throughout, a mystery which
+he hardly cared to solve,&mdash;a sealed book which
+he was not desirous to open.  "Of the two
+eternal factors in the destiny of man, warfare
+and love," although he allowed that "to love
+is the great amulet which makes the world a
+garden," he preferred to deal almost exclusively
+with the warfare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet one women had played a very
+important part in Stevenson's life: and it was
+practically with his marriage that the tide of
+his fortunes had changed.  His wife,&mdash;"trusty,
+dusky, vivid, true," was his very <i>alter ego</i>: with
+"a character" (to quote Mr. Sidney Colvin)
+"as strong, interesting, and romantic almost
+as his own: an inseparable sharer of all his
+thoughts, the most shrewd and stimulating of
+critics: and in sickness, despite her own
+precarious health, the most devoted and most
+efficient of nurses."  To while away the weary
+hours of illness, Mrs. Stevenson made up
+stories to amuse him,&mdash;and subsequently the
+husband and wife would write them out
+together.  She, with her "eyes of gold and
+bramble-dew," was literally all-in-all to him as
+companion, helpmate, friend;&mdash;and far&mdash;how
+infinitely far!&mdash;above the ideal wife whom he
+had described so adroitly,&mdash;in his bachelor
+days,&mdash;that woman who should have "a fine
+touch for the affections," and who should at
+least be sufficiently talented to avoid boring her
+life-long comrade.  The character of the ideal
+wife, as there indicated,&mdash;apt at gracious
+compromises, possessor of a cheerful fluent
+tongue,&mdash;was very obviously set forth by a man who
+had never yet been stirred by the sharp throbs
+of an imperative emotion.  And now that
+Stevenson realised what love in its depth and
+breadth might mean, it held a certain sanctity
+for him,&mdash;he was loth to speak of it, as to write
+of it.  It was a marvel that had befallen him
+personally: but for other people, it might still
+perhaps, be no more than that gentle domesticated
+affection which he had portrayed with
+such amiable humour.  But there was one
+point in which he, consciously or unconsciously
+insisted, in his <i>desiderata</i> of the female
+character.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It always warms a man," he had declared,
+"to see a woman brave," and he saw it daily
+in his wife.  Therefore it came about, that,
+unversed in women&mdash;as Stevenson unquestionably
+was, he was able to endow his heroines
+with a touch of gallant boyishness, a hint of
+the heroic&mdash;and if they failed in
+flesh-and-blood-<i>vraisemblance</i>,
+they had that "steel-true,
+blade-straight" quality which he adored in the
+women he had chosen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You will notice this courageous virtue in
+all of them, rich and poor; from <i>Catriona</i>, that
+"tall, pretty, tender figure of a maiden, when,
+having assured her father's escape from prison
+by a bold stratagem, she arrives a fugitive and
+an exile at Helvoetsluys, and lands from the
+staggering side of the <i>Rose</i> into the little boat
+below;&mdash;when, in David Balfour's words:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I began to think I had made a fool's
+bargain, that it was merely impossible Catriona
+should be got on board to me, and that I stood
+to be set ashore in Helvoet all by myself
+... But this was to reckon without the lass's courage
+... Up she stood on the bulwarks and held
+by a stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats,
+which made the enterprise more dangerous,
+and gave us rather more a view of her stockings
+than would be thought genteel in cities"&mdash;(<i>Catriona.</i>)
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+to Seraphina in <i>Prince Otto</i>, still inherently
+valorous in that desperate flight through the
+forest: where:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"At length when she was well weary, she
+came upon a wide and shallow pool.  Stones
+stood in it, like islands; bulrushes fringed the
+coast; the floor was paved with pine needles;
+and the pines themselves, whose roots made
+promontories, looked down silently on their
+green images.  She crept to the margin and
+beheld herself with wonder, a hollow and
+bright-eyed phantom, in the ruins of her palace
+robe ... She addressed herself to make a
+toilette by that forest mirror, washed herself
+pure from all the stains of her adventure, took
+off her jewels and wrapped them in her handkerchief,
+re-arranged the tatters of her dress, and
+took down the folds of her hair.  She shook it
+round her face, and the pool repeated her thus
+veiled."  (<i>Prince Otto.</i>)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clara Huddlestone, in the <i>Pavilion on the
+Links</i>, repeats the same undauntable note: Olalla
+is inexorable in moral courage of renunciation,
+even the weeping Blanche, in the <i>Sieur de
+Malétroit's Door</i>, has the mettle of some small
+creature at bay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The charm of Stevenson's heroines is, in
+short, a cold charm; nor does he often accord
+them the assistance of a personal description.
+But they are finely tempered, of the best Toledo
+steel, and owing to their boyish character, there
+is no very obvious gap in those novels where
+they are conspicuously absent, such as <i>The Ebb
+Tide</i>, <i>The Wreckers</i>, and <i>The Master of Ballantrae</i>.
+In the latter, indeed, there is a slight "female
+interest," but a stronger personality in the
+heroine must inevitably have changed or
+coloured the whole course of the book: and
+one cannot but detect a certain vacuum, where
+at least some emotion might have lifted a
+haggard head, in the character of Mrs. Henry,&mdash;even
+in that scene, surcharged with hidden
+explosive possibilities, when the author
+describes how:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Master played upon that little ballad,
+and upon those who heard him, like an instrument,
+and seemed now upon the point of failing,
+and now to conquer his distress, so that the
+words and music seemed to pour out of his own
+heart and his own past, and to be aimed directly
+at Mrs. Henry....  When it came to an end
+we all sat silent for a time: he had chosen the
+dusk of the afternoon, so that none could see
+his neighbour's face: but it seemed as if we
+held our breathing: only my old lord cleared
+his throat.  The first to move was the singer,
+who got to his feet suddenly and softly, and
+went and walked softly to and fro in the low
+end of the hall."  (<i>The Master of Ballantrae.</i>)
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+But Mrs. Henry plays a very minor part
+in the marring or making, here, of two men's
+lives: it is a rôle of <i>vis inertiæ</i> at best.  And,
+indeed, when all is said, what shall a petticoat
+be if not irrelevant, among the clash of steel
+and smoke of pistols, in an atmosphere
+permeated by Spanish doubloons or illicit piratical
+treasure?  Stevenson's infallible artistic
+instinct led him to keep the adventure-story
+pendant upon the deeds of men, and the eager
+mistakes of boys; and a certain curious
+penchant for the squalid, the submerged, the
+picturesque, brought him by choice into such
+company as no heroine should enter&mdash;that of
+Villon, for instance, and John Silver, and
+Herrick the cockney vagabond.  "The spice
+of life is battle," he said; and his life, and his
+books, were brimful of battles with foes or
+with fortune.
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"'The words and music seemed to pour out of<br />
+his own heart and his own past and to be<br />
+aimed directly at Mrs. Henry."
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Master of Ballantrae.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-020-t"></a>
+<a href="images/img-020.jpg">
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-020-t.jpg" alt="Master of Ballantrae" />
+</a>
+<br />
+<i>Master of Ballantrae</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+The open-air life which he had perforce
+abandoned, the joy of physical strength and
+hair-breadth 'scape, could still be his by proxy.
+He revelled in delineating his ideal man:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Being a true lover of living, a fellow with
+something pushing and spontaneous in his inside,
+he must, like any other soldier, in any other
+stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best
+pace until he touch the goal.  'A peerage or
+Westminster Abbey!' cried Nelson in his
+bright, boyish, heroic manner.  These are great
+incentives; not for any of these, but for the
+plain satisfaction of living, of being about their
+business in some sort or other, do the brave,
+serviceable men of every nation tread down
+the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all
+the stumbling-blocks of prudence."  (<i>Virginibus
+Puerisque.</i>)
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+The tramp of horse-hoofs, the clank of the
+capstan, the door ajar&mdash;a thousand sights and
+sounds were but symbolisms to him of some
+mysterious by-way of adventure to be followed
+up, quick with latent possibilities of romance;
+and from one word, one name, he could evolve
+a whole intricate plot.  With the simplest of
+sentences, he could electrify the startled reader,
+as when in <i>The Wrecker</i>, where the desperate
+castaways sit gambling on the desert island, and
+one suddenly cries aloud, "Sail ho!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"All turned at the cry,&mdash;and there, in the
+wild light of the morning, heading straight for
+Midway Reef, was the brig <i>Flying Scud</i> of
+Hull."  (<i>The Wrecker.</i>)
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+On that moment the whole tale hangs as on
+a pivot.  All its involution and evolution, all
+its intricate and tangled clues, lead&mdash;backwards
+or forwards&mdash;to this one swift breathless sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His morning's work accomplished, the tall
+gaunt man came downstairs, literally to play
+awhile.  After weeks, it might be, of enforced
+seclusion in his room, his eye rested pleasurably
+upon the various attractive objects which
+almost seemed like new to him.  Stevenson,&mdash;the
+avowed evader of personal property, the
+rolling-stone that had so long refused to gather
+moss,&mdash;was now, under a woman's tender
+surveillance, surrounded with charm and comfort.
+"Our drawing room," he maintained, "is a
+place so beautiful that it's like eating to sit
+down in it.  No other room is so lovely in the
+world ... I blush for the figure I cut in such
+a bower."  The garden, Mrs. Stevenson's
+special pleasure, but one in which her husband
+did not share, was very lovely, with a lawn,
+and heather-bank, and a half-acre of land,
+where a little stream ran down a "chine" full
+of rhododendrons.  A large dovecot figured in
+the garden; and there also "Boguey," the
+Stevensons' dog, was buried, to whom no other
+dog had ever been deemed a worthy successor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stevenson, his clothes hanging loosely on
+his emaciated figure, and his hands&mdash;"wonderful
+hands&mdash;long and fragile, like those in the
+early portraits of Velasquez," lingered lovingly
+over the keys.  For a while he amused himself
+by picking out, note by note, the old-world
+dance measures of Lully and Rameau; those
+gavottes, rigadoons and minuets, which
+conveyed to him the indefinable <i>pot-pourri</i>-like,
+flavour of his favourite eighteenth century,
+embued with a certain stately dignity, "the
+periwig feeling," he called it, as of lords and
+ladies treading courtly measures.  Stevenson
+was passionately fond of classical music, but he
+had never attained to any facility of execution.
+And when he grew tired with his efforts as an
+interpreter of Lully, he turned to "pickling," as
+he called it&mdash;composing, that is to say, after a
+fashion, with "the manly and melodious
+forefinger."  The fact that he had invariably failed
+to master the rudiments of theory, in no wise
+deterred him; on the contrary, difficulties
+rather enhanced his delight.  "Books are of
+no use," he avowed, "they tell you how to
+write in four parts, and that cannot be done
+by man."  So he continued to "pickle" with
+a light heart, and to enjoy consecutive fifths
+and other theoretical delinquencies with an
+enthusiasm worthy of the most modern composer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing but the lunch hour brought his
+musical experiments to a close.  Stevenson,
+who had, in his own words, "been obliged to
+strip himself, one after another, of all the
+pleasures that he had chosen, except smoking"
+(and indeed, he was smoking cigarettes all day
+long) by no means disdained the pleasures of
+the table.  Not, perhaps, in the role of a
+gourmet&mdash;but as an artist in the more recondite
+delicacies of taste and smell.  "To detect the
+flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human
+perfection than to find beauty in the colours of
+a sunset," he observed; he coupled the flavour
+of wine with the beauty of the dawn, and
+declared that we do not recognise at its full
+value the great part in life that is played by
+eating and drinking.  "There is a romance
+about the matter after all," he observed.
+"Probably the table has more devotees than love;
+and I am sure food is more generally
+entertaining than scenery."  It was the "romance of
+the matter" that appealed to him; especially
+the colour, and savour, and poetical tradition
+of wine.  "Books, and tobacco jars, and some
+old Burgundy as red as a November sunset,
+and as fragrant as a violet in April"&mdash;these,
+he thought, should suffice the most luxurious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After lunch, if he anticipated an exhausting
+evening, he went to sleep&mdash;at a moment's
+notice&mdash;and after a short, sound repose, was
+as eager as ever to resume his pianoforte
+amusements; which he continued until friends
+arrived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the age of four-and-twenty, Stevenson
+had noted down his three chief wishes.  "First,
+good health: secondly, a small competence:
+thirdly, <i>O Du lieber Gott!</i> friends."  The first:
+wish was irrevocably denied: the second was
+only just beginning to be granted, the guerdon
+of unresting toil: the third petition had been
+abundantly answered.  Never was a man more
+happy in his friends; or one who made them so
+instantaneously and without effort.  "He had
+only to speak," said one friend, "in order to
+be recognised in the first minute for a witty
+and charming gentleman, and in the second,
+for a man of genius."  Some, indeed, like
+Mr. Edmund Gosse, came home dazzled and
+astounded, saying, as Constance does of Arthur,
+"Was ever such a gracious creature born?"  His
+expression, of mingled tenderness and
+mirth, his "scholarly and eclectic
+presence"&mdash;together with his picturesque, velvet-coated
+appearance, and his flashing flow of words,
+combined to make a man so attractive and so
+unique as could command all love at will.  And
+the friends were very many and very notable,
+who haunted Skerryvore.  First and foremost
+was "Bob," Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, the
+poet's first cousin, the brilliant art critic: "the
+man likest and most unlike to me," as
+R.L.S. described him.  "Bob's" sister, Mrs. de Mattos,
+and her child were frequent visitors; then there
+were celebrities from London: such as Sargent
+the painter, William Archer, Sidney Colvin,
+W. E. Henley, Henry James; and again
+friends residing in the neighbourhood of
+Bournemouth; the poet Sir Henry Taylor, and his
+family; Sir Percy Shelley and his wife.  These
+latter, indeed, regarded Stevenson almost in the
+light of a son.  He struck them as bearing an
+extraordinary resemblance to Percy Bysshe
+Shelley; less, perhaps, in lineaments than in
+figure and in mind; and in consequence of this
+similarity, they held him very dear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to all he was the same bewildering
+charming host, the man who variously displayed,
+to quote W. E. Henley:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,<br />
+  Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,&mdash;"<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+And combined with these curiously versatile
+fruits, "something of the Shorter Catechist."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Generous in criticism, kind in praise, grave
+and humorous in rapid transition, the amazing
+scope and variety of Stevenson's writings were
+excelled by the scope and variety of his talk.
+"There was no part of the writer that was not
+visibly present in the man."  (Graham Balfour.)  He
+had laid down his opinion that "there can
+be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to
+be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome."  But
+none save those who were privileged to
+hear him, as with quick, impetuous gestures,
+like a Southern foreigner, he emphasised his
+phrases, could realise the power, the versatility,
+the inexpressible, irrepressible charm with
+which the author could fulfil his "fair ambition."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the visitors had severally taken
+their departure, the strong resonant voice,
+with its Scottish accent and rich, full tones still
+ringing in their ears,&mdash;Stevenson had suffered
+no abatement in the stream of his exuberant
+mental vitality.  The excitement of
+conversation had, if anything, keyed him up; and
+presently, for the writing of a few unavoidable
+letters, he betook himself to his study; "the
+study where a smiling God beholds each day
+my stage of labour trod," and sate himself
+down there with reluctance.
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"All turned at the cry, and there in the wild<br />
+light of the morning heaving straight for<br />
+midway reef was the brig <i>Flying Scud</i> of<br />
+Hull."
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>The Wrecker.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-030-t"></a>
+<a href="images/img-030.jpg">
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-030-t.jpg" alt="The Wrecker" />
+</a>
+<br />
+<i>The Wrecker</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+Correspondence, as a rule, he found but an
+irksome affair; unless conducted upon his own
+whimsical lines.  "I deny that letters should
+contain news&mdash;I mean mine&mdash;those of other
+people should," was his theory; and he boasted
+himself of a "willingness to pour forth unmitigated
+rot, which constitutes in me the true spirit
+of correspondence."  For all that, his letters,
+grave or gay, remain among the most delightful
+reading in existence; flavoured with his
+quaintest conceits, endowed with his most
+delicate turns of phrase, and often tempered
+with that "something of the Shorter Catechist"
+to which Henley had alluded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For, undoubtedly, as time went on,
+although Stevenson continued to "combine the
+face of a boy with the distinguished bearing
+of a man of the world," he was gradually
+exchanging the "streak of Puck" and
+the capricious unconventions of the born
+Bohemian, for something graver and more
+mature,&mdash;a tendency almost towards the
+didactic.  "'Tis a strange world indeed," he
+had commented, "but there is a manifest God
+for those who care to look for Him."  And
+now, "with the passing of years," he observed,
+"there grows more and more upon me that
+belief in the kindness of this scheme of things,
+and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an
+excellent and pacifying compensation."  He
+was suffering, and in all probability would
+perpetually suffer, from "that sharp ferule of
+calamity under which we are all God's scholars
+till we die": but his patience was impregnable,
+and his desire to leave a brave example bore
+him constant company.  "To suffer," said he,
+"sets a keen edge on what remains of the
+agreeable," and he prepared to enjoy with
+equal zest all pleasures which were still
+permitted to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he put away his writing materials, and
+descended once more to his beloved piano, his
+father and mother came in.  They were living
+in Bournemouth to be near their only son.
+The old lighthouse engineer, whose father had
+built the Bell Rock, who had served under his
+brother Alan in the building of Skerryvore,
+"the noblest of all extant sea-lights," who had
+himself erected Dhu Heartach, was now palpably
+failing.  The spectacle of a stern and
+honest man slowly evacuating all that he had
+held of personal strength, was, to his son Louis,
+a poignantly pathetic one.  Their disagreements
+had been very many and deep-rooted,
+dating from even before that "dreadful evening
+walk" in Stevenson's youth, when, "on being
+tightly cross-questioned," the lad who had been
+trained for a civil engineer, and had "worked
+in a carpenter's shop and had a brass foundry,
+and hung about wood-yards and the like," confessed
+that he cared for nothing but literature,&mdash;"no
+profession!" as his father contemptuously
+replied.  They had differed on almost
+every conceivable topic open to their discussion,&mdash;yet
+here, in the fulness of time, they were at
+peace together,&mdash;the austere old man in his
+second childhood, and the chronic invalid who
+"must live as though he were walking on
+eggs."  Innumerable ineffaceable traits of similarity
+bound one to the other; at bottom of all the
+bygone angers lay a permanent bedrock of
+mutual love.  And perhaps the nearing vision
+of death which terminated all vistas for both of
+them, exercised its usual effect, of calm, and
+<i>laisser-faire</i>, and the equalisation of things: for
+it is probable that no man has a just sense of
+proportionate values until he stands in the
+presence of death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stevenson had often alluded, as a matter of
+personal knowledge, to his constant prescience
+of mortality, and how it affected a man's
+thoughts of life.  Very seldom has the view of
+the confirmed invalid, the doomed consumptive,
+been put forth to the world with the frankness
+with which Stevenson invested it.  He has
+been sometimes charged with a certain lack of
+reticence: but in this matter, unquestionably,
+his candour was to the benefitting of mankind:
+to whom these close views of the inevitable end
+are rarely possible under such deliberate and
+clear-headed conditions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is nothing maudlin, nothing hypochondriacal,
+about Stevenson's treatment of
+this subject: the same cheerful philosophy
+bears him up, the same vitality of joy.  It is
+hardly to be wondered at, that some critics
+handled him seriously, on account of his
+lightheartedness in the august shadow of the last
+enemy,&mdash;and his inveterate optimism in the face
+of all calamities.  "He jests at scars who never
+felt a wound," they practically told him,&mdash;and
+could hardly be persuaded to credit the paradox
+that the man who preached in season and out of
+season, the gospel of that "cheery old Pagan,
+Hope," was not a denizen of the open-air,&mdash;healthy,
+athletic, vigorous, incapable of realising
+the maladies incident to man,&mdash;instead of an
+emaciated, bed-ridden creature, whose smallest
+pleasures must be measured, so to speak, in a
+medicine-glass.  But, "It is something after
+all," he has said, "to leave a brave example":
+and in that he triumphantly succeeded.  For
+the opportunities of meteoric heroisms are few
+and far between; but every hour beholds the
+need of those obscurer braveries which may be
+born of pain and suffering....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In <i>Ordered South</i> and other well-known
+essays, he shows the gradual relaxation of the
+ties which bind a man to terrestrial things,&mdash;and
+the curiously significant alteration in his
+regard for the facts of life,&mdash;from the sower in
+the dank spring furrows, to the sight of little
+children with their long possibilities before them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stevenson had no children of his own.
+His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, then at school in
+Bournemouth, was destined to become his
+friend and collaborator: but it is doubtful that
+he cared for children as such.  The average
+small folk, "dragged about in a pleasing stupor
+by nurses," were very far remote from that
+superabundant vitality nursed in an attenuated
+physique, which had sat up with a shawl over
+its shoulders, so many tedious months in
+childhood, when its principal <i>habitat</i> was "The Land
+of Counterpane" and other regions mapped
+out in the great and glorious world of Make-Believe.
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+ST. IVES DESCENDS FROM EDINBURGH CASTLE.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"The whole forces of my mind were so consumed<br />
+with losing hold and getting it again, that I<br />
+could scarce have told whether I was going up<br />
+or coming down."
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>St. Ives.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-038-t"></a>
+<a href="images/img-038.jpg">
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-038-t.jpg" alt="St. Ives" />
+</a>
+<br />
+<i>St. Ives</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+For this reason, the <i>Child's Garden of Verses</i>
+is not, in any real sense of the word, a child's
+book at all.  It contains the exquisite
+imaginations of childhood as the grown-up man
+remembers them: to him they have the charm of
+the vanished past, they are the utterances of
+one who has also lived in Arcadia.  But to the
+child, they are the very commonplaces of
+existence.  To sway to and fro in a swing,
+"the pleasantest thing a child can do,"&mdash;to
+bring home treasures from field and wood, nuts
+and wooden whistles, and some all-precious
+unidentifiable stone, "though father denies it,
+I'm sure it is gold,"&mdash;these are everyday affairs
+to the country-child,&mdash;just as watching the
+lamplighter is to the town child.  To read
+verses about them is but a waste of time, when
+one might be actively engaged in similar
+avocations.  But to the grown-man who can never
+play with wooden soldiers in the garden, never
+be a pirate any more,&mdash;these reminiscences of
+Stevenson's are a delight unfailing.  No one
+else has ever worded them quite so accurately,
+quite so simply: and, taken all for all, they are
+in themselves a summing-up of that most
+excellent philosophy of this author, "The
+world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure
+we should all be as happy as kings!"  The
+world was indeed full of a number of things to
+R.L.S. and,&mdash;passed through the crucible of
+his own astonishing personality,&mdash;they were
+all, bad or good, transmogrified into things
+that make for joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After eight o'clock dinner was over, the
+old folks bade good-night,&mdash;the father, with
+touching affection, kissing Louis as though he
+were a child, and murmuring, "You'll see me
+in the morning, dearie," as if still addressing
+that little feeble creature who had been kept
+alive with such difficulty in the old days at
+Edinburgh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The younger man returned to the piano-forte;
+it drew him like a magnet.  For a short
+time he indulged in his desultory music-making,
+relishing to the uttermost every success of
+sound which he achieved: and the happiness,
+which was his theory of life, radiated in warm
+abundance from his richly-tinted face and
+glowing eyes.  "It's a fine life," he exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last the day's supply of energy succumbed
+before the imperious demands of this
+"fiery threadpaper of a man," and in deference
+to his wife's suggestion he betook himself to bed.
+Not necessarily to rest; for even in his dreams
+his busy brain was working, and his "Brownies,"
+as he termed them, bringing him fresh material
+for plots.  <i>Dr. Jekyll</i> had been thus evolved from
+three scenes dreamed successively in detail, from
+which the dreamer waked with cries of horror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he did not flinch before the coming
+night, and anything that it might bring of
+sickness or unrest.  He thought alone upon the
+past delightful day, fraught with strenuous work
+and simple pleasures; and he petitioned, in his
+own words:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "If I have faltered more or less<br />
+  In my great task of happiness;<br />
+  If I have moved along my race<br />
+  And shown no glorious morning face;<br />
+  If beams from happy human eyes<br />
+  Have moved me not; if morning skies,<br />
+  Books, and my food, and summer rain<br />
+  Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:&mdash;<br />
+  Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take<br />
+  And stab my spirit broad awake!"<br />
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;(<i>Underwoods.</i>)<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+His wife hovered around him with gentle
+ministrations, as suddenly out-wearied, Robert
+Louis Stevenson extended his long, lean form
+to a possible repose.  There was not, perhaps,
+a cheerfuller man that night in England.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sea hummed at the foot of the chine,
+with that soft and dove-like purring of the
+South-coast sea; the doves made answer with
+a vibrant cooing in the middle distance of the
+twilight garden.  Spring buds of pear-trees and
+cherry-trees globed themselves stealthily into
+blossom; a delicate latent energy was
+consciously present in the air&mdash;the rising of sap
+and revivification of seed, all the mysterious
+hidden progresses of April.  And the man
+whose ways were set in a perpetual
+convergence towards the doors of death, waved,
+so to speak, a blithe recognition to the myriad
+hosts of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"O toiling hands of mortals!  O unwearied
+feet, travelling ye know not whither!  Soon,
+soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on
+some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way
+further, against the setting sun, descry the
+spires of El Dorado.  Little do ye know your
+own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a
+better thing than to arrive, and the true success
+is labour."  (<i>Virginibus Puerisque.</i>)
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+The author desires to acknowledge the
+kindness of Messrs. Cassell &amp; Co., in allowing
+short extracts to be made from <i>The Master of
+Ballantrae</i>, <i>The Wrecker</i>, and <i>Catriona</i>; also to
+thank Mr. William Heinemann for a similar
+courtesy with regard to <i>St. Ives</i>, and
+Messrs. Chatto &amp; Windus for their permission to
+include various quotations from <i>Virginibus
+Puerisque</i>, <i>Underwoods</i>, and <i>Prince Otto</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="t4">
+  Printed by The Bushey Colour Press (André &amp; Sleigh, Ltd.),<br />
+  Bushey, Herts., England.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-cover-r"></a>
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-cover-r.jpg" alt="Rear cover" />
+<br />
+Rear cover
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 53165 ***</div>
+</body>
+
+</html>
+
diff --git a/53165-8.txt b/old/53165-8.txt
index 8937cbe..ce36028 100644
--- a/53165-8.txt
+++ b/old/53165-8.txt
@@ -1,1146 +1,1146 @@
-Project Gutenberg's A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson, by Maurice Clare

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most

-other parts of the world 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.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have

-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.

-

-Title: A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson

-

-Author: Maurice Clare

-

-Release Date: September 28, 2016 [EBook #53165]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

-

-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DAY WITH ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ***

-

-

-

-

-Produced by Al Haines

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-[Illustration: Cover art]

-

-

-

-

-[Illustration: Robert Louis Stevenson]

-

-

-

-

-_Painting by W. Hatherell._

-

-  "Took down the folds of her hair--shook it

-  round her face and the pool repeated her

-  thus veiled."

-

-_Prince Otto._

-

-[Illustration: _Prince Otto_]

-

-

-

-

-  A DAY WITH

-  ROBERT LOUIS

-  STEVENSON

-

-

-  BY MAURICE CLARE

-

-

-

-  LONDON

-  HODDER & STOUGHTON

-  1910

-

-

-

-

-  _In the same Series.

-    Dickens.

-    Thackeray._

-

-

-

-

-A DAY WITH STEVENSON.

-

-

-Supposing that in the month of April, 1886, you had arrived, a guest

-foreseen, at the pleasant ivy-muffled dwelling in Bournemouth, which

-had recently adopted the name of Skerryvore, and that you had been

-permitted to enter its doors--you might account yourself a somewhat

-favoured person.  For the master of the house, "that rickety and

-cloistered spectre," as he termed himself, the "pallid brute who lived

-in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit," might be invisible for the

-nonce--shut upstairs, forbidden even to speak for fear of inducing

-hemorrhage.  Or again, you might yourself be afflicted with an obvious

-cold: in which case you would not be admitted into his presence, lest

-you left contagion of that cold.

-

-But if fate befriended you, you would chance upon the most remarkable

-personality, it might be, that you had yet encountered.  A lean, long

-flat-chested man, gracefully emphatic of gesture--pacing up and down

-the room as he talked--burning with hectic energy--a man of rich brown

-tints in hair and eyes and skin: mutable, mirthful, brilliant--above

-all "vital," as he had described himself, "wholly vital with a buoyance

-of life" which had upborne him hitherto over the crest of most

-tumultuous distresses.

-

-Robert Louis Stevenson was now thirty-six years old: and ever since his

-sixth year, when, as his mother recorded in her diary, he dreamed that

-he "heard the noise of pens writing," his aim had been set unswervingly

-toward the one goal.  Born of a strong and strenuous family, the great

-lighthouse builders of the north, he was not, like them, intent upon

-the subjugation of obstinate stone, the ordering and ordaining of rocks

-and seas.  Dhu Heartach and the Bell Rock and Skerryvore he could

-admire at a distance: but the material which cried aloud to him for

-mastery, was much more plastic,--yet, to him, no less stubborn.  "I

-imagine," he declared, "nobody ever had such pains to learn a trade as

-I had; but I slogged at it day in and day out."  His fastidious soul

-refused to be contented with a facile and slipshod utterance.  A

-passionate quest: after _le mot propre_, which had led him, in his own

-phrase, to "play the sedulus ape" to all the great prose writers of the

-past--and a sense of style such as no man had ever so anxiously and

-assiduously developed in himself--these had achieved their own reward.

-"'Thanks to my dire industry," said Stevenson, "I have done more with

-smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world."

-

-And this was a just pride: for there was no branch of literature in

-which he could not admirably acquit himself.  So many years a struggler

-in obscurity, with small hopes, few successes, little

-encouragement--battling with continuous and crippling maladies,--this

-indomitable artist, by sheer dint of "dire industry," now suddenly

-stood forth in full blaze of public recognition.  The author of

-_Virginibus Puerisque_, _Treasure Island_, _Prince Otto_, _The Child's

-Garden of Verse_, and _Dr. Jekyll_, was very much a man to be reckoned

-with.

-

-Probably few modern books have met with such instantaneous and

-triumphant success as _Treasure Island_ and _Dr. Jekyll_.  The first,

-after running its course, unannounced and comparatively unrecognized,

-the serial of an obscure author, in _Young Folks' Paper_, was published

-in book form,--and Stevenson, like Byron, "awoke to find himself

-famous."  The honours which he had failed to obtain with all the dainty

-humour, all the valiant fatalism, of _Virginibus Puerisque_, had been

-accorded without stint to _Treasure Island_.  It was a tense and

-stimulating piece of pure adventure.  The authentic air of the

-eighteenth century breathed through every sentence of it: and its fine

-flavour of dare-devil romance kindled even sober statesmen, such as Mr.

-Gladstone, to a very furore of avidity in devouring its breathless

-pages.

-

-As for _Dr. Jekyll_, that gruesome work--literally the product of a

-nightmare--had been quoted in pulpits, discussed in newspapers, read by

-everybody,--it had taken the world by storm.  Yet Stevenson's head was

-not turned by his tardily-won success: with his customary _sang froid_,

-he took things as they came, failures and triumphs, and met each alike

-with smiling gallantry.

-

-The motives which had led him into authorship--or rather forced him,

-despite all stress and hindrance of froward circumstances,--were as

-curiously varied as his own nature; and it was these motives which

-still drove him hard and incessantly.  To fame he was perhaps not

-wholly indifferent.  No author sits so austerely aloft as to disdain

-popular applause altogether.  Yet a born stylist and a conscious

-artist, like Stevenson, knew that his most finished work was above and

-beyond the appreciation of the general public.  For money,--though it

-was a necessity of life to him, and although, with all his recent

-triumphs, he was not at present earning more than £400 a year,--for

-money he did not care, except as a means to an end.  "Wealth is only

-useful for two things," he said, "a yacht and a string quartet.  Except

-for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as a man can possibly

-want."  Still, in declaring, "I do not write for the public," he added

-with engaging candour, "I do write for money, a nobler deity," and

-this, to a certain extent was true.  It was for money only, no doubt,

-that he was now undertaking, against the grain, that "romance of

-tushery," _The Black Arrow_, a tale with a mediæval setting in which he

-felt himself ill at ease.  But "most of all," he allowed, "I write for

-myself; not perhaps any more noble, but both more intelligent and

-nearer home."

-

-And that a man in such difficulties of health and finance, and so

-precarious a position, should have the courage of his own determined

-artistry, was in itself sufficiently remarkable: but the result more

-than justified his choice.

-

-All the morning, Stevenson had been upstairs writing: probably after a

-bad night; very likely in what any other man would term a totally unfit

-condition.  Under any and all circumstances, he continued to write

-unflinchingly; racked by coughing, reeling with weakness, with his

-right arm in a sling, and his left hand holding the pen,--sitting up in

-bed with a clinical thermometer in his mouth; and yet, as he declared,

-"I like my life all the same ... I should bear false witness if I did

-not declare life happy." ... He was, in his own words, "made for a

-contest, and the powers have so willed that my battlefield should be

-this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle."

-

-"To declare life happy," became, in fact, his literary mission,--the

-condensed philosophy of his gay, inveterate courage.  "I believe that

-literature should give joy," was his maxim, "one dank, dispirited word

-is harmful,--a crime of _lèse-humanité_."  This brave and cheerful

-outlook is evident in all his essays,--it is, so to speak, a glorified

-and artistic Mark-Tapleyism, all-pervading, unimpugnable, ready to

-survive the most malevolent accidents of life, the crowning tragedy of

-death itself.  And so you find the "chronic sickist," as he termed

-himself, still ready, in all but body, for great risks and inspiriting

-adventures, and--through a mist of pain--leading forlorn hopes with a

-waving sword of flame.  You hear him proclaiming that:

-

-"All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good

-work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it.

-Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful

-impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

-And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in

-mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous

-foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful

-language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced; is there not

-something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life

-go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice,

-than miserable struggling to an end in sandy deltas?"  (_Virginibus

-Puerisque_.)

-

-And to him, above all, applied his own triumphant lines, those which he

-addressed to W. E. Henley, another writer, a man of like courageous

-outlook, who, like himself, "in the fell grip of circumstances, had not

-winced nor cried aloud:

-

-  "... Small the pipe; but oh! do thou,

-  Peak-faced and suffering piper, blow therein

-  The dirge of heroes dead; and to these sick,

-  These dying, sound the triumph over death.

-  Behold! each greatly breathes; each tastes a joy

-  Unknown before in dying; for each knows

-  A hero dies with him--though unfulfilled,

-  Yet conquering truly--and not dies in vain."

-

-

-At present he was engaged upon _Kidnapped_, that admirable piece of

-fiction which he had begun, "partly as a lark and partly as a

-pot-boiler."  It was a relief, after the concentrated horror of _Dr.

-Jekyll_, to escape into the Scottish heather-scent and to feel the salt

-sea-wind whistling through the cordage of _Kidnapped_.

-

-

-_Painting by W. Hatherell._

-

-  "She stood on the bulwarks and held on by a

-  stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats.

-

-_Catriona._

-

-[Illustration: _Catriona_]

-

-

-Stevenson was desirous to "get free of this prison-yard of the

-abominably ugly, where I take my daily exercise with my

-contemporaries."  Possibly he recognised that the amazing popularity of

-_Jekyll_ had been due to the morbid attractiveness of its subject,

-rather than to its merits of craftsmanship; for, as he had averred, "I

-know that good work sometimes hits; but, with my hand on my heart, I

-think it is an accident."  But now he was at liberty to give play to

-his infinite variety upon a true boys' book,--a story to satisfy the

-inveterate boyishness of his own heart.  "Of the romance of boyhood and

-adolescence, it has been said, he is an unsurpassed master ... the

-philosophy of life developed in both his essays and romances is that

-rather of a gifted boy than a mature man."  (J. W. Mackail.)  And even

-the girls of Stevenson's imagination have been accused of being "boys

-in petticoats."  The phrase has reason.  "I have never admired a girl,"

-he wrote, and again, "I have never pleased myself with any women of

-mine."  The other sex remained for him, throughout, a mystery which he

-hardly cared to solve,--a sealed book which he was not desirous to

-open.  "Of the two eternal factors in the destiny of man, warfare and

-love," although he allowed that "to love is the great amulet which

-makes the world a garden," he preferred to deal almost exclusively with

-the warfare.

-

-And yet one women had played a very important part in Stevenson's life:

-and it was practically with his marriage that the tide of his fortunes

-had changed.  His wife,--"trusty, dusky, vivid, true," was his very

-_alter ego_: with "a character" (to quote Mr. Sidney Colvin) "as

-strong, interesting, and romantic almost as his own: an inseparable

-sharer of all his thoughts, the most shrewd and stimulating of critics:

-and in sickness, despite her own precarious health, the most devoted

-and most efficient of nurses."  To while away the weary hours of

-illness, Mrs. Stevenson made up stories to amuse him,--and subsequently

-the husband and wife would write them out together.  She, with her

-"eyes of gold and bramble-dew," was literally all-in-all to him as

-companion, helpmate, friend;--and far--how infinitely far!--above the

-ideal wife whom he had described so adroitly,--in his bachelor

-days,--that woman who should have "a fine touch for the affections,"

-and who should at least be sufficiently talented to avoid boring her

-life-long comrade.  The character of the ideal wife, as there

-indicated,--apt at gracious compromises, possessor of a cheerful fluent

-tongue,--was very obviously set forth by a man who had never yet been

-stirred by the sharp throbs of an imperative emotion.  And now that

-Stevenson realised what love in its depth and breadth might mean, it

-held a certain sanctity for him,--he was loth to speak of it, as to

-write of it.  It was a marvel that had befallen him personally: but for

-other people, it might still perhaps, be no more than that gentle

-domesticated affection which he had portrayed with such amiable humour.

-But there was one point in which he, consciously or unconsciously

-insisted, in his _desiderata_ of the female character.

-

-"It always warms a man," he had declared, "to see a woman brave," and

-he saw it daily in his wife.  Therefore it came about, that, unversed

-in women--as Stevenson unquestionably was, he was able to endow his

-heroines with a touch of gallant boyishness, a hint of the heroic--and

-if they failed in flesh-and-blood-_vraisemblance_, they had that

-"steel-true, blade-straight" quality which he adored in the women he

-had chosen.

-

-You will notice this courageous virtue in all of them, rich and poor;

-from _Catriona_, that "tall, pretty, tender figure of a maiden, when,

-having assured her father's escape from prison by a bold stratagem, she

-arrives a fugitive and an exile at Helvoetsluys, and lands from the

-staggering side of the _Rose_ into the little boat below;--when, in

-David Balfour's words:

-

-"I began to think I had made a fool's bargain, that it was merely

-impossible Catriona should be got on board to me, and that I stood to

-be set ashore in Helvoet all by myself ... But this was to reckon

-without the lass's courage ... Up she stood on the bulwarks and held by

-a stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats, which made the enterprise

-more dangerous, and gave us rather more a view of her stockings than

-would be thought genteel in cities"--(_Catriona._)

-

-to Seraphina in _Prince Otto_, still inherently valorous in that

-desperate flight through the forest: where:

-

-"At length when she was well weary, she came upon a wide and shallow

-pool.  Stones stood in it, like islands; bulrushes fringed the coast;

-the floor was paved with pine needles; and the pines themselves, whose

-roots made promontories, looked down silently on their green images.

-She crept to the margin and beheld herself with wonder, a hollow and

-bright-eyed phantom, in the ruins of her palace robe ... She addressed

-herself to make a toilette by that forest mirror, washed herself pure

-from all the stains of her adventure, took off her jewels and wrapped

-them in her handkerchief, re-arranged the tatters of her dress, and

-took down the folds of her hair.  She shook it round her face, and the

-pool repeated her thus veiled."  (_Prince Otto._)

-

-Clara Huddlestone, in the _Pavilion on the Links_, repeats the same

-undauntable note: Olalla is inexorable in moral courage of

-renunciation, even the weeping Blanche, in the _Sieur de Malétroit's

-Door_, has the mettle of some small creature at bay.

-

-The charm of Stevenson's heroines is, in short, a cold charm; nor does

-he often accord them the assistance of a personal description.  But

-they are finely tempered, of the best Toledo steel, and owing to their

-boyish character, there is no very obvious gap in those novels where

-they are conspicuously absent, such as _The Ebb Tide_, _The Wreckers_,

-and _The Master of Ballantrae_.  In the latter, indeed, there is a

-slight "female interest," but a stronger personality in the heroine

-must inevitably have changed or coloured the whole course of the book:

-and one cannot but detect a certain vacuum, where at least some emotion

-might have lifted a haggard head, in the character of Mrs. Henry,--even

-in that scene, surcharged with hidden explosive possibilities, when the

-author describes how:

-

-"The Master played upon that little ballad, and upon those who heard

-him, like an instrument, and seemed now upon the point of failing, and

-now to conquer his distress, so that the words and music seemed to pour

-out of his own heart and his own past, and to be aimed directly at Mrs.

-Henry....  When it came to an end we all sat silent for a time: he had

-chosen the dusk of the afternoon, so that none could see his

-neighbour's face: but it seemed as if we held our breathing: only my

-old lord cleared his throat.  The first to move was the singer, who got

-to his feet suddenly and softly, and went and walked softly to and fro

-in the low end of the hall."  (_The Master of Ballantrae._)

-

-

-But Mrs. Henry plays a very minor part in the marring or making, here,

-of two men's lives: it is a rôle of _vis inertiæ_ at best.  And,

-indeed, when all is said, what shall a petticoat be if not irrelevant,

-among the clash of steel and smoke of pistols, in an atmosphere

-permeated by Spanish doubloons or illicit piratical treasure?

-Stevenson's infallible artistic instinct led him to keep the

-adventure-story pendant upon the deeds of men, and the eager mistakes

-of boys; and a certain curious penchant for the squalid, the submerged,

-the picturesque, brought him by choice into such company as no heroine

-should enter--that of Villon, for instance, and John Silver, and

-Herrick the cockney vagabond.  "The spice of life is battle," he said;

-and his life, and his books, were brimful of battles with foes or with

-fortune.

-

-

-_Painting by W. Hatherell._

-

-  "'The words and music seemed to pour out of

-  his own heart and his own past and to be

-  aimed directly at Mrs. Henry."

-

-_Master of Ballantrae._

-

-[Illustration: _Master of Ballantrae_]

-

-

-The open-air life which he had perforce abandoned, the joy of physical

-strength and hair-breadth 'scape, could still be his by proxy.  He

-revelled in delineating his ideal man:

-

-"Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and

-spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any

-other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch

-the goal.  'A peerage or Westminster Abbey!' cried Nelson in his

-bright, boyish, heroic manner.  These are great incentives; not for any

-of these, but for the plain satisfaction of living, of being about

-their business in some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of

-every nation tread down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all

-the stumbling-blocks of prudence."  (_Virginibus Puerisque._)

-

-

-The tramp of horse-hoofs, the clank of the capstan, the door ajar--a

-thousand sights and sounds were but symbolisms to him of some

-mysterious by-way of adventure to be followed up, quick with latent

-possibilities of romance; and from one word, one name, he could evolve

-a whole intricate plot.  With the simplest of sentences, he could

-electrify the startled reader, as when in _The Wrecker_, where the

-desperate castaways sit gambling on the desert island, and one suddenly

-cries aloud, "Sail ho!"

-

-"All turned at the cry,--and there, in the wild light of the morning,

-heading straight for Midway Reef, was the brig _Flying Scud_ of Hull."

-(_The Wrecker._)

-

-

-On that moment the whole tale hangs as on a pivot.  All its involution

-and evolution, all its intricate and tangled clues, lead--backwards or

-forwards--to this one swift breathless sight.

-

-His morning's work accomplished, the tall gaunt man came downstairs,

-literally to play awhile.  After weeks, it might be, of enforced

-seclusion in his room, his eye rested pleasurably upon the various

-attractive objects which almost seemed like new to him.

-Stevenson,--the avowed evader of personal property, the rolling-stone

-that had so long refused to gather moss,--was now, under a woman's

-tender surveillance, surrounded with charm and comfort.  "Our drawing

-room," he maintained, "is a place so beautiful that it's like eating to

-sit down in it.  No other room is so lovely in the world ... I blush

-for the figure I cut in such a bower."  The garden, Mrs. Stevenson's

-special pleasure, but one in which her husband did not share, was very

-lovely, with a lawn, and heather-bank, and a half-acre of land, where a

-little stream ran down a "chine" full of rhododendrons.  A large

-dovecot figured in the garden; and there also "Boguey," the Stevensons'

-dog, was buried, to whom no other dog had ever been deemed a worthy

-successor.

-

-Stevenson, his clothes hanging loosely on his emaciated figure, and his

-hands--"wonderful hands--long and fragile, like those in the early

-portraits of Velasquez," lingered lovingly over the keys.  For a while

-he amused himself by picking out, note by note, the old-world dance

-measures of Lully and Rameau; those gavottes, rigadoons and minuets,

-which conveyed to him the indefinable _pot-pourri_-like, flavour of his

-favourite eighteenth century, embued with a certain stately dignity,

-"the periwig feeling," he called it, as of lords and ladies treading

-courtly measures.  Stevenson was passionately fond of classical music,

-but he had never attained to any facility of execution.  And when he

-grew tired with his efforts as an interpreter of Lully, he turned to

-"pickling," as he called it--composing, that is to say, after a

-fashion, with "the manly and melodious forefinger."  The fact that he

-had invariably failed to master the rudiments of theory, in no wise

-deterred him; on the contrary, difficulties rather enhanced his

-delight.  "Books are of no use," he avowed, "they tell you how to write

-in four parts, and that cannot be done by man."  So he continued to

-"pickle" with a light heart, and to enjoy consecutive fifths and other

-theoretical delinquencies with an enthusiasm worthy of the most modern

-composer.

-

-Nothing but the lunch hour brought his musical experiments to a close.

-Stevenson, who had, in his own words, "been obliged to strip himself,

-one after another, of all the pleasures that he had chosen, except

-smoking" (and indeed, he was smoking cigarettes all day long) by no

-means disdained the pleasures of the table.  Not, perhaps, in the role

-of a gourmet--but as an artist in the more recondite delicacies of

-taste and smell.  "To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece

-of human perfection than to find beauty in the colours of a sunset," he

-observed; he coupled the flavour of wine with the beauty of the dawn,

-and declared that we do not recognise at its full value the great part

-in life that is played by eating and drinking.  "There is a romance

-about the matter after all," he observed.  "Probably the table has more

-devotees than love; and I am sure food is more generally entertaining

-than scenery."  It was the "romance of the matter" that appealed to

-him; especially the colour, and savour, and poetical tradition of wine.

-"Books, and tobacco jars, and some old Burgundy as red as a November

-sunset, and as fragrant as a violet in April"--these, he thought,

-should suffice the most luxurious.

-

-After lunch, if he anticipated an exhausting evening, he went to

-sleep--at a moment's notice--and after a short, sound repose, was as

-eager as ever to resume his pianoforte amusements; which he continued

-until friends arrived.

-

-At the age of four-and-twenty, Stevenson had noted down his three chief

-wishes.  "First, good health: secondly, a small competence: thirdly, _O

-Du lieber Gott!_ friends."  The first: wish was irrevocably denied: the

-second was only just beginning to be granted, the guerdon of unresting

-toil: the third petition had been abundantly answered.  Never was a man

-more happy in his friends; or one who made them so instantaneously and

-without effort.  "He had only to speak," said one friend, "in order to

-be recognised in the first minute for a witty and charming gentleman,

-and in the second, for a man of genius."  Some, indeed, like Mr. Edmund

-Gosse, came home dazzled and astounded, saying, as Constance does of

-Arthur, "Was ever such a gracious creature born?"  His expression, of

-mingled tenderness and mirth, his "scholarly and eclectic

-presence"--together with his picturesque, velvet-coated appearance, and

-his flashing flow of words, combined to make a man so attractive and so

-unique as could command all love at will.  And the friends were very

-many and very notable, who haunted Skerryvore.  First and foremost was

-"Bob," Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, the poet's first cousin, the brilliant

-art critic: "the man likest and most unlike to me," as R.L.S. described

-him.  "Bob's" sister, Mrs. de Mattos, and her child were frequent

-visitors; then there were celebrities from London: such as Sargent the

-painter, William Archer, Sidney Colvin, W. E. Henley, Henry James; and

-again friends residing in the neighbourhood of Bournemouth; the poet

-Sir Henry Taylor, and his family; Sir Percy Shelley and his wife.

-These latter, indeed, regarded Stevenson almost in the light of a son.

-He struck them as bearing an extraordinary resemblance to Percy Bysshe

-Shelley; less, perhaps, in lineaments than in figure and in mind; and

-in consequence of this similarity, they held him very dear.

-

-But to all he was the same bewildering charming host, the man who

-variously displayed, to quote W. E. Henley:

-

-  "A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,

-  Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,--"

-

-And combined with these curiously versatile fruits, "something of the

-Shorter Catechist."

-

-Generous in criticism, kind in praise, grave and humorous in rapid

-transition, the amazing scope and variety of Stevenson's writings were

-excelled by the scope and variety of his talk.  "There was no part of

-the writer that was not visibly present in the man."  (Graham Balfour.)

-He had laid down his opinion that "there can be no fairer ambition than

-to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome."  But

-none save those who were privileged to hear him, as with quick,

-impetuous gestures, like a Southern foreigner, he emphasised his

-phrases, could realise the power, the versatility, the inexpressible,

-irrepressible charm with which the author could fulfil his "fair

-ambition."

-

-When the visitors had severally taken their departure, the strong

-resonant voice, with its Scottish accent and rich, full tones still

-ringing in their ears,--Stevenson had suffered no abatement in the

-stream of his exuberant mental vitality.  The excitement of

-conversation had, if anything, keyed him up; and presently, for the

-writing of a few unavoidable letters, he betook himself to his study;

-"the study where a smiling God beholds each day my stage of labour

-trod," and sate himself down there with reluctance.

-

-

-_Painting by W. Hatherell._

-

-  "All turned at the cry, and there in the wild

-  light of the morning heaving straight for

-  midway reef was the brig _Flying Scud_ of

-  Hull."

-

-_The Wrecker._

-

-[Illustration: _The Wrecker_]

-

-

-Correspondence, as a rule, he found but an irksome affair; unless

-conducted upon his own whimsical lines.  "I deny that letters should

-contain news--I mean mine--those of other people should," was his

-theory; and he boasted himself of a "willingness to pour forth

-unmitigated rot, which constitutes in me the true spirit of

-correspondence."  For all that, his letters, grave or gay, remain among

-the most delightful reading in existence; flavoured with his quaintest

-conceits, endowed with his most delicate turns of phrase, and often

-tempered with that "something of the Shorter Catechist" to which Henley

-had alluded.

-

-For, undoubtedly, as time went on, although Stevenson continued to

-"combine the face of a boy with the distinguished bearing of a man of

-the world," he was gradually exchanging the "streak of Puck" and the

-capricious unconventions of the born Bohemian, for something graver and

-more mature,--a tendency almost towards the didactic.  "'Tis a strange

-world indeed," he had commented, "but there is a manifest God for those

-who care to look for Him."  And now, "with the passing of years," he

-observed, "there grows more and more upon me that belief in the

-kindness of this scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God,

-which is an excellent and pacifying compensation."  He was suffering,

-and in all probability would perpetually suffer, from "that sharp

-ferule of calamity under which we are all God's scholars till we die":

-but his patience was impregnable, and his desire to leave a brave

-example bore him constant company.  "To suffer," said he, "sets a keen

-edge on what remains of the agreeable," and he prepared to enjoy with

-equal zest all pleasures which were still permitted to him.

-

-As he put away his writing materials, and descended once more to his

-beloved piano, his father and mother came in.  They were living in

-Bournemouth to be near their only son.  The old lighthouse engineer,

-whose father had built the Bell Rock, who had served under his brother

-Alan in the building of Skerryvore, "the noblest of all extant

-sea-lights," who had himself erected Dhu Heartach, was now palpably

-failing.  The spectacle of a stern and honest man slowly evacuating all

-that he had held of personal strength, was, to his son Louis, a

-poignantly pathetic one.  Their disagreements had been very many and

-deep-rooted, dating from even before that "dreadful evening walk" in

-Stevenson's youth, when, "on being tightly cross-questioned," the lad

-who had been trained for a civil engineer, and had "worked in a

-carpenter's shop and had a brass foundry, and hung about wood-yards and

-the like," confessed that he cared for nothing but literature,--"no

-profession!" as his father contemptuously replied.  They had differed

-on almost every conceivable topic open to their discussion,--yet here,

-in the fulness of time, they were at peace together,--the austere old

-man in his second childhood, and the chronic invalid who "must live as

-though he were walking on eggs."  Innumerable ineffaceable traits of

-similarity bound one to the other; at bottom of all the bygone angers

-lay a permanent bedrock of mutual love.  And perhaps the nearing vision

-of death which terminated all vistas for both of them, exercised its

-usual effect, of calm, and _laisser-faire_, and the equalisation of

-things: for it is probable that no man has a just sense of

-proportionate values until he stands in the presence of death.

-

-Stevenson had often alluded, as a matter of personal knowledge, to his

-constant prescience of mortality, and how it affected a man's thoughts

-of life.  Very seldom has the view of the confirmed invalid, the doomed

-consumptive, been put forth to the world with the frankness with which

-Stevenson invested it.  He has been sometimes charged with a certain

-lack of reticence: but in this matter, unquestionably, his candour was

-to the benefitting of mankind: to whom these close views of the

-inevitable end are rarely possible under such deliberate and

-clear-headed conditions.

-

-There is nothing maudlin, nothing hypochondriacal, about Stevenson's

-treatment of this subject: the same cheerful philosophy bears him up,

-the same vitality of joy.  It is hardly to be wondered at, that some

-critics handled him seriously, on account of his lightheartedness in

-the august shadow of the last enemy,--and his inveterate optimism in

-the face of all calamities.  "He jests at scars who never felt a

-wound," they practically told him,--and could hardly be persuaded to

-credit the paradox that the man who preached in season and out of

-season, the gospel of that "cheery old Pagan, Hope," was not a denizen

-of the open-air,--healthy, athletic, vigorous, incapable of realising

-the maladies incident to man,--instead of an emaciated, bed-ridden

-creature, whose smallest pleasures must be measured, so to speak, in a

-medicine-glass.  But, "It is something after all," he has said, "to

-leave a brave example": and in that he triumphantly succeeded.  For the

-opportunities of meteoric heroisms are few and far between; but every

-hour beholds the need of those obscurer braveries which may be born of

-pain and suffering....

-

-In _Ordered South_ and other well-known essays, he shows the gradual

-relaxation of the ties which bind a man to terrestrial things,--and the

-curiously significant alteration in his regard for the facts of

-life,--from the sower in the dank spring furrows, to the sight of

-little children with their long possibilities before them.

-

-Stevenson had no children of his own.  His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne,

-then at school in Bournemouth, was destined to become his friend and

-collaborator: but it is doubtful that he cared for children as such.

-The average small folk, "dragged about in a pleasing stupor by nurses,"

-were very far remote from that superabundant vitality nursed in an

-attenuated physique, which had sat up with a shawl over its shoulders,

-so many tedious months in childhood, when its principal _habitat_ was

-"The Land of Counterpane" and other regions mapped out in the great and

-glorious world of Make-Believe.

-

-

-_Painting by W. Hatherell._

-

-ST. IVES DESCENDS FROM EDINBURGH CASTLE.

-

-  "The whole forces of my mind were so consumed

-  with losing hold and getting it again, that I

-  could scarce have told whether I was going up

-  or coming down."

-

-_St. Ives._

-

-[Illustration: _St. Ives_]

-

-

-For this reason, the _Child's Garden of Verses_ is not, in any real

-sense of the word, a child's book at all.  It contains the exquisite

-imaginations of childhood as the grown-up man remembers them: to him

-they have the charm of the vanished past, they are the utterances of

-one who has also lived in Arcadia.  But to the child, they are the very

-commonplaces of existence.  To sway to and fro in a swing, "the

-pleasantest thing a child can do,"--to bring home treasures from field

-and wood, nuts and wooden whistles, and some all-precious

-unidentifiable stone, "though father denies it, I'm sure it is

-gold,"--these are everyday affairs to the country-child,--just as

-watching the lamplighter is to the town child.  To read verses about

-them is but a waste of time, when one might be actively engaged in

-similar avocations.  But to the grown-man who can never play with

-wooden soldiers in the garden, never be a pirate any more,--these

-reminiscences of Stevenson's are a delight unfailing.  No one else has

-ever worded them quite so accurately, quite so simply: and, taken all

-for all, they are in themselves a summing-up of that most excellent

-philosophy of this author, "The world is so full of a number of things,

-I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings!"  The world was indeed

-full of a number of things to R.L.S. and,--passed through the crucible

-of his own astonishing personality,--they were all, bad or good,

-transmogrified into things that make for joy.

-

-After eight o'clock dinner was over, the old folks bade

-good-night,--the father, with touching affection, kissing Louis as

-though he were a child, and murmuring, "You'll see me in the morning,

-dearie," as if still addressing that little feeble creature who had

-been kept alive with such difficulty in the old days at Edinburgh.

-

-The younger man returned to the piano-forte; it drew him like a magnet.

-For a short time he indulged in his desultory music-making, relishing

-to the uttermost every success of sound which he achieved: and the

-happiness, which was his theory of life, radiated in warm abundance

-from his richly-tinted face and glowing eyes.  "It's a fine life," he

-exclaimed.

-

-At last the day's supply of energy succumbed before the imperious

-demands of this "fiery threadpaper of a man," and in deference to his

-wife's suggestion he betook himself to bed.  Not necessarily to rest;

-for even in his dreams his busy brain was working, and his "Brownies,"

-as he termed them, bringing him fresh material for plots.  _Dr. Jekyll_

-had been thus evolved from three scenes dreamed successively in detail,

-from which the dreamer waked with cries of horror.

-

-But he did not flinch before the coming night, and anything that it

-might bring of sickness or unrest.  He thought alone upon the past

-delightful day, fraught with strenuous work and simple pleasures; and

-he petitioned, in his own words:

-

-  "If I have faltered more or less

-  In my great task of happiness;

-  If I have moved along my race

-  And shown no glorious morning face;

-  If beams from happy human eyes

-  Have moved me not; if morning skies,

-  Books, and my food, and summer rain

-  Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:--

-  Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take

-  And stab my spirit broad awake!"

-                          (_Underwoods._)

-

-

-His wife hovered around him with gentle ministrations, as suddenly

-out-wearied, Robert Louis Stevenson extended his long, lean form to a

-possible repose.  There was not, perhaps, a cheerfuller man that night

-in England.

-

-The sea hummed at the foot of the chine, with that soft and dove-like

-purring of the South-coast sea; the doves made answer with a vibrant

-cooing in the middle distance of the twilight garden.  Spring buds of

-pear-trees and cherry-trees globed themselves stealthily into blossom;

-a delicate latent energy was consciously present in the air--the rising

-of sap and revivification of seed, all the mysterious hidden progresses

-of April.  And the man whose ways were set in a perpetual convergence

-towards the doors of death, waved, so to speak, a blithe recognition to

-the myriad hosts of life.

-

-"O toiling hands of mortals!  O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not

-whither!  Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some

-conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting

-sun, descry the spires of El Dorado.  Little do ye know your own

-blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,

-and the true success is labour."  (_Virginibus Puerisque._)

-

-

-

-The author desires to acknowledge the kindness of Messrs. Cassell &

-Co., in allowing short extracts to be made from _The Master of

-Ballantrae_, _The Wrecker_, and _Catriona_; also to thank Mr. William

-Heinemann for a similar courtesy with regard to _St. Ives_, and Messrs.

-Chatto & Windus for their permission to include various quotations from

-_Virginibus Puerisque_, _Underwoods_, and _Prince Otto_.

-

-

-

-  Printed by The Bushey Colour Press (André & Sleigh, Ltd.),

-  Bushey, Herts., England.

-

-

-

-

-[Illustration: Rear cover]

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-End of Project Gutenberg's A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson, by Maurice Clare

-

-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DAY WITH ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ***

-

-***** This file should be named 53165-8.txt or 53165-8.zip *****

-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:

-        http://www.gutenberg.org/5/3/1/6/53165/

-

-Produced by Al Haines

-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will

-be renamed.

-

-Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright

-law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,

-so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United

-States without permission and without paying copyright

-royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part

-of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project

-Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm

-concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,

-and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive

-specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this

-eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook

-for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,

-performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given

-away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks

-not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the

-trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.

-

-START: FULL LICENSE

-

-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

-

-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free

-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work

-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project

-Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full

-Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at

-www.gutenberg.org/license.

-

-Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project

-Gutenberg-tm electronic works

-

-1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm

-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to

-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property

-(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all

-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or

-destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your

-possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a

-Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound

-by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the

-person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph

-1.E.8.

-

-1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be

-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who

-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few

-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works

-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See

-paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project

-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this

-agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm

-electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

-

-1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the

-Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection

-of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual

-works in the collection are in the public domain in the United

-States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the

-United States and you are located in the United States, we do not

-claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,

-displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as

-all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope

-that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting

-free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm

-works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the

-Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily

-comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the

-same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when

-you share it without charge with others.

-

-1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern

-what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are

-in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,

-check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this

-agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,

-distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any

-other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no

-representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any

-country outside the United States.

-

-1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

-

-1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other

-immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear

-prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work

-on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the

-phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,

-performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

-

-  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and

-  most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the

-  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you

-  are located before using this ebook.

-

-1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is

-derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not

-contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the

-copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in

-the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are

-redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project

-Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply

-either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or

-obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm

-trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

-

-1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted

-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution

-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any

-additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms

-will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works

-posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the

-beginning of this work.

-

-1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm

-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this

-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.

-

-1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this

-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without

-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with

-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project

-Gutenberg-tm License.

-

-1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,

-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including

-any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access

-to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format

-other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official

-version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site

-(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense

-to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means

-of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain

-Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the

-full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

-

-1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,

-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works

-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

-

-1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing

-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works

-provided that

-

-* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from

-  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method

-  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed

-  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has

-  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project

-  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid

-  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are

-  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty

-  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project

-  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in

-  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg

-  Literary Archive Foundation."

-

-* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies

-  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he

-  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm

-  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all

-  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue

-  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm

-  works.

-

-* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of

-  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the

-  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of

-  receipt of the work.

-

-* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free

-  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.

-

-1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project

-Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than

-are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing

-from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The

-Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm

-trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

-

-1.F.

-

-1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable

-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread

-works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project

-Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm

-electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may

-contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate

-or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other

-intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or

-other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or

-cannot be read by your equipment.

-

-1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right

-of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project

-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project

-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project

-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all

-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal

-fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT

-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE

-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE

-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE

-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR

-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH

-DAMAGE.

-

-1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a

-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can

-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a

-written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you

-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium

-with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you

-with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in

-lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person

-or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second

-opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If

-the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing

-without further opportunities to fix the problem.

-

-1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth

-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO

-OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT

-LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

-

-1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of

-damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement

-violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the

-agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or

-limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or

-unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the

-remaining provisions.

-

-1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the

-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone

-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in

-accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the

-production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm

-electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,

-including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of

-the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this

-or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or

-additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any

-Defect you cause.

-

-Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm

-

-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of

-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of

-computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It

-exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations

-from people in all walks of life.

-

-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the

-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's

-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will

-remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project

-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure

-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future

-generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary

-Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see

-Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at

-www.gutenberg.org

-

-

-

-Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

-

-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit

-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the

-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal

-Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification

-number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary

-Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by

-U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.

-

-The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the

-mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its

-volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous

-locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt

-Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to

-date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and

-official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

-

-For additional contact information:

-

-    Dr. Gregory B. Newby

-    Chief Executive and Director

-    gbnewby@pglaf.org

-

-Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg

-Literary Archive Foundation

-

-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide

-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of

-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be

-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest

-array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations

-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt

-status with the IRS.

-

-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating

-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United

-States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a

-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up

-with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations

-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND

-DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular

-state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate

-

-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we

-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition

-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who

-approach us with offers to donate.

-

-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make

-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from

-outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

-

-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation

-methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other

-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To

-donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate

-

-Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.

-

-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project

-Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be

-freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and

-distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of

-volunteer support.

-

-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed

-editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in

-the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not

-necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper

-edition.

-

-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search

-facility: www.gutenberg.org

-

-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,

-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary

-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to

-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.

-

+Project Gutenberg's A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson, by Maurice Clare
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world 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.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Author: Maurice Clare
+
+Release Date: September 28, 2016 [EBook #53165]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DAY WITH ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Cover art]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Robert Louis Stevenson]
+
+
+
+
+_Painting by W. Hatherell._
+
+  "Took down the folds of her hair--shook it
+  round her face and the pool repeated her
+  thus veiled."
+
+_Prince Otto._
+
+[Illustration: _Prince Otto_]
+
+
+
+
+  A DAY WITH
+  ROBERT LOUIS
+  STEVENSON
+
+
+  BY MAURICE CLARE
+
+
+
+  LONDON
+  HODDER & STOUGHTON
+  1910
+
+
+
+
+  _In the same Series.
+    Dickens.
+    Thackeray._
+
+
+
+
+A DAY WITH STEVENSON.
+
+
+Supposing that in the month of April, 1886, you had arrived, a guest
+foreseen, at the pleasant ivy-muffled dwelling in Bournemouth, which
+had recently adopted the name of Skerryvore, and that you had been
+permitted to enter its doors--you might account yourself a somewhat
+favoured person.  For the master of the house, "that rickety and
+cloistered spectre," as he termed himself, the "pallid brute who lived
+in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit," might be invisible for the
+nonce--shut upstairs, forbidden even to speak for fear of inducing
+hemorrhage.  Or again, you might yourself be afflicted with an obvious
+cold: in which case you would not be admitted into his presence, lest
+you left contagion of that cold.
+
+But if fate befriended you, you would chance upon the most remarkable
+personality, it might be, that you had yet encountered.  A lean, long
+flat-chested man, gracefully emphatic of gesture--pacing up and down
+the room as he talked--burning with hectic energy--a man of rich brown
+tints in hair and eyes and skin: mutable, mirthful, brilliant--above
+all "vital," as he had described himself, "wholly vital with a buoyance
+of life" which had upborne him hitherto over the crest of most
+tumultuous distresses.
+
+Robert Louis Stevenson was now thirty-six years old: and ever since his
+sixth year, when, as his mother recorded in her diary, he dreamed that
+he "heard the noise of pens writing," his aim had been set unswervingly
+toward the one goal.  Born of a strong and strenuous family, the great
+lighthouse builders of the north, he was not, like them, intent upon
+the subjugation of obstinate stone, the ordering and ordaining of rocks
+and seas.  Dhu Heartach and the Bell Rock and Skerryvore he could
+admire at a distance: but the material which cried aloud to him for
+mastery, was much more plastic,--yet, to him, no less stubborn.  "I
+imagine," he declared, "nobody ever had such pains to learn a trade as
+I had; but I slogged at it day in and day out."  His fastidious soul
+refused to be contented with a facile and slipshod utterance.  A
+passionate quest: after _le mot propre_, which had led him, in his own
+phrase, to "play the sedulus ape" to all the great prose writers of the
+past--and a sense of style such as no man had ever so anxiously and
+assiduously developed in himself--these had achieved their own reward.
+"'Thanks to my dire industry," said Stevenson, "I have done more with
+smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world."
+
+And this was a just pride: for there was no branch of literature in
+which he could not admirably acquit himself.  So many years a struggler
+in obscurity, with small hopes, few successes, little
+encouragement--battling with continuous and crippling maladies,--this
+indomitable artist, by sheer dint of "dire industry," now suddenly
+stood forth in full blaze of public recognition.  The author of
+_Virginibus Puerisque_, _Treasure Island_, _Prince Otto_, _The Child's
+Garden of Verse_, and _Dr. Jekyll_, was very much a man to be reckoned
+with.
+
+Probably few modern books have met with such instantaneous and
+triumphant success as _Treasure Island_ and _Dr. Jekyll_.  The first,
+after running its course, unannounced and comparatively unrecognized,
+the serial of an obscure author, in _Young Folks' Paper_, was published
+in book form,--and Stevenson, like Byron, "awoke to find himself
+famous."  The honours which he had failed to obtain with all the dainty
+humour, all the valiant fatalism, of _Virginibus Puerisque_, had been
+accorded without stint to _Treasure Island_.  It was a tense and
+stimulating piece of pure adventure.  The authentic air of the
+eighteenth century breathed through every sentence of it: and its fine
+flavour of dare-devil romance kindled even sober statesmen, such as Mr.
+Gladstone, to a very furore of avidity in devouring its breathless
+pages.
+
+As for _Dr. Jekyll_, that gruesome work--literally the product of a
+nightmare--had been quoted in pulpits, discussed in newspapers, read by
+everybody,--it had taken the world by storm.  Yet Stevenson's head was
+not turned by his tardily-won success: with his customary _sang froid_,
+he took things as they came, failures and triumphs, and met each alike
+with smiling gallantry.
+
+The motives which had led him into authorship--or rather forced him,
+despite all stress and hindrance of froward circumstances,--were as
+curiously varied as his own nature; and it was these motives which
+still drove him hard and incessantly.  To fame he was perhaps not
+wholly indifferent.  No author sits so austerely aloft as to disdain
+popular applause altogether.  Yet a born stylist and a conscious
+artist, like Stevenson, knew that his most finished work was above and
+beyond the appreciation of the general public.  For money,--though it
+was a necessity of life to him, and although, with all his recent
+triumphs, he was not at present earning more than £400 a year,--for
+money he did not care, except as a means to an end.  "Wealth is only
+useful for two things," he said, "a yacht and a string quartet.  Except
+for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as a man can possibly
+want."  Still, in declaring, "I do not write for the public," he added
+with engaging candour, "I do write for money, a nobler deity," and
+this, to a certain extent was true.  It was for money only, no doubt,
+that he was now undertaking, against the grain, that "romance of
+tushery," _The Black Arrow_, a tale with a mediæval setting in which he
+felt himself ill at ease.  But "most of all," he allowed, "I write for
+myself; not perhaps any more noble, but both more intelligent and
+nearer home."
+
+And that a man in such difficulties of health and finance, and so
+precarious a position, should have the courage of his own determined
+artistry, was in itself sufficiently remarkable: but the result more
+than justified his choice.
+
+All the morning, Stevenson had been upstairs writing: probably after a
+bad night; very likely in what any other man would term a totally unfit
+condition.  Under any and all circumstances, he continued to write
+unflinchingly; racked by coughing, reeling with weakness, with his
+right arm in a sling, and his left hand holding the pen,--sitting up in
+bed with a clinical thermometer in his mouth; and yet, as he declared,
+"I like my life all the same ... I should bear false witness if I did
+not declare life happy." ... He was, in his own words, "made for a
+contest, and the powers have so willed that my battlefield should be
+this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle."
+
+"To declare life happy," became, in fact, his literary mission,--the
+condensed philosophy of his gay, inveterate courage.  "I believe that
+literature should give joy," was his maxim, "one dank, dispirited word
+is harmful,--a crime of _lèse-humanité_."  This brave and cheerful
+outlook is evident in all his essays,--it is, so to speak, a glorified
+and artistic Mark-Tapleyism, all-pervading, unimpugnable, ready to
+survive the most malevolent accidents of life, the crowning tragedy of
+death itself.  And so you find the "chronic sickist," as he termed
+himself, still ready, in all but body, for great risks and inspiriting
+adventures, and--through a mist of pain--leading forlorn hopes with a
+waving sword of flame.  You hear him proclaiming that:
+
+"All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good
+work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it.
+Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful
+impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
+And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in
+mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous
+foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful
+language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced; is there not
+something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life
+go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice,
+than miserable struggling to an end in sandy deltas?"  (_Virginibus
+Puerisque_.)
+
+And to him, above all, applied his own triumphant lines, those which he
+addressed to W. E. Henley, another writer, a man of like courageous
+outlook, who, like himself, "in the fell grip of circumstances, had not
+winced nor cried aloud:
+
+  "... Small the pipe; but oh! do thou,
+  Peak-faced and suffering piper, blow therein
+  The dirge of heroes dead; and to these sick,
+  These dying, sound the triumph over death.
+  Behold! each greatly breathes; each tastes a joy
+  Unknown before in dying; for each knows
+  A hero dies with him--though unfulfilled,
+  Yet conquering truly--and not dies in vain."
+
+
+At present he was engaged upon _Kidnapped_, that admirable piece of
+fiction which he had begun, "partly as a lark and partly as a
+pot-boiler."  It was a relief, after the concentrated horror of _Dr.
+Jekyll_, to escape into the Scottish heather-scent and to feel the salt
+sea-wind whistling through the cordage of _Kidnapped_.
+
+
+_Painting by W. Hatherell._
+
+  "She stood on the bulwarks and held on by a
+  stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats.
+
+_Catriona._
+
+[Illustration: _Catriona_]
+
+
+Stevenson was desirous to "get free of this prison-yard of the
+abominably ugly, where I take my daily exercise with my
+contemporaries."  Possibly he recognised that the amazing popularity of
+_Jekyll_ had been due to the morbid attractiveness of its subject,
+rather than to its merits of craftsmanship; for, as he had averred, "I
+know that good work sometimes hits; but, with my hand on my heart, I
+think it is an accident."  But now he was at liberty to give play to
+his infinite variety upon a true boys' book,--a story to satisfy the
+inveterate boyishness of his own heart.  "Of the romance of boyhood and
+adolescence, it has been said, he is an unsurpassed master ... the
+philosophy of life developed in both his essays and romances is that
+rather of a gifted boy than a mature man."  (J. W. Mackail.)  And even
+the girls of Stevenson's imagination have been accused of being "boys
+in petticoats."  The phrase has reason.  "I have never admired a girl,"
+he wrote, and again, "I have never pleased myself with any women of
+mine."  The other sex remained for him, throughout, a mystery which he
+hardly cared to solve,--a sealed book which he was not desirous to
+open.  "Of the two eternal factors in the destiny of man, warfare and
+love," although he allowed that "to love is the great amulet which
+makes the world a garden," he preferred to deal almost exclusively with
+the warfare.
+
+And yet one women had played a very important part in Stevenson's life:
+and it was practically with his marriage that the tide of his fortunes
+had changed.  His wife,--"trusty, dusky, vivid, true," was his very
+_alter ego_: with "a character" (to quote Mr. Sidney Colvin) "as
+strong, interesting, and romantic almost as his own: an inseparable
+sharer of all his thoughts, the most shrewd and stimulating of critics:
+and in sickness, despite her own precarious health, the most devoted
+and most efficient of nurses."  To while away the weary hours of
+illness, Mrs. Stevenson made up stories to amuse him,--and subsequently
+the husband and wife would write them out together.  She, with her
+"eyes of gold and bramble-dew," was literally all-in-all to him as
+companion, helpmate, friend;--and far--how infinitely far!--above the
+ideal wife whom he had described so adroitly,--in his bachelor
+days,--that woman who should have "a fine touch for the affections,"
+and who should at least be sufficiently talented to avoid boring her
+life-long comrade.  The character of the ideal wife, as there
+indicated,--apt at gracious compromises, possessor of a cheerful fluent
+tongue,--was very obviously set forth by a man who had never yet been
+stirred by the sharp throbs of an imperative emotion.  And now that
+Stevenson realised what love in its depth and breadth might mean, it
+held a certain sanctity for him,--he was loth to speak of it, as to
+write of it.  It was a marvel that had befallen him personally: but for
+other people, it might still perhaps, be no more than that gentle
+domesticated affection which he had portrayed with such amiable humour.
+But there was one point in which he, consciously or unconsciously
+insisted, in his _desiderata_ of the female character.
+
+"It always warms a man," he had declared, "to see a woman brave," and
+he saw it daily in his wife.  Therefore it came about, that, unversed
+in women--as Stevenson unquestionably was, he was able to endow his
+heroines with a touch of gallant boyishness, a hint of the heroic--and
+if they failed in flesh-and-blood-_vraisemblance_, they had that
+"steel-true, blade-straight" quality which he adored in the women he
+had chosen.
+
+You will notice this courageous virtue in all of them, rich and poor;
+from _Catriona_, that "tall, pretty, tender figure of a maiden, when,
+having assured her father's escape from prison by a bold stratagem, she
+arrives a fugitive and an exile at Helvoetsluys, and lands from the
+staggering side of the _Rose_ into the little boat below;--when, in
+David Balfour's words:
+
+"I began to think I had made a fool's bargain, that it was merely
+impossible Catriona should be got on board to me, and that I stood to
+be set ashore in Helvoet all by myself ... But this was to reckon
+without the lass's courage ... Up she stood on the bulwarks and held by
+a stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats, which made the enterprise
+more dangerous, and gave us rather more a view of her stockings than
+would be thought genteel in cities"--(_Catriona._)
+
+to Seraphina in _Prince Otto_, still inherently valorous in that
+desperate flight through the forest: where:
+
+"At length when she was well weary, she came upon a wide and shallow
+pool.  Stones stood in it, like islands; bulrushes fringed the coast;
+the floor was paved with pine needles; and the pines themselves, whose
+roots made promontories, looked down silently on their green images.
+She crept to the margin and beheld herself with wonder, a hollow and
+bright-eyed phantom, in the ruins of her palace robe ... She addressed
+herself to make a toilette by that forest mirror, washed herself pure
+from all the stains of her adventure, took off her jewels and wrapped
+them in her handkerchief, re-arranged the tatters of her dress, and
+took down the folds of her hair.  She shook it round her face, and the
+pool repeated her thus veiled."  (_Prince Otto._)
+
+Clara Huddlestone, in the _Pavilion on the Links_, repeats the same
+undauntable note: Olalla is inexorable in moral courage of
+renunciation, even the weeping Blanche, in the _Sieur de Malétroit's
+Door_, has the mettle of some small creature at bay.
+
+The charm of Stevenson's heroines is, in short, a cold charm; nor does
+he often accord them the assistance of a personal description.  But
+they are finely tempered, of the best Toledo steel, and owing to their
+boyish character, there is no very obvious gap in those novels where
+they are conspicuously absent, such as _The Ebb Tide_, _The Wreckers_,
+and _The Master of Ballantrae_.  In the latter, indeed, there is a
+slight "female interest," but a stronger personality in the heroine
+must inevitably have changed or coloured the whole course of the book:
+and one cannot but detect a certain vacuum, where at least some emotion
+might have lifted a haggard head, in the character of Mrs. Henry,--even
+in that scene, surcharged with hidden explosive possibilities, when the
+author describes how:
+
+"The Master played upon that little ballad, and upon those who heard
+him, like an instrument, and seemed now upon the point of failing, and
+now to conquer his distress, so that the words and music seemed to pour
+out of his own heart and his own past, and to be aimed directly at Mrs.
+Henry....  When it came to an end we all sat silent for a time: he had
+chosen the dusk of the afternoon, so that none could see his
+neighbour's face: but it seemed as if we held our breathing: only my
+old lord cleared his throat.  The first to move was the singer, who got
+to his feet suddenly and softly, and went and walked softly to and fro
+in the low end of the hall."  (_The Master of Ballantrae._)
+
+
+But Mrs. Henry plays a very minor part in the marring or making, here,
+of two men's lives: it is a rôle of _vis inertiæ_ at best.  And,
+indeed, when all is said, what shall a petticoat be if not irrelevant,
+among the clash of steel and smoke of pistols, in an atmosphere
+permeated by Spanish doubloons or illicit piratical treasure?
+Stevenson's infallible artistic instinct led him to keep the
+adventure-story pendant upon the deeds of men, and the eager mistakes
+of boys; and a certain curious penchant for the squalid, the submerged,
+the picturesque, brought him by choice into such company as no heroine
+should enter--that of Villon, for instance, and John Silver, and
+Herrick the cockney vagabond.  "The spice of life is battle," he said;
+and his life, and his books, were brimful of battles with foes or with
+fortune.
+
+
+_Painting by W. Hatherell._
+
+  "'The words and music seemed to pour out of
+  his own heart and his own past and to be
+  aimed directly at Mrs. Henry."
+
+_Master of Ballantrae._
+
+[Illustration: _Master of Ballantrae_]
+
+
+The open-air life which he had perforce abandoned, the joy of physical
+strength and hair-breadth 'scape, could still be his by proxy.  He
+revelled in delineating his ideal man:
+
+"Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and
+spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any
+other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch
+the goal.  'A peerage or Westminster Abbey!' cried Nelson in his
+bright, boyish, heroic manner.  These are great incentives; not for any
+of these, but for the plain satisfaction of living, of being about
+their business in some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of
+every nation tread down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all
+the stumbling-blocks of prudence."  (_Virginibus Puerisque._)
+
+
+The tramp of horse-hoofs, the clank of the capstan, the door ajar--a
+thousand sights and sounds were but symbolisms to him of some
+mysterious by-way of adventure to be followed up, quick with latent
+possibilities of romance; and from one word, one name, he could evolve
+a whole intricate plot.  With the simplest of sentences, he could
+electrify the startled reader, as when in _The Wrecker_, where the
+desperate castaways sit gambling on the desert island, and one suddenly
+cries aloud, "Sail ho!"
+
+"All turned at the cry,--and there, in the wild light of the morning,
+heading straight for Midway Reef, was the brig _Flying Scud_ of Hull."
+(_The Wrecker._)
+
+
+On that moment the whole tale hangs as on a pivot.  All its involution
+and evolution, all its intricate and tangled clues, lead--backwards or
+forwards--to this one swift breathless sight.
+
+His morning's work accomplished, the tall gaunt man came downstairs,
+literally to play awhile.  After weeks, it might be, of enforced
+seclusion in his room, his eye rested pleasurably upon the various
+attractive objects which almost seemed like new to him.
+Stevenson,--the avowed evader of personal property, the rolling-stone
+that had so long refused to gather moss,--was now, under a woman's
+tender surveillance, surrounded with charm and comfort.  "Our drawing
+room," he maintained, "is a place so beautiful that it's like eating to
+sit down in it.  No other room is so lovely in the world ... I blush
+for the figure I cut in such a bower."  The garden, Mrs. Stevenson's
+special pleasure, but one in which her husband did not share, was very
+lovely, with a lawn, and heather-bank, and a half-acre of land, where a
+little stream ran down a "chine" full of rhododendrons.  A large
+dovecot figured in the garden; and there also "Boguey," the Stevensons'
+dog, was buried, to whom no other dog had ever been deemed a worthy
+successor.
+
+Stevenson, his clothes hanging loosely on his emaciated figure, and his
+hands--"wonderful hands--long and fragile, like those in the early
+portraits of Velasquez," lingered lovingly over the keys.  For a while
+he amused himself by picking out, note by note, the old-world dance
+measures of Lully and Rameau; those gavottes, rigadoons and minuets,
+which conveyed to him the indefinable _pot-pourri_-like, flavour of his
+favourite eighteenth century, embued with a certain stately dignity,
+"the periwig feeling," he called it, as of lords and ladies treading
+courtly measures.  Stevenson was passionately fond of classical music,
+but he had never attained to any facility of execution.  And when he
+grew tired with his efforts as an interpreter of Lully, he turned to
+"pickling," as he called it--composing, that is to say, after a
+fashion, with "the manly and melodious forefinger."  The fact that he
+had invariably failed to master the rudiments of theory, in no wise
+deterred him; on the contrary, difficulties rather enhanced his
+delight.  "Books are of no use," he avowed, "they tell you how to write
+in four parts, and that cannot be done by man."  So he continued to
+"pickle" with a light heart, and to enjoy consecutive fifths and other
+theoretical delinquencies with an enthusiasm worthy of the most modern
+composer.
+
+Nothing but the lunch hour brought his musical experiments to a close.
+Stevenson, who had, in his own words, "been obliged to strip himself,
+one after another, of all the pleasures that he had chosen, except
+smoking" (and indeed, he was smoking cigarettes all day long) by no
+means disdained the pleasures of the table.  Not, perhaps, in the role
+of a gourmet--but as an artist in the more recondite delicacies of
+taste and smell.  "To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece
+of human perfection than to find beauty in the colours of a sunset," he
+observed; he coupled the flavour of wine with the beauty of the dawn,
+and declared that we do not recognise at its full value the great part
+in life that is played by eating and drinking.  "There is a romance
+about the matter after all," he observed.  "Probably the table has more
+devotees than love; and I am sure food is more generally entertaining
+than scenery."  It was the "romance of the matter" that appealed to
+him; especially the colour, and savour, and poetical tradition of wine.
+"Books, and tobacco jars, and some old Burgundy as red as a November
+sunset, and as fragrant as a violet in April"--these, he thought,
+should suffice the most luxurious.
+
+After lunch, if he anticipated an exhausting evening, he went to
+sleep--at a moment's notice--and after a short, sound repose, was as
+eager as ever to resume his pianoforte amusements; which he continued
+until friends arrived.
+
+At the age of four-and-twenty, Stevenson had noted down his three chief
+wishes.  "First, good health: secondly, a small competence: thirdly, _O
+Du lieber Gott!_ friends."  The first: wish was irrevocably denied: the
+second was only just beginning to be granted, the guerdon of unresting
+toil: the third petition had been abundantly answered.  Never was a man
+more happy in his friends; or one who made them so instantaneously and
+without effort.  "He had only to speak," said one friend, "in order to
+be recognised in the first minute for a witty and charming gentleman,
+and in the second, for a man of genius."  Some, indeed, like Mr. Edmund
+Gosse, came home dazzled and astounded, saying, as Constance does of
+Arthur, "Was ever such a gracious creature born?"  His expression, of
+mingled tenderness and mirth, his "scholarly and eclectic
+presence"--together with his picturesque, velvet-coated appearance, and
+his flashing flow of words, combined to make a man so attractive and so
+unique as could command all love at will.  And the friends were very
+many and very notable, who haunted Skerryvore.  First and foremost was
+"Bob," Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, the poet's first cousin, the brilliant
+art critic: "the man likest and most unlike to me," as R.L.S. described
+him.  "Bob's" sister, Mrs. de Mattos, and her child were frequent
+visitors; then there were celebrities from London: such as Sargent the
+painter, William Archer, Sidney Colvin, W. E. Henley, Henry James; and
+again friends residing in the neighbourhood of Bournemouth; the poet
+Sir Henry Taylor, and his family; Sir Percy Shelley and his wife.
+These latter, indeed, regarded Stevenson almost in the light of a son.
+He struck them as bearing an extraordinary resemblance to Percy Bysshe
+Shelley; less, perhaps, in lineaments than in figure and in mind; and
+in consequence of this similarity, they held him very dear.
+
+But to all he was the same bewildering charming host, the man who
+variously displayed, to quote W. E. Henley:
+
+  "A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
+  Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,--"
+
+And combined with these curiously versatile fruits, "something of the
+Shorter Catechist."
+
+Generous in criticism, kind in praise, grave and humorous in rapid
+transition, the amazing scope and variety of Stevenson's writings were
+excelled by the scope and variety of his talk.  "There was no part of
+the writer that was not visibly present in the man."  (Graham Balfour.)
+He had laid down his opinion that "there can be no fairer ambition than
+to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome."  But
+none save those who were privileged to hear him, as with quick,
+impetuous gestures, like a Southern foreigner, he emphasised his
+phrases, could realise the power, the versatility, the inexpressible,
+irrepressible charm with which the author could fulfil his "fair
+ambition."
+
+When the visitors had severally taken their departure, the strong
+resonant voice, with its Scottish accent and rich, full tones still
+ringing in their ears,--Stevenson had suffered no abatement in the
+stream of his exuberant mental vitality.  The excitement of
+conversation had, if anything, keyed him up; and presently, for the
+writing of a few unavoidable letters, he betook himself to his study;
+"the study where a smiling God beholds each day my stage of labour
+trod," and sate himself down there with reluctance.
+
+
+_Painting by W. Hatherell._
+
+  "All turned at the cry, and there in the wild
+  light of the morning heaving straight for
+  midway reef was the brig _Flying Scud_ of
+  Hull."
+
+_The Wrecker._
+
+[Illustration: _The Wrecker_]
+
+
+Correspondence, as a rule, he found but an irksome affair; unless
+conducted upon his own whimsical lines.  "I deny that letters should
+contain news--I mean mine--those of other people should," was his
+theory; and he boasted himself of a "willingness to pour forth
+unmitigated rot, which constitutes in me the true spirit of
+correspondence."  For all that, his letters, grave or gay, remain among
+the most delightful reading in existence; flavoured with his quaintest
+conceits, endowed with his most delicate turns of phrase, and often
+tempered with that "something of the Shorter Catechist" to which Henley
+had alluded.
+
+For, undoubtedly, as time went on, although Stevenson continued to
+"combine the face of a boy with the distinguished bearing of a man of
+the world," he was gradually exchanging the "streak of Puck" and the
+capricious unconventions of the born Bohemian, for something graver and
+more mature,--a tendency almost towards the didactic.  "'Tis a strange
+world indeed," he had commented, "but there is a manifest God for those
+who care to look for Him."  And now, "with the passing of years," he
+observed, "there grows more and more upon me that belief in the
+kindness of this scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God,
+which is an excellent and pacifying compensation."  He was suffering,
+and in all probability would perpetually suffer, from "that sharp
+ferule of calamity under which we are all God's scholars till we die":
+but his patience was impregnable, and his desire to leave a brave
+example bore him constant company.  "To suffer," said he, "sets a keen
+edge on what remains of the agreeable," and he prepared to enjoy with
+equal zest all pleasures which were still permitted to him.
+
+As he put away his writing materials, and descended once more to his
+beloved piano, his father and mother came in.  They were living in
+Bournemouth to be near their only son.  The old lighthouse engineer,
+whose father had built the Bell Rock, who had served under his brother
+Alan in the building of Skerryvore, "the noblest of all extant
+sea-lights," who had himself erected Dhu Heartach, was now palpably
+failing.  The spectacle of a stern and honest man slowly evacuating all
+that he had held of personal strength, was, to his son Louis, a
+poignantly pathetic one.  Their disagreements had been very many and
+deep-rooted, dating from even before that "dreadful evening walk" in
+Stevenson's youth, when, "on being tightly cross-questioned," the lad
+who had been trained for a civil engineer, and had "worked in a
+carpenter's shop and had a brass foundry, and hung about wood-yards and
+the like," confessed that he cared for nothing but literature,--"no
+profession!" as his father contemptuously replied.  They had differed
+on almost every conceivable topic open to their discussion,--yet here,
+in the fulness of time, they were at peace together,--the austere old
+man in his second childhood, and the chronic invalid who "must live as
+though he were walking on eggs."  Innumerable ineffaceable traits of
+similarity bound one to the other; at bottom of all the bygone angers
+lay a permanent bedrock of mutual love.  And perhaps the nearing vision
+of death which terminated all vistas for both of them, exercised its
+usual effect, of calm, and _laisser-faire_, and the equalisation of
+things: for it is probable that no man has a just sense of
+proportionate values until he stands in the presence of death.
+
+Stevenson had often alluded, as a matter of personal knowledge, to his
+constant prescience of mortality, and how it affected a man's thoughts
+of life.  Very seldom has the view of the confirmed invalid, the doomed
+consumptive, been put forth to the world with the frankness with which
+Stevenson invested it.  He has been sometimes charged with a certain
+lack of reticence: but in this matter, unquestionably, his candour was
+to the benefitting of mankind: to whom these close views of the
+inevitable end are rarely possible under such deliberate and
+clear-headed conditions.
+
+There is nothing maudlin, nothing hypochondriacal, about Stevenson's
+treatment of this subject: the same cheerful philosophy bears him up,
+the same vitality of joy.  It is hardly to be wondered at, that some
+critics handled him seriously, on account of his lightheartedness in
+the august shadow of the last enemy,--and his inveterate optimism in
+the face of all calamities.  "He jests at scars who never felt a
+wound," they practically told him,--and could hardly be persuaded to
+credit the paradox that the man who preached in season and out of
+season, the gospel of that "cheery old Pagan, Hope," was not a denizen
+of the open-air,--healthy, athletic, vigorous, incapable of realising
+the maladies incident to man,--instead of an emaciated, bed-ridden
+creature, whose smallest pleasures must be measured, so to speak, in a
+medicine-glass.  But, "It is something after all," he has said, "to
+leave a brave example": and in that he triumphantly succeeded.  For the
+opportunities of meteoric heroisms are few and far between; but every
+hour beholds the need of those obscurer braveries which may be born of
+pain and suffering....
+
+In _Ordered South_ and other well-known essays, he shows the gradual
+relaxation of the ties which bind a man to terrestrial things,--and the
+curiously significant alteration in his regard for the facts of
+life,--from the sower in the dank spring furrows, to the sight of
+little children with their long possibilities before them.
+
+Stevenson had no children of his own.  His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne,
+then at school in Bournemouth, was destined to become his friend and
+collaborator: but it is doubtful that he cared for children as such.
+The average small folk, "dragged about in a pleasing stupor by nurses,"
+were very far remote from that superabundant vitality nursed in an
+attenuated physique, which had sat up with a shawl over its shoulders,
+so many tedious months in childhood, when its principal _habitat_ was
+"The Land of Counterpane" and other regions mapped out in the great and
+glorious world of Make-Believe.
+
+
+_Painting by W. Hatherell._
+
+ST. IVES DESCENDS FROM EDINBURGH CASTLE.
+
+  "The whole forces of my mind were so consumed
+  with losing hold and getting it again, that I
+  could scarce have told whether I was going up
+  or coming down."
+
+_St. Ives._
+
+[Illustration: _St. Ives_]
+
+
+For this reason, the _Child's Garden of Verses_ is not, in any real
+sense of the word, a child's book at all.  It contains the exquisite
+imaginations of childhood as the grown-up man remembers them: to him
+they have the charm of the vanished past, they are the utterances of
+one who has also lived in Arcadia.  But to the child, they are the very
+commonplaces of existence.  To sway to and fro in a swing, "the
+pleasantest thing a child can do,"--to bring home treasures from field
+and wood, nuts and wooden whistles, and some all-precious
+unidentifiable stone, "though father denies it, I'm sure it is
+gold,"--these are everyday affairs to the country-child,--just as
+watching the lamplighter is to the town child.  To read verses about
+them is but a waste of time, when one might be actively engaged in
+similar avocations.  But to the grown-man who can never play with
+wooden soldiers in the garden, never be a pirate any more,--these
+reminiscences of Stevenson's are a delight unfailing.  No one else has
+ever worded them quite so accurately, quite so simply: and, taken all
+for all, they are in themselves a summing-up of that most excellent
+philosophy of this author, "The world is so full of a number of things,
+I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings!"  The world was indeed
+full of a number of things to R.L.S. and,--passed through the crucible
+of his own astonishing personality,--they were all, bad or good,
+transmogrified into things that make for joy.
+
+After eight o'clock dinner was over, the old folks bade
+good-night,--the father, with touching affection, kissing Louis as
+though he were a child, and murmuring, "You'll see me in the morning,
+dearie," as if still addressing that little feeble creature who had
+been kept alive with such difficulty in the old days at Edinburgh.
+
+The younger man returned to the piano-forte; it drew him like a magnet.
+For a short time he indulged in his desultory music-making, relishing
+to the uttermost every success of sound which he achieved: and the
+happiness, which was his theory of life, radiated in warm abundance
+from his richly-tinted face and glowing eyes.  "It's a fine life," he
+exclaimed.
+
+At last the day's supply of energy succumbed before the imperious
+demands of this "fiery threadpaper of a man," and in deference to his
+wife's suggestion he betook himself to bed.  Not necessarily to rest;
+for even in his dreams his busy brain was working, and his "Brownies,"
+as he termed them, bringing him fresh material for plots.  _Dr. Jekyll_
+had been thus evolved from three scenes dreamed successively in detail,
+from which the dreamer waked with cries of horror.
+
+But he did not flinch before the coming night, and anything that it
+might bring of sickness or unrest.  He thought alone upon the past
+delightful day, fraught with strenuous work and simple pleasures; and
+he petitioned, in his own words:
+
+  "If I have faltered more or less
+  In my great task of happiness;
+  If I have moved along my race
+  And shown no glorious morning face;
+  If beams from happy human eyes
+  Have moved me not; if morning skies,
+  Books, and my food, and summer rain
+  Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:--
+  Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take
+  And stab my spirit broad awake!"
+                          (_Underwoods._)
+
+
+His wife hovered around him with gentle ministrations, as suddenly
+out-wearied, Robert Louis Stevenson extended his long, lean form to a
+possible repose.  There was not, perhaps, a cheerfuller man that night
+in England.
+
+The sea hummed at the foot of the chine, with that soft and dove-like
+purring of the South-coast sea; the doves made answer with a vibrant
+cooing in the middle distance of the twilight garden.  Spring buds of
+pear-trees and cherry-trees globed themselves stealthily into blossom;
+a delicate latent energy was consciously present in the air--the rising
+of sap and revivification of seed, all the mysterious hidden progresses
+of April.  And the man whose ways were set in a perpetual convergence
+towards the doors of death, waved, so to speak, a blithe recognition to
+the myriad hosts of life.
+
+"O toiling hands of mortals!  O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not
+whither!  Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some
+conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting
+sun, descry the spires of El Dorado.  Little do ye know your own
+blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,
+and the true success is labour."  (_Virginibus Puerisque._)
+
+
+
+The author desires to acknowledge the kindness of Messrs. Cassell &
+Co., in allowing short extracts to be made from _The Master of
+Ballantrae_, _The Wrecker_, and _Catriona_; also to thank Mr. William
+Heinemann for a similar courtesy with regard to _St. Ives_, and Messrs.
+Chatto & Windus for their permission to include various quotations from
+_Virginibus Puerisque_, _Underwoods_, and _Prince Otto_.
+
+
+
+  Printed by The Bushey Colour Press (André & Sleigh, Ltd.),
+  Bushey, Herts., England.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Rear cover]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson, by Maurice Clare
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DAY WITH ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ***
+
+***** This file should be named 53165-8.txt or 53165-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/5/3/1/6/53165/
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
+States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
+specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
+eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
+for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
+performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
+away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
+not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
+trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country outside the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
+  are located before using this ebook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
+Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
+mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
+volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
+locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
+Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
+date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
+official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+
+    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+    Chief Executive and Director
+    gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
diff --git a/53165-8.zip b/old/53165-8.zip
index 81c4c50..81c4c50 100644
--- a/53165-8.zip
+++ b/old/53165-8.zip
diff --git a/53165-h.zip b/old/53165-h.zip
index 904e33e..904e33e 100644
--- a/53165-h.zip
+++ b/old/53165-h.zip
diff --git a/old/53165-h/53165-h.htm b/old/53165-h/53165-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..51c7883
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/53165-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,1772 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
+
+<head>
+
+<link rel="coverpage" href="images/img-cover-f.jpg" />
+
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
+
+<title>
+The Project Gutenberg E-text of A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson,
+by Maurice Clare
+</title>
+
+<style type="text/css">
+body { color: black;
+       background: white;
+       margin-right: 10%;
+       margin-left: 10%;
+       font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;
+       text-align: justify }
+
+p {text-indent: 4% }
+
+p.noindent {text-indent: 0% }
+
+p.t1 {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 200%;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t2 {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 150%;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t2b {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 150%;
+      font-weight: bold;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t3 {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 100%;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t3b {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 100%;
+      font-weight: bold;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t4 {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 80%;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t4b {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 80%;
+      font-weight: bold;
+      text-align: center }
+
+p.t5 {text-indent: 0% ;
+      font-size: 60%;
+      text-align: center }
+
+h1 { text-align: center }
+h2 { text-align: center }
+h3 { text-align: center }
+h4 { text-align: center }
+h5 { text-align: center }
+
+p.poem {text-indent: 0%;
+        margin-left: 10%; }
+
+p.thought {text-indent: 0% ;
+           letter-spacing: 4em ;
+           text-align: center }
+
+p.letter {text-indent: 0%;
+          margin-left: 10% ;
+          margin-right: 10% }
+
+p.footnote {text-indent: 0% ;
+            font-size: 80%;
+            margin-left: 10% ;
+            margin-right: 10% }
+
+p.dedication {text-indent: 0%;
+              margin-left: 15%;
+              text-align: justify }
+
+p.quote {text-indent: 4% ;
+         margin-left: 0% ;
+         margin-right: 0% }
+
+p.finis { font-size: larger ;
+          text-align: center ;
+          text-indent: 0% ;
+          margin-left: 0% ;
+          margin-right: 0% }
+
+p.capcenter { margin-left: 0;
+              margin-right: 0 ;
+              margin-bottom: .5% ;
+              margin-top: 0;
+              font-weight: bold;
+              float: none ;
+              clear: both ;
+              text-indent: 0%;
+              text-align: center  }
+
+img.imgcenter { margin-left: auto;
+                margin-bottom: 0;
+                margin-top: 1%;
+                margin-right: auto; }
+
+</style>
+
+</head>
+
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson, by Maurice Clare
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world 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.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Author: Maurice Clare
+
+Release Date: September 28, 2016 [EBook #53165]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DAY WITH ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-cover-f"></a>
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-cover-f.jpg" alt="Cover art" />
+<br />
+Cover art
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-000"></a>
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-000.jpg" alt="Robert Louis Stevenson" />
+<br />
+Robert Louis Stevenson
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"Took down the folds of her hair&mdash;shook it<br />
+round her face and the pool repeated her<br />
+thus veiled."
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Prince Otto.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-front-t"></a>
+<a href="images/img-front.jpg">
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-front-t.jpg" alt="Prince Otto" />
+</a>
+<br />
+<i>Prince Otto</i>
+</p>
+
+<h1>
+<br /><br />
+  A DAY WITH<br />
+  ROBERT LOUIS<br />
+  STEVENSON<br />
+</h1>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="t2b">
+  BY MAURICE CLARE<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="t2">
+  LONDON<br />
+  HODDER &amp; STOUGHTON<br />
+  1910<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+  <i>In the same Series.<br />
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Dickens.<br />
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thackeray.</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p><a id="chap01"></a></p>
+
+<h3>
+A DAY WITH STEVENSON.
+</h3>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+Supposing that in the month
+of April, 1886, you had arrived,
+a guest foreseen, at the pleasant
+ivy-muffled dwelling in Bournemouth,
+which had recently adopted
+the name of Skerryvore, and
+that you had been permitted to
+enter its doors&mdash;you might account yourself a
+somewhat favoured person.  For the master
+of the house, "that rickety and cloistered
+spectre," as he termed himself, the "pallid
+brute who lived in Skerryvore like a weevil
+in a biscuit," might be invisible for the
+nonce&mdash;shut upstairs, forbidden even to speak for
+fear of inducing hemorrhage.  Or again, you
+might yourself be afflicted with an obvious
+cold: in which case you would not be admitted
+into his presence, lest you left contagion of
+that cold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if fate befriended you, you would
+chance upon the most remarkable personality,
+it might be, that you had yet encountered.  A
+lean, long flat-chested man, gracefully emphatic
+of gesture&mdash;pacing up and down the room as he
+talked&mdash;burning with hectic energy&mdash;a man of
+rich brown tints in hair and eyes and skin:
+mutable, mirthful, brilliant&mdash;above all "vital,"
+as he had described himself, "wholly vital with
+a buoyance of life" which had upborne him
+hitherto over the crest of most tumultuous distresses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Robert Louis Stevenson was now thirty-six
+years old: and ever since his sixth year, when,
+as his mother recorded in her diary, he dreamed
+that he "heard the noise of pens writing," his
+aim had been set unswervingly toward the one
+goal.  Born of a strong and strenuous family,
+the great lighthouse builders of the north, he
+was not, like them, intent upon the subjugation
+of obstinate stone, the ordering and ordaining
+of rocks and seas.  Dhu Heartach and the Bell
+Rock and Skerryvore he could admire at a
+distance: but the material which cried aloud to
+him for mastery, was much more plastic,&mdash;yet,
+to him, no less stubborn.  "I imagine," he
+declared, "nobody ever had such pains to learn
+a trade as I had; but I slogged at it day in and
+day out."  His fastidious soul refused to be
+contented with a facile and slipshod utterance.
+A passionate quest: after <i>le mot propre</i>, which had
+led him, in his own phrase, to "play the sedulus
+ape" to all the great prose writers of the
+past&mdash;and a sense of style such as no man had ever so
+anxiously and assiduously developed in
+himself&mdash;these had achieved their own reward.
+"'Thanks to my dire industry," said Stevenson,
+"I have done more with smaller gifts than
+almost any man of letters in the world."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this was a just pride: for there was
+no branch of literature in which he could not
+admirably acquit himself.  So many years a
+struggler in obscurity, with small hopes, few
+successes, little encouragement&mdash;battling with
+continuous and crippling maladies,&mdash;this
+indomitable artist, by sheer dint of "dire industry,"
+now suddenly stood forth in full blaze of
+public recognition.  The author of <i>Virginibus
+Puerisque</i>, <i>Treasure Island</i>, <i>Prince Otto</i>, <i>The Child's
+Garden of Verse</i>, and <i>Dr. Jekyll</i>, was very much
+a man to be reckoned with.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Probably few modern books have met with
+such instantaneous and triumphant success as
+<i>Treasure Island</i> and <i>Dr. Jekyll</i>.  The first, after
+running its course, unannounced and comparatively
+unrecognized, the serial of an obscure
+author, in <i>Young Folks' Paper</i>, was published
+in book form,&mdash;and Stevenson, like Byron,
+"awoke to find himself famous."  The honours
+which he had failed to obtain with all the
+dainty humour, all the valiant fatalism, of
+<i>Virginibus Puerisque</i>, had been accorded
+without stint to <i>Treasure Island</i>.  It was a tense
+and stimulating piece of pure adventure.  The
+authentic air of the eighteenth century breathed
+through every sentence of it: and its fine
+flavour of dare-devil romance kindled even
+sober statesmen, such as Mr. Gladstone, to a
+very furore of avidity in devouring its
+breathless pages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for <i>Dr. Jekyll</i>, that gruesome
+work&mdash;literally the product of a nightmare&mdash;had been
+quoted in pulpits, discussed in newspapers, read
+by everybody,&mdash;it had taken the world by
+storm.  Yet Stevenson's head was not turned
+by his tardily-won success: with his customary
+<i>sang froid</i>, he took things as they came, failures
+and triumphs, and met each alike with smiling gallantry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The motives which had led him into authorship&mdash;or
+rather forced him, despite all stress
+and hindrance of froward circumstances,&mdash;were
+as curiously varied as his own nature; and it
+was these motives which still drove him hard
+and incessantly.  To fame he was perhaps not
+wholly indifferent.  No author sits so austerely
+aloft as to disdain popular applause altogether.
+Yet a born stylist and a conscious artist, like
+Stevenson, knew that his most finished work
+was above and beyond the appreciation of the
+general public.  For money,&mdash;though it was a
+necessity of life to him, and although, with all
+his recent triumphs, he was not at present
+earning more than £400 a year,&mdash;for money he
+did not care, except as a means to an end.
+"Wealth is only useful for two things," he
+said, "a yacht and a string quartet.  Except
+for these, I hold that £700 a year is as much as
+a man can possibly want."  Still, in declaring,
+"I do not write for the public," he added with
+engaging candour, "I do write for money, a
+nobler deity," and this, to a certain extent was
+true.  It was for money only, no doubt, that he
+was now undertaking, against the grain, that
+"romance of tushery," <i>The Black Arrow</i>, a tale
+with a mediæval setting in which he felt himself
+ill at ease.  But "most of all," he allowed, "I
+write for myself; not perhaps any more noble,
+but both more intelligent and nearer home."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And that a man in such difficulties of health
+and finance, and so precarious a position, should
+have the courage of his own determined artistry,
+was in itself sufficiently remarkable: but the
+result more than justified his choice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the morning, Stevenson had been
+upstairs writing: probably after a bad night;
+very likely in what any other man would term
+a totally unfit condition.  Under any and all
+circumstances, he continued to write unflinchingly;
+racked by coughing, reeling with weakness,
+with his right arm in a sling, and his left
+hand holding the pen,&mdash;sitting up in bed with
+a clinical thermometer in his mouth; and yet,
+as he declared, "I like my life all the same
+... I should bear false witness if I did not
+declare life happy." ... He was, in his own
+words, "made for a contest, and the powers
+have so willed that my battlefield should be
+this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the
+physic bottle."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"To declare life happy," became, in fact,
+his literary mission,&mdash;the condensed philosophy
+of his gay, inveterate courage.  "I believe that
+literature should give joy," was his maxim,
+"one dank, dispirited word is harmful,&mdash;a
+crime of <i>lèse-humanité</i>."  This brave and cheerful
+outlook is evident in all his essays,&mdash;it is,
+so to speak, a glorified and artistic
+Mark-Tapleyism, all-pervading, unimpugnable, ready
+to survive the most malevolent accidents of
+life, the crowning tragedy of death itself.  And
+so you find the "chronic sickist," as he termed
+himself, still ready, in all but body, for great
+risks and inspiriting adventures, and&mdash;through
+a mist of pain&mdash;leading forlorn hopes with a
+waving sword of flame.  You hear him
+proclaiming that:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"All who have meant good work with their
+whole hearts, have done good work, although
+they may die before they have the time to sign
+it.  Every heart that has beat strong and
+cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it
+in the world, and bettered the tradition of
+mankind.  And even if death catch people,
+like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying
+out vast projects, and planning monstrous
+foundations, flushed with hope, and their
+mouths full of boastful language, they should
+be at once tripped up and silenced; is there
+not something brave and spirited in such a
+termination? and does not life go down with
+a better grace, foaming in full body over a
+precipice, than miserable struggling to an end
+in sandy deltas?"  (<i>Virginibus Puerisque</i>.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And to him, above all, applied his own
+triumphant lines, those which he addressed to
+W. E. Henley, another writer, a man of like
+courageous outlook, who, like himself, "in the
+fell grip of circumstances, had not winced nor
+cried aloud:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "... Small the pipe; but oh! do thou,<br />
+  Peak-faced and suffering piper, blow therein<br />
+  The dirge of heroes dead; and to these sick,<br />
+  These dying, sound the triumph over death.<br />
+  Behold! each greatly breathes; each tastes a joy<br />
+  Unknown before in dying; for each knows<br />
+  A hero dies with him&mdash;though unfulfilled,<br />
+  Yet conquering truly&mdash;and not dies in vain."<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+At present he was engaged upon <i>Kidnapped</i>,
+that admirable piece of fiction which he had
+begun, "partly as a lark and partly as a
+pot-boiler."  It was a relief, after the concentrated
+horror of <i>Dr. Jekyll</i>, to escape into the Scottish
+heather-scent and to feel the salt sea-wind
+whistling through the cordage of <i>Kidnapped</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"She stood on the bulwarks and held on by a<br />
+stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Catriona.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-012-t"></a>
+<a href="images/img-012.jpg">
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-012-t.jpg" alt="Catriona" />
+</a>
+<br />
+<i>Catriona</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+Stevenson was desirous to "get free of this
+prison-yard of the abominably ugly, where I
+take my daily exercise with my contemporaries."  Possibly
+he recognised that the amazing
+popularity of <i>Jekyll</i> had been due to the morbid
+attractiveness of its subject, rather than to its
+merits of craftsmanship; for, as he had averred,
+"I know that good work sometimes hits; but,
+with my hand on my heart, I think it is an
+accident."  But now he was at liberty to give
+play to his infinite variety upon a true boys'
+book,&mdash;a story to satisfy the inveterate
+boyishness of his own heart.  "Of the romance of
+boyhood and adolescence, it has been said, he
+is an unsurpassed master ... the philosophy
+of life developed in both his essays and romances
+is that rather of a gifted boy than a mature
+man."  (J. W. Mackail.)  And even the girls
+of Stevenson's imagination have been accused
+of being "boys in petticoats."  The phrase has
+reason.  "I have never admired a girl," he
+wrote, and again, "I have never pleased
+myself with any women of mine."  The other sex
+remained for him, throughout, a mystery which
+he hardly cared to solve,&mdash;a sealed book which
+he was not desirous to open.  "Of the two
+eternal factors in the destiny of man, warfare
+and love," although he allowed that "to love
+is the great amulet which makes the world a
+garden," he preferred to deal almost exclusively
+with the warfare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet one women had played a very
+important part in Stevenson's life: and it was
+practically with his marriage that the tide of
+his fortunes had changed.  His wife,&mdash;"trusty,
+dusky, vivid, true," was his very <i>alter ego</i>: with
+"a character" (to quote Mr. Sidney Colvin)
+"as strong, interesting, and romantic almost
+as his own: an inseparable sharer of all his
+thoughts, the most shrewd and stimulating of
+critics: and in sickness, despite her own
+precarious health, the most devoted and most
+efficient of nurses."  To while away the weary
+hours of illness, Mrs. Stevenson made up
+stories to amuse him,&mdash;and subsequently the
+husband and wife would write them out
+together.  She, with her "eyes of gold and
+bramble-dew," was literally all-in-all to him as
+companion, helpmate, friend;&mdash;and far&mdash;how
+infinitely far!&mdash;above the ideal wife whom he
+had described so adroitly,&mdash;in his bachelor
+days,&mdash;that woman who should have "a fine
+touch for the affections," and who should at
+least be sufficiently talented to avoid boring her
+life-long comrade.  The character of the ideal
+wife, as there indicated,&mdash;apt at gracious
+compromises, possessor of a cheerful fluent
+tongue,&mdash;was very obviously set forth by a man who
+had never yet been stirred by the sharp throbs
+of an imperative emotion.  And now that
+Stevenson realised what love in its depth and
+breadth might mean, it held a certain sanctity
+for him,&mdash;he was loth to speak of it, as to write
+of it.  It was a marvel that had befallen him
+personally: but for other people, it might still
+perhaps, be no more than that gentle domesticated
+affection which he had portrayed with
+such amiable humour.  But there was one
+point in which he, consciously or unconsciously
+insisted, in his <i>desiderata</i> of the female
+character.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It always warms a man," he had declared,
+"to see a woman brave," and he saw it daily
+in his wife.  Therefore it came about, that,
+unversed in women&mdash;as Stevenson unquestionably
+was, he was able to endow his heroines
+with a touch of gallant boyishness, a hint of
+the heroic&mdash;and if they failed in
+flesh-and-blood-<i>vraisemblance</i>,
+they had that "steel-true,
+blade-straight" quality which he adored in the
+women he had chosen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You will notice this courageous virtue in
+all of them, rich and poor; from <i>Catriona</i>, that
+"tall, pretty, tender figure of a maiden, when,
+having assured her father's escape from prison
+by a bold stratagem, she arrives a fugitive and
+an exile at Helvoetsluys, and lands from the
+staggering side of the <i>Rose</i> into the little boat
+below;&mdash;when, in David Balfour's words:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I began to think I had made a fool's
+bargain, that it was merely impossible Catriona
+should be got on board to me, and that I stood
+to be set ashore in Helvoet all by myself
+... But this was to reckon without the lass's courage
+... Up she stood on the bulwarks and held
+by a stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats,
+which made the enterprise more dangerous,
+and gave us rather more a view of her stockings
+than would be thought genteel in cities"&mdash;(<i>Catriona.</i>)
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+to Seraphina in <i>Prince Otto</i>, still inherently
+valorous in that desperate flight through the
+forest: where:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"At length when she was well weary, she
+came upon a wide and shallow pool.  Stones
+stood in it, like islands; bulrushes fringed the
+coast; the floor was paved with pine needles;
+and the pines themselves, whose roots made
+promontories, looked down silently on their
+green images.  She crept to the margin and
+beheld herself with wonder, a hollow and
+bright-eyed phantom, in the ruins of her palace
+robe ... She addressed herself to make a
+toilette by that forest mirror, washed herself
+pure from all the stains of her adventure, took
+off her jewels and wrapped them in her handkerchief,
+re-arranged the tatters of her dress, and
+took down the folds of her hair.  She shook it
+round her face, and the pool repeated her thus
+veiled."  (<i>Prince Otto.</i>)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clara Huddlestone, in the <i>Pavilion on the
+Links</i>, repeats the same undauntable note: Olalla
+is inexorable in moral courage of renunciation,
+even the weeping Blanche, in the <i>Sieur de
+Malétroit's Door</i>, has the mettle of some small
+creature at bay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The charm of Stevenson's heroines is, in
+short, a cold charm; nor does he often accord
+them the assistance of a personal description.
+But they are finely tempered, of the best Toledo
+steel, and owing to their boyish character, there
+is no very obvious gap in those novels where
+they are conspicuously absent, such as <i>The Ebb
+Tide</i>, <i>The Wreckers</i>, and <i>The Master of Ballantrae</i>.
+In the latter, indeed, there is a slight "female
+interest," but a stronger personality in the
+heroine must inevitably have changed or
+coloured the whole course of the book: and
+one cannot but detect a certain vacuum, where
+at least some emotion might have lifted a
+haggard head, in the character of Mrs. Henry,&mdash;even
+in that scene, surcharged with hidden
+explosive possibilities, when the author
+describes how:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The Master played upon that little ballad,
+and upon those who heard him, like an instrument,
+and seemed now upon the point of failing,
+and now to conquer his distress, so that the
+words and music seemed to pour out of his own
+heart and his own past, and to be aimed directly
+at Mrs. Henry....  When it came to an end
+we all sat silent for a time: he had chosen the
+dusk of the afternoon, so that none could see
+his neighbour's face: but it seemed as if we
+held our breathing: only my old lord cleared
+his throat.  The first to move was the singer,
+who got to his feet suddenly and softly, and
+went and walked softly to and fro in the low
+end of the hall."  (<i>The Master of Ballantrae.</i>)
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+But Mrs. Henry plays a very minor part
+in the marring or making, here, of two men's
+lives: it is a rôle of <i>vis inertiæ</i> at best.  And,
+indeed, when all is said, what shall a petticoat
+be if not irrelevant, among the clash of steel
+and smoke of pistols, in an atmosphere
+permeated by Spanish doubloons or illicit piratical
+treasure?  Stevenson's infallible artistic
+instinct led him to keep the adventure-story
+pendant upon the deeds of men, and the eager
+mistakes of boys; and a certain curious
+penchant for the squalid, the submerged, the
+picturesque, brought him by choice into such
+company as no heroine should enter&mdash;that of
+Villon, for instance, and John Silver, and
+Herrick the cockney vagabond.  "The spice
+of life is battle," he said; and his life, and his
+books, were brimful of battles with foes or
+with fortune.
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"'The words and music seemed to pour out of<br />
+his own heart and his own past and to be<br />
+aimed directly at Mrs. Henry."
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Master of Ballantrae.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-020-t"></a>
+<a href="images/img-020.jpg">
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-020-t.jpg" alt="Master of Ballantrae" />
+</a>
+<br />
+<i>Master of Ballantrae</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+The open-air life which he had perforce
+abandoned, the joy of physical strength and
+hair-breadth 'scape, could still be his by proxy.
+He revelled in delineating his ideal man:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Being a true lover of living, a fellow with
+something pushing and spontaneous in his inside,
+he must, like any other soldier, in any other
+stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best
+pace until he touch the goal.  'A peerage or
+Westminster Abbey!' cried Nelson in his
+bright, boyish, heroic manner.  These are great
+incentives; not for any of these, but for the
+plain satisfaction of living, of being about their
+business in some sort or other, do the brave,
+serviceable men of every nation tread down
+the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all
+the stumbling-blocks of prudence."  (<i>Virginibus
+Puerisque.</i>)
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+The tramp of horse-hoofs, the clank of the
+capstan, the door ajar&mdash;a thousand sights and
+sounds were but symbolisms to him of some
+mysterious by-way of adventure to be followed
+up, quick with latent possibilities of romance;
+and from one word, one name, he could evolve
+a whole intricate plot.  With the simplest of
+sentences, he could electrify the startled reader,
+as when in <i>The Wrecker</i>, where the desperate
+castaways sit gambling on the desert island, and
+one suddenly cries aloud, "Sail ho!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"All turned at the cry,&mdash;and there, in the
+wild light of the morning, heading straight for
+Midway Reef, was the brig <i>Flying Scud</i> of
+Hull."  (<i>The Wrecker.</i>)
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+On that moment the whole tale hangs as on
+a pivot.  All its involution and evolution, all
+its intricate and tangled clues, lead&mdash;backwards
+or forwards&mdash;to this one swift breathless sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His morning's work accomplished, the tall
+gaunt man came downstairs, literally to play
+awhile.  After weeks, it might be, of enforced
+seclusion in his room, his eye rested pleasurably
+upon the various attractive objects which
+almost seemed like new to him.  Stevenson,&mdash;the
+avowed evader of personal property, the
+rolling-stone that had so long refused to gather
+moss,&mdash;was now, under a woman's tender
+surveillance, surrounded with charm and comfort.
+"Our drawing room," he maintained, "is a
+place so beautiful that it's like eating to sit
+down in it.  No other room is so lovely in the
+world ... I blush for the figure I cut in such
+a bower."  The garden, Mrs. Stevenson's
+special pleasure, but one in which her husband
+did not share, was very lovely, with a lawn,
+and heather-bank, and a half-acre of land,
+where a little stream ran down a "chine" full
+of rhododendrons.  A large dovecot figured in
+the garden; and there also "Boguey," the
+Stevensons' dog, was buried, to whom no other
+dog had ever been deemed a worthy successor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stevenson, his clothes hanging loosely on
+his emaciated figure, and his hands&mdash;"wonderful
+hands&mdash;long and fragile, like those in the
+early portraits of Velasquez," lingered lovingly
+over the keys.  For a while he amused himself
+by picking out, note by note, the old-world
+dance measures of Lully and Rameau; those
+gavottes, rigadoons and minuets, which
+conveyed to him the indefinable <i>pot-pourri</i>-like,
+flavour of his favourite eighteenth century,
+embued with a certain stately dignity, "the
+periwig feeling," he called it, as of lords and
+ladies treading courtly measures.  Stevenson
+was passionately fond of classical music, but he
+had never attained to any facility of execution.
+And when he grew tired with his efforts as an
+interpreter of Lully, he turned to "pickling," as
+he called it&mdash;composing, that is to say, after a
+fashion, with "the manly and melodious
+forefinger."  The fact that he had invariably failed
+to master the rudiments of theory, in no wise
+deterred him; on the contrary, difficulties
+rather enhanced his delight.  "Books are of
+no use," he avowed, "they tell you how to
+write in four parts, and that cannot be done
+by man."  So he continued to "pickle" with
+a light heart, and to enjoy consecutive fifths
+and other theoretical delinquencies with an
+enthusiasm worthy of the most modern composer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing but the lunch hour brought his
+musical experiments to a close.  Stevenson,
+who had, in his own words, "been obliged to
+strip himself, one after another, of all the
+pleasures that he had chosen, except smoking"
+(and indeed, he was smoking cigarettes all day
+long) by no means disdained the pleasures of
+the table.  Not, perhaps, in the role of a
+gourmet&mdash;but as an artist in the more recondite
+delicacies of taste and smell.  "To detect the
+flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human
+perfection than to find beauty in the colours of
+a sunset," he observed; he coupled the flavour
+of wine with the beauty of the dawn, and
+declared that we do not recognise at its full
+value the great part in life that is played by
+eating and drinking.  "There is a romance
+about the matter after all," he observed.
+"Probably the table has more devotees than love;
+and I am sure food is more generally
+entertaining than scenery."  It was the "romance of
+the matter" that appealed to him; especially
+the colour, and savour, and poetical tradition
+of wine.  "Books, and tobacco jars, and some
+old Burgundy as red as a November sunset,
+and as fragrant as a violet in April"&mdash;these,
+he thought, should suffice the most luxurious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After lunch, if he anticipated an exhausting
+evening, he went to sleep&mdash;at a moment's
+notice&mdash;and after a short, sound repose, was
+as eager as ever to resume his pianoforte
+amusements; which he continued until friends
+arrived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the age of four-and-twenty, Stevenson
+had noted down his three chief wishes.  "First,
+good health: secondly, a small competence:
+thirdly, <i>O Du lieber Gott!</i> friends."  The first:
+wish was irrevocably denied: the second was
+only just beginning to be granted, the guerdon
+of unresting toil: the third petition had been
+abundantly answered.  Never was a man more
+happy in his friends; or one who made them so
+instantaneously and without effort.  "He had
+only to speak," said one friend, "in order to
+be recognised in the first minute for a witty
+and charming gentleman, and in the second,
+for a man of genius."  Some, indeed, like
+Mr. Edmund Gosse, came home dazzled and
+astounded, saying, as Constance does of Arthur,
+"Was ever such a gracious creature born?"  His
+expression, of mingled tenderness and
+mirth, his "scholarly and eclectic
+presence"&mdash;together with his picturesque, velvet-coated
+appearance, and his flashing flow of words,
+combined to make a man so attractive and so
+unique as could command all love at will.  And
+the friends were very many and very notable,
+who haunted Skerryvore.  First and foremost
+was "Bob," Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, the
+poet's first cousin, the brilliant art critic: "the
+man likest and most unlike to me," as
+R.L.S. described him.  "Bob's" sister, Mrs. de Mattos,
+and her child were frequent visitors; then there
+were celebrities from London: such as Sargent
+the painter, William Archer, Sidney Colvin,
+W. E. Henley, Henry James; and again
+friends residing in the neighbourhood of
+Bournemouth; the poet Sir Henry Taylor, and his
+family; Sir Percy Shelley and his wife.  These
+latter, indeed, regarded Stevenson almost in the
+light of a son.  He struck them as bearing an
+extraordinary resemblance to Percy Bysshe
+Shelley; less, perhaps, in lineaments than in
+figure and in mind; and in consequence of this
+similarity, they held him very dear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to all he was the same bewildering
+charming host, the man who variously displayed,
+to quote W. E. Henley:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,<br />
+  Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,&mdash;"<br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+And combined with these curiously versatile
+fruits, "something of the Shorter Catechist."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Generous in criticism, kind in praise, grave
+and humorous in rapid transition, the amazing
+scope and variety of Stevenson's writings were
+excelled by the scope and variety of his talk.
+"There was no part of the writer that was not
+visibly present in the man."  (Graham Balfour.)  He
+had laid down his opinion that "there can
+be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to
+be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome."  But
+none save those who were privileged to
+hear him, as with quick, impetuous gestures,
+like a Southern foreigner, he emphasised his
+phrases, could realise the power, the versatility,
+the inexpressible, irrepressible charm with
+which the author could fulfil his "fair ambition."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the visitors had severally taken
+their departure, the strong resonant voice,
+with its Scottish accent and rich, full tones still
+ringing in their ears,&mdash;Stevenson had suffered
+no abatement in the stream of his exuberant
+mental vitality.  The excitement of
+conversation had, if anything, keyed him up; and
+presently, for the writing of a few unavoidable
+letters, he betook himself to his study; "the
+study where a smiling God beholds each day
+my stage of labour trod," and sate himself
+down there with reluctance.
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"All turned at the cry, and there in the wild<br />
+light of the morning heaving straight for<br />
+midway reef was the brig <i>Flying Scud</i> of<br />
+Hull."
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>The Wrecker.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-030-t"></a>
+<a href="images/img-030.jpg">
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-030-t.jpg" alt="The Wrecker" />
+</a>
+<br />
+<i>The Wrecker</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+Correspondence, as a rule, he found but an
+irksome affair; unless conducted upon his own
+whimsical lines.  "I deny that letters should
+contain news&mdash;I mean mine&mdash;those of other
+people should," was his theory; and he boasted
+himself of a "willingness to pour forth unmitigated
+rot, which constitutes in me the true spirit
+of correspondence."  For all that, his letters,
+grave or gay, remain among the most delightful
+reading in existence; flavoured with his
+quaintest conceits, endowed with his most
+delicate turns of phrase, and often tempered
+with that "something of the Shorter Catechist"
+to which Henley had alluded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For, undoubtedly, as time went on,
+although Stevenson continued to "combine the
+face of a boy with the distinguished bearing
+of a man of the world," he was gradually
+exchanging the "streak of Puck" and
+the capricious unconventions of the born
+Bohemian, for something graver and more
+mature,&mdash;a tendency almost towards the
+didactic.  "'Tis a strange world indeed," he
+had commented, "but there is a manifest God
+for those who care to look for Him."  And
+now, "with the passing of years," he observed,
+"there grows more and more upon me that
+belief in the kindness of this scheme of things,
+and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an
+excellent and pacifying compensation."  He
+was suffering, and in all probability would
+perpetually suffer, from "that sharp ferule of
+calamity under which we are all God's scholars
+till we die": but his patience was impregnable,
+and his desire to leave a brave example bore
+him constant company.  "To suffer," said he,
+"sets a keen edge on what remains of the
+agreeable," and he prepared to enjoy with
+equal zest all pleasures which were still
+permitted to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he put away his writing materials, and
+descended once more to his beloved piano, his
+father and mother came in.  They were living
+in Bournemouth to be near their only son.
+The old lighthouse engineer, whose father had
+built the Bell Rock, who had served under his
+brother Alan in the building of Skerryvore,
+"the noblest of all extant sea-lights," who had
+himself erected Dhu Heartach, was now palpably
+failing.  The spectacle of a stern and
+honest man slowly evacuating all that he had
+held of personal strength, was, to his son Louis,
+a poignantly pathetic one.  Their disagreements
+had been very many and deep-rooted,
+dating from even before that "dreadful evening
+walk" in Stevenson's youth, when, "on being
+tightly cross-questioned," the lad who had been
+trained for a civil engineer, and had "worked
+in a carpenter's shop and had a brass foundry,
+and hung about wood-yards and the like," confessed
+that he cared for nothing but literature,&mdash;"no
+profession!" as his father contemptuously
+replied.  They had differed on almost
+every conceivable topic open to their discussion,&mdash;yet
+here, in the fulness of time, they were at
+peace together,&mdash;the austere old man in his
+second childhood, and the chronic invalid who
+"must live as though he were walking on
+eggs."  Innumerable ineffaceable traits of similarity
+bound one to the other; at bottom of all the
+bygone angers lay a permanent bedrock of
+mutual love.  And perhaps the nearing vision
+of death which terminated all vistas for both of
+them, exercised its usual effect, of calm, and
+<i>laisser-faire</i>, and the equalisation of things: for
+it is probable that no man has a just sense of
+proportionate values until he stands in the
+presence of death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stevenson had often alluded, as a matter of
+personal knowledge, to his constant prescience
+of mortality, and how it affected a man's
+thoughts of life.  Very seldom has the view of
+the confirmed invalid, the doomed consumptive,
+been put forth to the world with the frankness
+with which Stevenson invested it.  He has
+been sometimes charged with a certain lack of
+reticence: but in this matter, unquestionably,
+his candour was to the benefitting of mankind:
+to whom these close views of the inevitable end
+are rarely possible under such deliberate and
+clear-headed conditions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is nothing maudlin, nothing hypochondriacal,
+about Stevenson's treatment of
+this subject: the same cheerful philosophy
+bears him up, the same vitality of joy.  It is
+hardly to be wondered at, that some critics
+handled him seriously, on account of his
+lightheartedness in the august shadow of the last
+enemy,&mdash;and his inveterate optimism in the face
+of all calamities.  "He jests at scars who never
+felt a wound," they practically told him,&mdash;and
+could hardly be persuaded to credit the paradox
+that the man who preached in season and out of
+season, the gospel of that "cheery old Pagan,
+Hope," was not a denizen of the open-air,&mdash;healthy,
+athletic, vigorous, incapable of realising
+the maladies incident to man,&mdash;instead of an
+emaciated, bed-ridden creature, whose smallest
+pleasures must be measured, so to speak, in a
+medicine-glass.  But, "It is something after
+all," he has said, "to leave a brave example":
+and in that he triumphantly succeeded.  For
+the opportunities of meteoric heroisms are few
+and far between; but every hour beholds the
+need of those obscurer braveries which may be
+born of pain and suffering....
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In <i>Ordered South</i> and other well-known
+essays, he shows the gradual relaxation of the
+ties which bind a man to terrestrial things,&mdash;and
+the curiously significant alteration in his
+regard for the facts of life,&mdash;from the sower in
+the dank spring furrows, to the sight of little
+children with their long possibilities before them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stevenson had no children of his own.
+His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, then at school in
+Bournemouth, was destined to become his
+friend and collaborator: but it is doubtful that
+he cared for children as such.  The average
+small folk, "dragged about in a pleasing stupor
+by nurses," were very far remote from that
+superabundant vitality nursed in an attenuated
+physique, which had sat up with a shawl over
+its shoulders, so many tedious months in
+childhood, when its principal <i>habitat</i> was "The Land
+of Counterpane" and other regions mapped
+out in the great and glorious world of Make-Believe.
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>Painting by W. Hatherell.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+ST. IVES DESCENDS FROM EDINBURGH CASTLE.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+"The whole forces of my mind were so consumed<br />
+with losing hold and getting it again, that I<br />
+could scarce have told whether I was going up<br />
+or coming down."
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<i>St. Ives.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-038-t"></a>
+<a href="images/img-038.jpg">
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-038-t.jpg" alt="St. Ives" />
+</a>
+<br />
+<i>St. Ives</i>
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+For this reason, the <i>Child's Garden of Verses</i>
+is not, in any real sense of the word, a child's
+book at all.  It contains the exquisite
+imaginations of childhood as the grown-up man
+remembers them: to him they have the charm of
+the vanished past, they are the utterances of
+one who has also lived in Arcadia.  But to the
+child, they are the very commonplaces of
+existence.  To sway to and fro in a swing,
+"the pleasantest thing a child can do,"&mdash;to
+bring home treasures from field and wood, nuts
+and wooden whistles, and some all-precious
+unidentifiable stone, "though father denies it,
+I'm sure it is gold,"&mdash;these are everyday affairs
+to the country-child,&mdash;just as watching the
+lamplighter is to the town child.  To read
+verses about them is but a waste of time, when
+one might be actively engaged in similar
+avocations.  But to the grown-man who can never
+play with wooden soldiers in the garden, never
+be a pirate any more,&mdash;these reminiscences of
+Stevenson's are a delight unfailing.  No one
+else has ever worded them quite so accurately,
+quite so simply: and, taken all for all, they are
+in themselves a summing-up of that most
+excellent philosophy of this author, "The
+world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure
+we should all be as happy as kings!"  The
+world was indeed full of a number of things to
+R.L.S. and,&mdash;passed through the crucible of
+his own astonishing personality,&mdash;they were
+all, bad or good, transmogrified into things
+that make for joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After eight o'clock dinner was over, the
+old folks bade good-night,&mdash;the father, with
+touching affection, kissing Louis as though he
+were a child, and murmuring, "You'll see me
+in the morning, dearie," as if still addressing
+that little feeble creature who had been kept
+alive with such difficulty in the old days at
+Edinburgh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The younger man returned to the piano-forte;
+it drew him like a magnet.  For a short
+time he indulged in his desultory music-making,
+relishing to the uttermost every success of
+sound which he achieved: and the happiness,
+which was his theory of life, radiated in warm
+abundance from his richly-tinted face and
+glowing eyes.  "It's a fine life," he exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last the day's supply of energy succumbed
+before the imperious demands of this
+"fiery threadpaper of a man," and in deference
+to his wife's suggestion he betook himself to bed.
+Not necessarily to rest; for even in his dreams
+his busy brain was working, and his "Brownies,"
+as he termed them, bringing him fresh material
+for plots.  <i>Dr. Jekyll</i> had been thus evolved from
+three scenes dreamed successively in detail, from
+which the dreamer waked with cries of horror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he did not flinch before the coming
+night, and anything that it might bring of
+sickness or unrest.  He thought alone upon the
+past delightful day, fraught with strenuous work
+and simple pleasures; and he petitioned, in his
+own words:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+  "If I have faltered more or less<br />
+  In my great task of happiness;<br />
+  If I have moved along my race<br />
+  And shown no glorious morning face;<br />
+  If beams from happy human eyes<br />
+  Have moved me not; if morning skies,<br />
+  Books, and my food, and summer rain<br />
+  Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:&mdash;<br />
+  Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take<br />
+  And stab my spirit broad awake!"<br />
+  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;(<i>Underwoods.</i>)<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+His wife hovered around him with gentle
+ministrations, as suddenly out-wearied, Robert
+Louis Stevenson extended his long, lean form
+to a possible repose.  There was not, perhaps,
+a cheerfuller man that night in England.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sea hummed at the foot of the chine,
+with that soft and dove-like purring of the
+South-coast sea; the doves made answer with
+a vibrant cooing in the middle distance of the
+twilight garden.  Spring buds of pear-trees and
+cherry-trees globed themselves stealthily into
+blossom; a delicate latent energy was
+consciously present in the air&mdash;the rising of sap
+and revivification of seed, all the mysterious
+hidden progresses of April.  And the man
+whose ways were set in a perpetual
+convergence towards the doors of death, waved,
+so to speak, a blithe recognition to the myriad
+hosts of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"O toiling hands of mortals!  O unwearied
+feet, travelling ye know not whither!  Soon,
+soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on
+some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way
+further, against the setting sun, descry the
+spires of El Dorado.  Little do ye know your
+own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a
+better thing than to arrive, and the true success
+is labour."  (<i>Virginibus Puerisque.</i>)
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p>
+The author desires to acknowledge the
+kindness of Messrs. Cassell &amp; Co., in allowing
+short extracts to be made from <i>The Master of
+Ballantrae</i>, <i>The Wrecker</i>, and <i>Catriona</i>; also to
+thank Mr. William Heinemann for a similar
+courtesy with regard to <i>St. Ives</i>, and
+Messrs. Chatto &amp; Windus for their permission to
+include various quotations from <i>Virginibus
+Puerisque</i>, <i>Underwoods</i>, and <i>Prince Otto</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="t4">
+  Printed by The Bushey Colour Press (André &amp; Sleigh, Ltd.),<br />
+  Bushey, Herts., England.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="capcenter">
+<a id="img-cover-r"></a>
+<img class="imgcenter" src="images/img-cover-r.jpg" alt="Rear cover" />
+<br />
+Rear cover
+</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Day with Robert Louis Stevenson, by Maurice Clare
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DAY WITH ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ***
+
+***** This file should be named 53165-h.htm or 53165-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/5/3/1/6/53165/
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
+States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
+specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
+eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
+for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
+performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
+away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
+not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
+trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country outside the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
+  are located before using this ebook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
+Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
+mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
+volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
+locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
+Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
+date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
+official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+
+    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+    Chief Executive and Director
+    gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</body>
+
+</html>
+
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-000.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-000.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..719e70d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-000.jpg
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-005.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-005.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..656aca9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-005.jpg
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-012-t.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-012-t.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d91d0e6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-012-t.jpg
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-012.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-012.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6609a82
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-012.jpg
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-020-t.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-020-t.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..abd2729
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-020-t.jpg
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-020.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-020.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..50b4fb0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-020.jpg
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-030-t.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-030-t.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..58dafb1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-030-t.jpg
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-030.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-030.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ae96205
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-030.jpg
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-038-t.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-038-t.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cab8ef5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-038-t.jpg
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-038.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-038.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..887b241
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-038.jpg
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-cover-f.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-cover-f.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..becbc59
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-cover-f.jpg
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-cover-r.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-cover-r.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b94ee01
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-cover-r.jpg
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-front-t.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-front-t.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d4cd72e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-front-t.jpg
diff --git a/old/53165-h/images/img-front.jpg b/old/53165-h/images/img-front.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2576c5e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/53165-h/images/img-front.jpg