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 Robert Louis Stevenson 
 From a photograph by Lloyd Osbourne 
 
THE LIFE OF 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 FOR BOYS AND GIRLS 
 
 BY 
 
 JACQUELINE M. OVERTON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1915 
 
Copyright, i 91 5, by 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Published August, 1915 
 
 
 ©Cl.A4.i0269 
 
 AUG 31 18:5 
 

 TO THE BOYS AT THE YORKVILLE LIBRARY 
 
 AND 
 
 TO ALL OTHER BOYS 
 
 WHO LOVE TO TRAMP AND CAMP AND SEEK ADVENTURE 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 
 
 WITH THE HOPE OF MAKING THEM 
 
 BETTER FRIENDS WITH A MAN WHO ALSO 
 
 LOVED THESE THINGS 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The Lighthouse Builders 3 
 
 II. Robert Louis Stevenson 16 
 
 III. The Lantern Bearer 31 
 
 IV. Edinburgh Days 47 
 
 V. Amateur Emigrant 72 
 
 VI. Scotland Again 93 
 
 VII. Second Visit to America 108 
 
 VIII. In the South Seas 121 
 
 IX. Vailima 148 
 
 Bibliography 175 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson Frontispiece 
 
 From a photograph by Mr. Lloyd Osbourne 
 
 FACING 
 PACE 
 
 No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Stevenson's 
 birthplace 18 
 
 Colinton Manse 26 
 
 Swanston Cottage 42 
 
 Edinburgh Castle 64 
 
 Skerryvore Cottage, Bournemouth 98 
 
 The Treasure Island map 100 
 
 Facsimile of letter sent to Cummy with "An 
 Inland Voyage" 106 
 
 Bas-relief of Stevenson by Augustus Saint Gaudens 112 
 
 South Sea houses 130 
 
 The house at Vailima 154 
 
 A feast of chiefs 162 
 
 The tomb of Stevenson on Vaea Mountain . . . 172 
 
THE LIFE OF 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 FOR BOYS AND GIRLS 
 
"Write me as one who loves his fellowmen." 
 
 — Hunt. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 
 
 "... For the sake 
 Of these, my kinsmen and my countrymen, 
 Who early and late in the windy ocean toiled 
 To plant a star for seamen." 
 
 THE pirate, Ralph the Rover, so legend 
 tells, while cruising off the coast of 
 Scotland searching for booty or sport, sank 
 the warning bell on one of the great rocks, 
 to plague the good Abbot of Arbroath who 
 had put it there. The following year the 
 Rover returned and perished himself on the 
 same rock. 
 
 In the life of one of Scotland's great men, 
 Robert Louis Stevenson, we find proud 
 record of his grandfather, Robert Steven- 
 son, having built Bell Rock Lighthouse on 
 this same spot years afterward. 
 
 No story of Robert Louis Stevenson's life 
 would be complete that failed to mention 
 3 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 the work done for Scotland and the world 
 at large by the two men he held most dear, 
 the engineers, his father and grandfather. 
 
 When Robert Stevenson, his grandfather, 
 received his appointment on the Board of 
 Northern Lights the art of lighthouse build- 
 ing in Scotland had just begun. Its bleak, 
 rocky shores were world-famous for their 
 danger, and few mariners cared to venture 
 around them. At that time the coast "was 
 lighted at a single point, the Isle of May, 
 in the jaws of the Firth of Forth, where, on 
 a tower already a hundred and fifty years 
 old, an open coal-fire blazed in an open 
 chaufer. The whole archipelago thus nightly 
 plunged in darkness was shunned by sea- 
 going vessels." * 
 
 The board at first proposed building four 
 new lights, but afterward built many more, 
 so that to-day Scotland stands foremost 
 among the nations for the number and splen- 
 dor of her coast lights. 
 
 Their construction in those early days 
 
 * Stevenson, " Family of Engineers." 
 4 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 
 
 meant working against tremendous obstacles 
 and dangers, and the life of the engineer was 
 a hazardous one. 
 
 "The seas into which his labors carried 
 him were still scarce charted, the coasts still 
 dark; his way on shore was often far be- 
 yond the convenience of any road; the isles 
 in which he must sojourn were still partly 
 savage. He must toss much in boats; he 
 must often adventure much on horseback by 
 dubious bridle-track through unfrequented 
 wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his 
 lighthouses in the very camp of wreckers. 
 
 "The aid of steam was not yet. At first 
 in random coasting sloop, and afterwards in 
 the cutter belonging to the service, the en- 
 gineer must ply and run amongst these mul- 
 tiplied dangers and sometimes late into the 
 stormy autumn." 
 
 All of which failed to daunt Robert Steven- 
 son who loved action and adventure and the 
 scent of things romantic. 
 
 "Not only had towers to be built and ap- 
 paratus transplanted, the supply of oil must 
 5 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 be maintained and tlie men fed, in the sahie 
 inaccessible and distant scenes, a whole 
 service with its routine . . . had to be 
 called out of nothing; and a new trade (that 
 of light-keeper) to be taught, recruited and 
 organized." 
 
 Bell Rock was only one of twenty light- 
 houses Robert Stevenson helped to build, but 
 it was by far the most difficult one . . . and 
 even to-day, after it has been lighted for 
 more than a hundred years, it still remains 
 unique — a monument to his skill. 
 
 Bell Rock was practically a reef completely 
 submerged at full tide and only a few feet of 
 its crest visible at low water. To raise a 
 tower on it meant placing a foundation 
 under water, a new and perilous experiment. 
 
 "Work upon the rock in the earliest stages 
 was confined to the calmest days of the 
 summer season, when the tides were lowest, 
 the water smoothest, and the wind in its 
 calmest mood. Under such conditions the 
 men were able to stay on the site for about 
 five hours. . . * 
 
 6 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 
 
 "One distinct drawback was the neces- 
 sity to establish a depot some distance from 
 the erecting site. Those were the days be- 
 fore steam navigation, and the capricious 
 sailing craft offered the only means of main- 
 taining communication between rock and 
 shore, and for the conveyance of men and 
 materials to and fro. . . . 
 
 "A temporary beacon was placed on the 
 reef, while adjacent to the site selected for 
 the tower a smith's forge was made fast, so 
 as to withstand the dragging motion of the 
 waves when the rock was submerged. The 
 men were housed on the Smeaton, which, 
 during the spells of work on the rock, rode at 
 anchor a short distance away in deep water."* 
 
 Once the engineers were all but lost when 
 the Smeaton slipped her moorings and left 
 them stranded on the rock. 
 
 In spite of all the obstacles, the work was 
 completed at the end of two years and the 
 light was shown for the first time Feb- 
 ruary 1, 1811. 
 
 * Talbot, "Lightships and Lighthouses." 
 7 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 "I found Robert Stevenson an appreci- 
 ative and intelligent companion," writes 
 Sir Walter Scott in his journal, speaking of 
 a cruise he made among the islands of 
 Scotland with a party of engineers. The 
 notes made by him on this trip were used 
 afterward in his two stories, "The Pirate" 
 and "Lord of the Isles." 
 
 "My grandfather was king in the service 
 to his fmger-tips," wrote Louis Stevenson. 
 "All should go his way, from the principal 
 light-keeper's coat to the assistant's fender, 
 from the gravel in the garden walks to the 
 bad smell in the kitchen, or the oil spots on 
 the storeroom floor. It might be thought 
 there was nothing more calculated to awaken 
 men's resentment, and yet his rule was not 
 more thorough than it was beneficent. 
 His thought for the keepers was continual. 
 . . . When a keeper was sick, he lent him 
 his horse and sent him mutton and brandy 
 from the ship. . . . They dwelt, many of 
 them, in uninhabited isles or desert fore- 
 lands, totally cut off from shops. 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 
 
 " No servant of the Northern Lights 
 came to Edinburgh but he was entertained 
 at Baxter Place. There at his own table 
 my grandfather sat down delightedly with 
 his broad-spoken, homespun officers." 
 
 As he grew old his "medicine and delight" 
 was his annual trip among his lighthouses, 
 but at length there came a time when this 
 joy was taken away from him and there 
 came "the end of all his cruising; the knowl- 
 edge that he had looked the last on Sun- 
 burgh, and the wild crags of Skye, and the 
 Sound of Mull; that he was never again to 
 hear the surf break in Clashcarnock; never 
 again to see lighthouse after lighthouse 
 (all younger than himself, and the more, 
 part of his own device) open in the hour of 
 dusk their flower of fire, or the topaz and 
 ruby interchange on the summit of Bell 
 Rock." 
 
 Throughout the rank and file of his men 
 
 he was adored. "I have spoken with 
 
 many who knew him; I was his grandson, 
 
 and their words may very well have been 
 
 9 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 words of flattery; but there was one thing 
 that could not be affected, and that was the 
 look that came over their faces at the name 
 of Robert Stevenson." 
 
 Of his family of thirteen children, three 
 of his sons became engineers. Thomas 
 Stevenson, the father of Robert Louis, like 
 the others of his family, contributed largely 
 to lighthouse building and harbor improve- 
 ment, serving under his older brother, Allen, 
 in building the Skerryvore, one of the 
 most famous deep-sea lights erected on a 
 treacherous reef off the west coast where, 
 for more than forty years, one wreck after 
 another had occurred. 
 
 "From the navigator's point of view, the 
 danger of this spot lay chiefly in the fact 
 that it was so widely scattered. The ridge 
 runs like a broken backbone for a distance 
 of some eight miles. ... In rough weather 
 the whole of the rocks are covered, and the 
 waves, beating heavily on the mass, convert 
 the scene into one of indescribable tu- 
 mult. . . . 
 
 10 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 
 
 "There was only one point where a 
 tower could be placed, and this was so 
 exposed that the safe handling of men and 
 material constituted a grave responsibility." 
 
 It was necessary to erect a tower one 
 hundred and thirty feet high; "the loftiest 
 and weightiest work of its character that 
 had ever been contemplated up to this 
 time. . . . 
 
 "The Atlantic swell, which rendered land- 
 ing on the ridge precarious and hazardous, 
 did not permit the men to be housed upon 
 a floating home, as had been the practice 
 in the early days of the Bell Rock tower. 
 In order to permit the work to go forward 
 as uninterruptedly as the sea would allow, 
 a peculiar barrack was erected. It was a 
 house on stilts, the legs being sunk firmly 
 into the rock, with the living quarters 
 perched some fifty feet up in the air, 
 
 "Residence in this tower was eerie. The 
 men climbed the ladder and entered a small 
 room, which served the purposes of kitchen, 
 living-room, and parlor. . . . 
 11 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 "When a storm was raging, the waves, 
 as they combed over the rock, shook the 
 legs violently and scurried under the floor 
 in seething foam. Now and again a roller, 
 rising higher than its fellows, broke upon the 
 rock and sent a mass of water against the 
 flooring to hammer at the door. Above 
 the living-room were the sleeping quarters, 
 high and dry, save when a shower of spray 
 fell upon the roof and walls like heavy 
 hail. . . . The men, however, were not per- 
 turbed. Sleeping, even under such con- 
 ditions, was far preferable to doubtful rest 
 in a bunk upon an attendant vessel, rolling 
 and pitching with the motion of the sea. 
 They had had a surfeit of such experi- 
 ence . . . while the barrack was under 
 erection. 
 
 "For two years it withstood the seas 
 without incident, and the engineer and men 
 came to regard the eyrie as safe as a house 
 on shore. But one night the little colony 
 received a shock. The angry Atlantic got 
 one or two of its trip-hammer blows well 
 12 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 
 
 home, and smashed the structure to frag- 
 ments. Fortunately, at the time it was un- 
 tenanted." 
 
 No time was lost in rebuilding the bar- 
 rack and this time it withstood all tests until 
 it was torn down after Skerry vore was 
 finished. 
 
 "While the foundations were being pre- 
 pared, and until the barrack was con- 
 structed, the men ran other terrible risks 
 every morning and night landing upon and 
 leaving the polished surface of the reef. 
 Five months during the summer was the 
 working season, but even then many days 
 and weeks were often lost owing to the 
 swell being too great to permit the rowing 
 boat to come alongside. The engineer re- 
 lates that the work was 'a good lesson in 
 the school of patience,' because the delays 
 were frequent and galling, while every 
 storm which got up and expended its rage 
 upon the reef left its mark indelibly among 
 the engineer's stock in trade. Cranes and 
 other materials were swept away as if they 
 13 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 were corks; lashings, no matter how strong, 
 were snapped like pack-threads. 
 
 "Probably the worst experience was when 
 the men on the rock were weather-bound 
 for seven weeks during one season. . . . 
 Their provisions sank to a very low level, 
 they ran short of fuel, their sodden clothing 
 was worn to rags. . . . 
 
 "Six years were occupied in the comple- 
 tion of the work, and, as may be imagined, 
 the final touches were welcomed with thank- 
 fulness by those who had been concerned in 
 the enterprise." 
 
 It was in meteorological researches and il- 
 lumination of lighthouses, however, that 
 Thomas Stevenson did his greatest work. 
 It was he who brought to perfection the re- 
 volving light now so generally used. 
 
 In spite of this and other valuable inven- 
 tions his name has remained little known, 
 owing to the fact that none of his inventions 
 were ever patented. The Stevensons be- 
 lieved that, holding government appoint- 
 ments, any original work they did belonged 
 14 
 
THE LIGHTHOUSE BUILDERS 
 
 to the nation. "A patent not only brings 
 in money but spreads reputation," writes 
 his son, "and my father's instruments enter 
 anonymously into a hundred light rooms 
 and are passed anonymously over in a hun- 
 dred reports, where the least considerable 
 patent would stand out and tell its author's 
 story." 
 
 He was beloved among a wide circle of 
 friends and the esteem of those in his pro- 
 fession was shown when in 1884 they chose 
 him for president of the Royal Society of 
 Edinburgh. To the general public, how- 
 ever, he remained unknown in spite of the 
 fact that "His lights were in all parts of 
 the world guiding the mariners." 
 
 15 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 "As from the house your mother sees 
 You playing round the garden trees, 
 So you may see, if you will look 
 Through the window of this book. 
 Another child, far, far away. 
 And in another garden, play." 
 
 — "Child's Garden of Verses." 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS BALFOUR STEVENSON 
 . was born at No. 8 Howard Place, 
 Edinburgh, Scotland, November 13, 1850. 
 
 In 1852 the family moved from Howard 
 Place to Inverleith Terrace, and two years 
 later to No. 17 Heriot Row, which remained 
 their home for many years. 
 
 As a child Louis was very delicate and 
 often ill, for years hardly a winter passed 
 that he did not spend many days in bed. 
 Edinburgh in winter is extremely damp 
 and he tells us: "Many winters I never 
 crossed the threshold, but used to lie on 
 16 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 my face on the nursery floor, chalking or 
 painting in water-colors the pictures in the 
 illustrated newspapers; or sit up in bed 
 with a little shawl pinned about my shoul- 
 ders, to play with bricks or what not." 
 
 The diverting history of "Hop-O'-My- 
 Thumb" and the "Seven-League Boots," 
 "Little Arthur's History of England," 
 "Peter Parley's Historical Tales," and 
 "Harry's Ladder to Learning" were books 
 which he delighted to pore over and their 
 pages bore many traces of his skill with 
 the pencil and paint-brush. 
 
 Those who have read the "Child's Gar- 
 den of Verses" already know the doings of 
 his childish days, for although those rhymes 
 were not written until he was a grown man 
 he was "one of the few who do not forget 
 their own lives" and "through the win- 
 dows of this book" gives us a vivid and 
 living picture of the boy who dwelt so 
 much in a world of his own with his quaint 
 thoughts. 
 
 If his body was frail his spirit was strong 
 17 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 and his power of imagination so great that 
 he cheered himself through many a weary 
 day by playing he was "captain of a tidy 
 little ship," a soldier, a fierce pirate, an In- 
 dian chief, or an explorer in foreign lands. 
 Miles he travelled in his little bed. 
 
 "I have just to shut my eyes, 
 To go sailing through the skies — 
 To go sailing far away 
 To the pleasant Land of Play" 
 
 he says. 
 
 In spite of his power for amusing himself, 
 days like these would have gone far harder 
 had it not been for two devoted people, 
 his mother and his nurse, Alison Cunning- 
 ham or "Cummie" as he called her. His 
 mother was devoted to him in every way 
 and encouraged his love for reading and 
 story-making. She kept a diary of his prog- 
 ress from day to day, and treasured every 
 picture he drew or scrap he wrote. Cummie 
 came to him as a Torryburn lassie when he 
 was eighteen months old and was like a 
 second mother to him. She not only cared 
 18 
 
No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Stevenson's birthplace 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 for his bodily comforts but was his friend 
 and comrade as well. She sang for him, 
 danced for him, spun fine tales of pirates 
 and smugglers, and read to him so dra- 
 matically that his mind was fired then and 
 there with a longing for travel and adven- 
 ture which he never lost. When they took 
 their walks through the streets together 
 Cummie had many stories to tell him of 
 Scotland and Edinburgh in the old days. 
 For Edinburgh is a wonderful old city with 
 a wonderful history full of tales of stirring 
 adventure and romance. "For centuries it 
 was a capitol thatched with heather and 
 more than once, in the evil days of English 
 invasion, it has gone up in flames to Heaven, 
 a beacon to ships at sea. ... It was the 
 jousting-ground of jealous nobles, not only 
 on Greenside or by the King's Stables, where 
 set tournaments were fought to the sound 
 of trumpets and under the authority of the 
 royal presence, but in every alley whe^-e 
 there was room to cross swords. ... In 
 the town, in one of those little shops plas- 
 19 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 tered like so many swallows' nests among 
 the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that 
 familiar autocrat James VI, would gladly 
 share a bottle of wine with George Heriot 
 the goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, 
 that so quietly look down on the castle 
 with the city lying in waves around it, 
 those mad and dismal fanatics, the Sweet 
 Singers, haggard from long exposure on the 
 moors, sat day and night 'with tearful 
 psalms.' ... In the Grassmarket, stiff- 
 necked covenanting heroes offered up the 
 often unnecessary, but not less honorable, 
 sacrifice of their lives, and bade eloquent 
 farewell to sun, moon and stars and earthly 
 friendships, or died silent to the roll of the 
 drums. Down by yon outlet rode Grahame 
 of Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, 
 with the town beating to arms behind their 
 horses' tails — a sorry handful thus riding 
 for their lives, but with a man at their head 
 who was to return in a different temper, 
 make a bold dash that staggered Scotland, 
 and die happily in the thick of the fight. . . . 
 20 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 "The palace of Holyrood is a house of 
 many memories. . . . Great people of yore, 
 kings and queens, buffoons and grave am- 
 bassadors played their stately farce for cen- 
 turies in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, 
 dancing has lasted deep into the night, 
 murder has been done in its chambers. 
 There Prince Charlie held his phantom 
 levees and in a very gallant manner repre- 
 sented a fallen dynasty for some hours. . . . 
 
 "There is an old story of the subterranean 
 passage between the castle and Holyrood 
 and a bold Highland piper who volunteered 
 to explore its windings. He made his en- 
 trance by the upper end, playing a strath- 
 spey; the curious footed it after him down 
 the street, following his descent by the 
 sound of the chanter from below; until all 
 of a sudden, about the level of St. Giles the 
 music came abruptly to an end, and the 
 people in the street stood at fault with hands 
 uplifted. Whether he choked with gases, 
 or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily 
 by the Evil One, remains a point of doubt, 
 21 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 but the piper has never again been seen or 
 heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he 
 wandered down into the land of Thomas the 
 Rhymer, and some day, when it is least 
 expected, may take a thought to revisit the 
 sunlit upper world. That will be a strange 
 moment for the cabmen on the stands be- 
 side St. Giles, when they hear the crone of 
 his pipes reascending from the earth below 
 their horses' feet." 
 
 In Edinburgh to-day there are armed 
 men and cannon in the castle high up on 
 the great rock above you: "You may see 
 the troops marshalled on the high parade, 
 and at night after the early winter evenfall 
 and in the morning before the laggard 
 winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over 
 Edinburgh the sounds of drums and 
 bugles."* 
 
 Long before Louis could write he made 
 up verses and stories for himself, and Cum- 
 mie wrote them down for him. " I thought 
 they were rare nonsense then," she said, 
 
 * Stevenson, " Essay on Edinburgh." 
 22 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 little dreaming that these same bits of 
 "rare nonsense" were the beginnings of 
 what was to make "her boy" famous across 
 two seas in years to come. 
 
 He writes of her when speaking of long 
 nights he lay awake unable to sleep because 
 of a troublesome cough: "How well I re- 
 member her lifting me out of bed, carrying 
 me to the window and showing me one or 
 two lit windows up in Queen Street across 
 the dark belt of garden, where also, we told 
 each other, there might be sick little boys 
 and their nurses waiting, like us, for the 
 morning." 
 
 Her devotion to him had its reward in the 
 love he gave her all his life. One of his 
 early essays written when he was twenty 
 and published in the Juvenilia was called 
 "Nurses." Fifteen years later came the 
 publication of the "Child's Garden of 
 Verses" with a splendid tribute to her as 
 a dedication. He sent her copies of all his 
 books, wrote letters to her, and invited her 
 to visit him. She herself tells that the last 
 23 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 time she ever saw him he said to her, "be- 
 fore a room full of people, ' It's you that 
 gave me a passion for the drama, Cummie.' 
 'Me, Master Lou,' I said, 'I never put foot 
 inside a playhouse in my life.' 'Ay, woman,' 
 said he, 'but it was the good dramatic way 
 ye had of reciting the hymns.' " 
 
 When he was six years old his Uncle 
 David offered a Bible picture-book as a 
 prize to the nephews who could write the 
 best history of Moses. 
 
 This was Louis's first real literary at- 
 tempt. He was not able to write himself, 
 but dictated to his mother and illustrated 
 the story and its cover with pictures which 
 he designed and painted himself. 
 
 He won the prize and from that time, his 
 mother says, "it was the desire of his heart 
 to be an author." 
 
 During the winter of 1856-57 his favorite 
 cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, 
 usually called Bob, visited them; a great 
 treat for Louis, not only because his ill 
 health kept him from making many com- 
 24 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 panions of his own age, but because Bob 
 loved many of the same things he did and 
 to "make believe" was as much a part of 
 his life as Louis's. Many fine games they 
 had together; built toy theatres, the scenery 
 and characters for which they bought for a 
 "penny plain and twopence colored," and 
 were never tired of dressing up. One of 
 their chief delights, he says, was in "rival 
 kingdoms of our own invention — Nosing- 
 tonia and Encyclopaedia, of which we were 
 perpetually drawing maps." Even the eat- 
 ing of porridge at breakfast became a game. 
 Bob ate his with sugar and said it was an 
 island covered with snow with here a moun- 
 tain and there a valley; while Louis's was 
 an island flooded by milk which gradually 
 disappeared bit by bit. 
 
 In the spring and summer his mother 
 took him for short trips to the watering- 
 places near Edinburgh. But the spot un- 
 like all others for a real visit was at Colin- 
 ton Manse, the home of his grandfather, the 
 Reverend Lewis Balfour, at Colinton, on 
 25 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 the Water of Leith, five miles southwest of 
 Edinburgh. Here he spent glorious days. 
 Not only was there the house and garden, 
 both rare spots for one of an exploring turn 
 of mind, but, best of all, there were the 
 numerous cousins of his own age sent out 
 from India, where their parents were, to be 
 nursed and educated under the loving eye 
 of Aunt Jane Balfour, for whom he wrote: 
 
 "Chief of our aunts — not only I, 
 But all the dozen nurslings cry — 
 What did the other children do? 
 And what was childhood, wanting you?" 
 
 If Louis lacked brothers and sisters he 
 had no dearth of cousins, fifty in all they 
 numbered, many of them near his own age. 
 Alan Stevenson, Henrietta and Willie Tra- 
 quair seem to have been his favorite chums 
 at Colinton. 
 
 Of his grandfather Balfour he says: "We 
 children admired him, partly for his beauti- 
 ful face and silver hair ... partly for 
 the solemn light in which we beheld him 
 once a week, the observed of all observers 
 26 
 
u 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 in the pulpit. But his strictness and dis- 
 tance, the effect, I now fancy, of old age, 
 slow blood, and settled habits, oppressed us 
 with a kind of terror. When not abroad, he 
 sat much alone writing sermons or letters 
 to his scattered family. . . . The study had 
 a redeeming grace in many Indian pictures 
 gaudily colored and dear to young eyes. 
 . . . When I was once sent in to say a 
 psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking 
 indeed with fear, but at the same time glow- 
 ing with hope that, if I said it well, he 
 might reward me with an Indian picture." 
 "There were two ways of entering the 
 Manse garden," he says, "one the two- 
 winged gate that admitted the old phaeton 
 and the other a door for pedestrians on the 
 side next the kirk. ... On the left hand 
 were the stables, coach-houses and washing 
 houses, clustered around a small, paved 
 court. . . . Once past the stable you were 
 fairly within the garden. On summer 
 afternoons the sloping lawn was literally 
 steeped in sunshine. . . . 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 "The wall of the church faces the manse, 
 but the church yard is on a level with the 
 top of the wall . , . and the tombstones 
 are visible from the enclosure of the manse. 
 . . . Under the retaining wall was a some- 
 what dark pathway, extending from the 
 stable to the far end of the garden, and called 
 the 'witches' walk' from a game we used to 
 play in it. . . . Even out of the 'witches' 
 walk' you saw the Manse facing toward you, 
 with its back to the river and the wooded 
 bank, and the bright flower-plots and stretches 
 of comfortable vegetables in front and on 
 each side of it; flower plots and vegetable 
 borders, by the way, on which it was almost 
 death to set foot, and about which we held 
 a curious belief, — namely, that my grand- 
 father went round and measured any foot- 
 prints that he saw, to compare the measure- 
 ment at night with the boots put out for 
 brushing; to avoid which we were accustomed, 
 by a strategic movement of the foot to make 
 the mark longer. . . . 
 
 "So much for the garden; now follow me 
 28 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 into the house. On entering the door you 
 had before you a stone paved lobby. . . . 
 There stood a case of foreign birds, two or 
 three marble deities from India and a lily 
 of the Nile in a pot, and at the far end the 
 stairs shut in the view. With how many 
 games of 'tig' or brick-building in the fore- 
 noon is the long low dining room connected 
 in my mind! The store-room was a most 
 voluptuous place, with its piles of biscuit 
 boxes and spice tins, the rack for buttered 
 eggs, the little window that let in the sun- 
 shine and the flickering shadows of leaves, 
 and the strong sweet odor of everything that 
 pleaseth the taste of men. . . . 
 
 "Opposite the study was the parlor, a 
 small room crammed full of furniture and 
 covered with portraits, with a cabinet at 
 the side full of foreign curiosities, and a sort 
 of anatomical trophy on the top. During a 
 grand cleaning of the apartment I remember 
 all the furniture was ranged on a circular 
 grass plot between the churchyard and the 
 house. It was a lovely still summer evening, 
 29 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 and I stayed out, climbing among the chairs 
 and sofas. Falling on a large bone or skull, 
 I asked what it was. Part of an albatross, 
 auntie told me. 'What is an albatross?' I 
 asked, and then she described to me this 
 great bird nearly as big as a house, that you 
 saw out miles away from any land, sleeping 
 above the vast and desolate ocean. She told 
 me that the Ancient Mariner was all about 
 one; and quoted with great verve (she had a 
 duster in her hand, I recollect) — 
 
 'With my crossbow 
 I shot the albatross.' 
 
 . , . Willie had a crossbow, but up to this 
 date I had never envied him its possession. 
 After this, however, it became one of the ob- 
 jects of my life." 
 
 With many playmates, free to roam and 
 romp as he chose, his illness forgotten, it is 
 no wonder he says he felt as if he led two 
 lives, one belonging to Edinburgh and one 
 to the country, and that Colinton ever re- 
 mained an enchanted spot to which it was 
 always hard to say good-by. 
 30 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE LANTERN BEARER 
 
 "Perhaps there lives some dreamy boy, untaught 
 In school, some graduate of the field or street, 
 Who shall become a master of the art, 
 An admiral sailing the high seas of thought, 
 Fearless and first, and steering with his fleet 
 For lands not yet laid down on any chart." 
 
 — Longfellow. 
 
 SCHOOL days began for Louis in 1859, 
 but were continually interrupted by ill- 
 ness, travel, and change of school. His 
 father did not believe in forcing him to study; 
 so he roamed through school according to 
 his own sweet will, attending classes where 
 he cared to, interesting himself in the sub- 
 jects that appealed to him — Latin, French, 
 and mathematics — neglecting the others 
 and bringing home no prizes, to Cummie's 
 distress. 
 
 Certain books were his prime favorites at 
 this time. "Robinson Crusoe," he says, 
 31 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 "and some of the books of Mayne Raid and 
 a book called Paul Blake — Swiss Family 
 Robinson also. At these I played, con- 
 jured up their scenes and delighted to hear 
 them rehearsed to seventy times seven. 
 
 "My father's library was a spot of some 
 austerity; the proceedings of learned soci- 
 eties, cyclopaedias, physical science and above 
 all, optics held the chief place upon the 
 shelves, and it was only in holes and corners 
 that anything legible existed as if by acci- 
 dent. Parents' Assistant, Rob Roy, Waver- 
 ley and Guy Mannering, Pilgrim's Progress, 
 Voyages of Capt. Woods Rogers, Ainsworth's 
 Tower of London and four old volumes of 
 Punch — these were among the chief ex- 
 ceptions. 
 
 " In these latter which made for years the 
 chief of my diet, I very early fell in love 
 (almost as soon as I could spell) with the 
 Snob Papers. I knew them almost by heart 
 . . . and I remember my surprise when I 
 found long afterward that they were famous, 
 and signed with a famous name; to me, as 
 32 
 
THE LANTERN BEARER 
 
 I read and admired them, they were the 
 works of Mr. Punch." 
 
 Two old Bibles interested him particularly. 
 They had belonged to his grandfather Steven- 
 son and contained many marked passages 
 and notes telling how they had been read 
 aboard lighthouse tenders and on tours of 
 inspection among the islands. 
 
 After he was thirteen his health was greatly 
 improved and he was able to enjoy the com- 
 radeship of other lads, though he never 
 cared greatly for sports. He was the leader 
 of a number of boys who used to go about 
 playing tricks on the neighbors — "tapping 
 on their windows after nightfall, and all 
 manner of wild freaks." 
 
 "Crusoing" was a favorite game and its 
 name stood for all picnicking in the open air, 
 building bonfires and cooking apples, but 
 the crowning sport of all was "Lantern Bear- 
 ing," a game invented by himself and shared 
 by a dozen of his cronies. 
 
 "Toward the end of September," he says, 
 "when school time was drawing near and the 
 33 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 nights were already black, we would begin 
 to sally from our respective villas, each 
 equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. . . . 
 We wore them buckled to the waist upon a 
 cricket belt, and over them, such was the 
 rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. 
 They smelled noxiously of blistered tin; 
 they never burned aright, though they 
 would always burn our fingers; their use 
 was naught; the pleasure of them merely 
 fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under 
 his top-coat asked for nothing more. 
 
 "When two of these asses met there would 
 be an anxious, 'Have you your lantern?' 
 and a gratified 'Yes.' That was the shib- 
 boleth, and a very needful one too; for as it 
 was the rule to keep our glory contained, none 
 could recognize a lantern-bearer, unless like 
 a polecat, by the smell. 
 
 "The essence of this bliss was to walk by 
 yourself in the black night, the slide shut, 
 the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping 
 whether to conduct your footsteps or make 
 your glory public, a mere pillar of darkness 
 34 
 
THE LANTERN BEARER 
 
 in the dark, and all the while, deep down in 
 the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you 
 had a bull's-eye at your belt and exult and 
 sing over the knowledge." 
 
 In later years one of the Lantern Bearers 
 describes Louis as he was then. "A slender, 
 long legged boy in pepper and salt tweeds, 
 with an undescribable influence that forced 
 us to include him in our play as a looker on, 
 critic and slave driver. ... No one had the 
 remotest intention of competing with R. L. S. 
 in story making, and his tales, had we known 
 it, were such as the world would listen to in 
 silence and wonder." 
 
 At home and at his last school he was al- 
 ways starting magazines. The stories were 
 illustrated with much color and the maga- 
 zines circulated among the boys for a penny 
 a reading. One was called The Sunbeam 
 Magaiine, an illustrated miscellany of fact, 
 fiction, and fun, and another The School Boy 
 Ma^aiine. The latter contained four stories 
 and its readers must have been hard to 
 satisfy if they did not have their fill of hor- 
 35 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 rors — "regular crawlers," Louis called them. 
 In the first tale, "The Adventures of Jan 
 Van Steen," the hero is left hidden in a 
 boiler under which a fire is lit. The second 
 is a "Ghost Story" of robbers in a deserted 
 castle. . . . The third is called, "by curious 
 anticipation of a story he was to write later 
 on, 'The Wreckers.' " 
 
 Numerous plays and novels he began but 
 they eventually found their fate in the trash 
 basket. An exception to this was a small 
 green pamphlet of twenty pages called 
 "The Pentland Rising, a page of history, 
 1666." It was published through his father's 
 interest on the two-hundredth anniversary 
 of the fight at Rullion Green. This event in 
 Scotland's history had been impressed on his 
 mind by the numerous stories Cummie had 
 told him of the Covenanters and the fact 
 that they had spent the night before their 
 defeat in the town of Colinton. 
 
 From the time he was a little chap, bal- 
 ancing on the limb of an apple-tree in the 
 Colinton garden trying to see what kind of 
 36 
 
THE LANTERN BEARER 
 
 a world lay beyond the garden wall, Louis 
 had had a longing to travel and see sights. 
 This began to find satisfaction now. 
 
 His father took him on a trip around the 
 coast of Fife, visiting the harbor lights. The 
 little towns along the coast were already 
 familiar to him by the stories of the past. 
 Dunfermline, where, according to the ballad, 
 Scotland's king once "sat in his tower drink- 
 ing blood-red wine"; Kerkcaldy, where the 
 witches used to sink "tall ships and honest 
 mariners in the North Sea"; and "Wemyss 
 with its bat-haunted caves, where the Chev- 
 alier Johnstone on his flight from Colloden 
 passed a night of superstitious terrors." 
 
 Later the family made a trip to the English 
 Lakes and in the winter of the same year to 
 the south of France, where they stayed two 
 months, then making a tour through Italy 
 and Switzerland. The following Christmas 
 found Louis and his mother again in Men- 
 tone, where they stayed until spring. 
 
 French was one of his favorite studies at 
 school, and now after a few months among 
 37 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 French people he was able to speak fluently. 
 Indeed, in after life he was often mistaken 
 for a Frenchman. 
 
 His French teacher on his second visit to 
 Mentone gave him no regular lessons, but 
 "merely talked to him in French, teaching 
 him piquet and card tricks, introducing him 
 to various French people and taking him to 
 concerts and other places; so, his mother re- 
 marks, like Louis' other teachers at home I 
 think they found it pleasanter to talk to him 
 then to teach him." 
 
 After their return to Edinburgh came the 
 time when, his school days finished, Louis 
 must make up his mind what his career is 
 to be and train himself for it. 
 
 Even then he knew what he wanted to do 
 was to write. He had fitted up a room on 
 the top floor at Heriot Row as a study and 
 spent hours there covering paper with stories 
 or trying to describe in the very best way 
 scenes which had impressed him. Most of 
 these were discarded when finished. " I liked 
 doing them indeed," he said, "but when 
 38 
 
THE LANTERN BEARER 
 
 done I could see they were rubbish." He 
 never doubted, however, that some day his 
 attempts would prove worth while, if he 
 could only devote his time to learning to 
 write and write well. 
 
 His father, he knew, had different plans for 
 him, however. Of course, Louis would fol- 
 low in his footsteps and be the sixth Steven- 
 son to hold a place on the Board of Northern 
 Lights. So, although he had little heart in 
 the work, he entered the University of 
 Edinburgh and spent the next three and a 
 half years studying for a science degree. 
 
 The summer of 1868 he was sent with an 
 engineering party to Anstruther, on the coast, 
 where a breakwater was being built. There 
 he had his first opportunity of seeing some 
 of the practical side of engineering. It was 
 rough work, but he enjoyed it. Later he 
 spent three weeks on Earraid Island, off Mull, 
 a place which left a strong impression on his 
 mind and figured afterward as the spot 
 where David Balfour was shipwrecked. 
 
 Among the experiences at that time which 
 39 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 pleased him most was a chance to descend 
 in a diver's dress to the foundation of the 
 harbor they were building. In his essays, 
 "Random Memories," he tells of the "dizzy 
 muddleheaded joy" he had in his surround- 
 ings, swaying like a reed, and grabbing at the 
 fish which darted past him. 
 
 In writing afterward of these years he 
 says: "What I gleaned I am sure I do not 
 know, but indeed I had already my own 
 private determination to be an author . . . 
 though I haunted the breakwater by day, 
 and even loved the place for the sake of the 
 sunshine, the thrilling sea-side air, the wash 
 of the waves on the sea face, the green 
 glimmer of the diver's helmets far below. 
 . . . My own genuine occupation lay else- 
 where and my only industry was in the hours 
 when I was not on duty. I lodged with a 
 certain Bailie Brown, a carpenter by trade, 
 and there as soon as dinner was despatched 
 . . . drew my chair to the table and pro- 
 ceeded to pour forth literature. 
 
 "I wish to speak with sympathy of my 
 education as an engineer. It takes a man 
 40 
 
THE LANTERN BEARER 
 
 into the open air; keeps him hanging about 
 harbor sides, the richest form of idling; it 
 carries him to wild islands; it gives him a 
 taste of the genial danger of the sea . . . 
 and when it has done so it carries him back 
 and shuts him in an office. From the roar- 
 ing skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing 
 boat, he passes to the stool and desk, and 
 with a memory full of ships and seas and 
 perilous headlands and shining pharos, he 
 must apply his long-sighted eyes to the 
 pretty niceties of drawing or measure his 
 inaccurate mind with several pages of con- 
 secutive figures." 
 
 "The roaring skerry and the tossing boat," 
 appealed to him as they had to his grand- 
 father before him, but they did not balance his 
 dislike for the "office and the stool" or make 
 him willing to devote his time and energy to 
 working for them, so his university record 
 was very poor. "No one ever played the 
 truant with more deliberate care," he says, 
 "and no one ever had more certificates (of 
 attendance) for less education." 
 
 One thing that he gained from his days at 
 41 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 the university was the friendship of Pro- 
 fessor Fleeming Jenkin. He was fifteen 
 years older than Louis, but they had many 
 common interests and the professor had much 
 good influence over him. He was one of the 
 first to see promise in his writing and en- 
 couraged him to go on with it. 
 
 Both the professor and Mrs. Jenkin were 
 much interested in dramatics and each year 
 brought a group of friends together at their 
 house for private theatricals. Stevenson was 
 a constant visitor at their home, joining 
 heartily in these plays and looking forward 
 to them, although he never took any very 
 important part. 
 
 After Professor Jenkin's death Stevenson 
 wrote his biography, and says it was a 
 "mingled pain and pleasure to dig into the 
 past of a dead friend, and find him, at every 
 spadeful, shine brighter." 
 
 About this time Thomas Stevenson bought 
 
 Swanston Cottage in the Pentland Hills, 
 
 about five miles from Edinburgh, and for 
 
 the next fourteen years the family spent 
 
 ■ 42 
 
THE LANTERN BEARER 
 
 their summers there, and Louis often went 
 out in winter as well. It ever remained one 
 of his favorite spots and with Colinton stood 
 out as a place that meant much in his life. 
 
 These years saw great change in him; from 
 a frank and happy child he had grown into 
 a lonely, moody boy making few friends and 
 shunning the social life that his father's 
 position in Edinburgh offered him. He de- 
 scribes himself as a "lean, ugly, unpopular 
 student," but those who knew him never 
 applied the term "ugly" to him at any time. 
 
 At Swanston he explored the hills alone 
 and grew to know them so well that the 
 Pentland country ever remained vividly in 
 his memory and found its way into many of 
 his stories, notably "St. Ives," where he de- 
 scribes Swanston as it was when they first 
 made it their summer home. 
 
 Many solitary winter evenings he spent 
 there rereading his favorite novels, par- 
 ticularly Dumas 's "Vicomte de Bragelonne," 
 which always pleased him. "Shakespeare 
 has served me best," he said. "Few living 
 43 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 friends have had upon me an influence so 
 strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. Per- 
 haps my dearest and best friend outside of 
 Shakespeare is D'Artagnan, the elderly D'Ar- 
 tagnan of the 'Vicomte de Bragelonne.' 
 
 "I would return in the early night from 
 one of my patrols with the shepherd, a friendly 
 face would meet me in the door, a friendly 
 retriever scurry up stairs to fetch my slippers, 
 and I would sit down with the Vicomte for a 
 long, silent, solitary lamp-lit evening by the 
 fire." 
 
 At Swanston he first began to really write, 
 "bad poetry," he says, and during his soli- 
 tary rambles fought with certain problems 
 that perplexed him. 
 
 Here he made the acquaintance of the 
 Scotch gardener, Robert Young, and John 
 Todd, the "Roaring Shepherd, the oldest 
 herd on the Pentlands," whom he accom- 
 panied on his rounds with the sheep, listen- 
 ing to his tales told in broad Scotch of the 
 highland shepherds in the old days when 
 "he himself often marched flocks into Eng- 
 44 
 
THE LANTERN BEARER 
 
 land, sleeping on the hillsides with his cara- 
 van; and by his account it was rough busi- 
 ness not without danger. The drove roads 
 lay apart from habitation; the drivers met 
 in the wilderness, as to-day the deep sea 
 fishers meet off the banks in the solitude of 
 the Atlantic." 
 
 All this time Louis was idling through the 
 university, knowing that in the end he would 
 make nothing of himself as an engineer and 
 dreading to confess it to his father. At 
 length, however, his failure in his studies 
 came to Thomas Stevenson's attention, and, 
 on being questioned about it "one dreadful 
 day" as they were walking together, the boy 
 frankly admitted that his heart was not with 
 the work and he cared for nothing but to be 
 able to write. 
 
 While at school his father had encouraged 
 him to follow his own bent in his studies and 
 reading, but when it came to the point of 
 choosing his life-work, there ought to be no 
 question of doubt. The only natural thing 
 for Louis to do was to carry on the great and 
 45 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 splendid work that he himself had helped to 
 build up. That the boy should have other 
 plans of his own surprised and troubled him. 
 Literature, he said, was no profession, and 
 thus far Louis had not done enough to prove 
 he had a claim for making it his career. 
 
 After much debate it was finally decided 
 that he should give up engineering, but 
 should enter the law school and study to be 
 admitted to the bar. This would not only 
 give him an established profession, but leave 
 him a little time to write as well. 
 
 46 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 " I am fevered with the sunset, 
 I am fretful with the bay, 
 For the wander-thirst is on me 
 And my soul is in Cathay. 
 
 "There's a schooner in the offing. 
 With her topsails shot with fire. 
 And my heart has gone aboard her 
 For the island of Desire." 
 
 — Richard Hovey. 
 
 IN spite of the fact that his law studies 
 now left him an opportunity for the work 
 he wanted so much to do, Louis was far 
 from happy, for between his parents and 
 himself, who had always been the best of 
 friends, there were many misunderstand- 
 ings. 
 
 Thomas Stevenson was bitterly disap- 
 pointed that his only son should choose to 
 be what he called "an idler" — generous to 
 a fault and always out of money, dressing in 
 47 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 a careless and eccentric way, which both 
 amused and annoyed his friends and caused 
 him to be ridiculed by strangers, preferring 
 to roam the streets of old Edinburgh scrap- 
 ing acquaintance with the fishwives and 
 dock hands, rather than staying at home and 
 mingling in the social circle to which his 
 parents belonged. But his father was still 
 more troubled by certain independent re- 
 ligious opinions, far different from those in 
 which he had been reared, that Louis adopted 
 at this time. 
 
 How any good result could come from all 
 this neither his father nor mother could see, 
 and with the loss of their sympathy he was 
 thrown upon himself and was lonely and re- 
 bellious. 
 
 He longed to get away from it all, to quit 
 Edinburgh with its harsh climate, and often 
 on his walks he leaned over the great bridge 
 that joins the New Town with the Old "and 
 watched the trains smoking out from under, 
 and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage 
 to brighter skies." He longed to go with 
 48 
 
EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 them "to that Somewhere-else of the imagi- 
 nation where all troubles are supposed to 
 end." 
 
 It was a comfort to him at this time to 
 remember other Scotchmen, Jeffries, Burns, 
 Fergusson, Scott, Carlyle, and others, who 
 had roamed these same streets before him, 
 not a few of them fighting with the same 
 problems he faced in their struggle to win 
 their ideal. 
 
 This unhappy time, this "Greensickness," 
 as he called it, came to an end, however, 
 through the help of what Louis had always 
 secretly longed for — friends. Several whom 
 he met at this time influenced him, but first 
 of them all he put his cousin Robert Alan 
 Mowbray Stevenson (Bob), who returned to 
 Edinburgh about this time from Paris, where 
 he had been studying art. 
 
 Louis says: "The mere return of Bob 
 changed at once and forever the course of 
 my life; I can give you an idea of my relief 
 only by saying that I was at last able to 
 breathe. ... I was done with the sullens for 
 49 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 good. ... I had got a friend to laugh 
 with." 
 
 Here at last was a companion who under- 
 stood him and sympathized with what he 
 was trying to do. Since as children they 
 had made believe together in their rival 
 kingdoms of "Nosingtonia" and "Ency- 
 clopaedia" they had had many traits and 
 tastes in common. They now began where 
 they had left off and proceeded to enjoy 
 themselves once more by all sorts of wild 
 pranks and gay expeditions. 
 
 The Speculative Society became another 
 great source of pleasure. It was an old soci- 
 ety and had numbered among its members 
 such men of note as Scott, Jeffrey, Robert 
 Emmet, and others. Once a week from 
 November to March the "Spec," as it was 
 called, met in rooms in the University of 
 Edinburgh. An essay was read and debates 
 followed with much hot discussion, which 
 delighted Stevenson. "Oh, I do think the 
 Spec is about the best thing in Edinburgh," 
 he said enthusiastically. 
 50 
 
EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 Sir Walter Simpson, son of the famous 
 doctor, Sir James Simpson, who discovered 
 chloroform, became another chum about 
 this time, and for the next ten years they 
 were much together. He likewise was study- 
 ing law and was a near neighbor. The 
 Simpsons kept open house, and it was the 
 custom for a group of cronies to drop in at all 
 hours of day and night. Louis was among 
 those who came oftenest, and Sir Walter's 
 sister writes: "He would frequently drop in 
 to dinner with us, and of an evening he had 
 the run of the smoking room. After ten 
 p.m. the 'open sesame' to our door was a 
 rattle on the letter box and Louis' fancy for 
 the mysterious was whetted by this admit- 
 tance by secret sign, and we liked his special 
 rat-a-tat for it was the forerunner of an hour 
 or two of talk." 
 
 They teased him about his queer clothes 
 and laughed at some of his wild ideas, but 
 he seldom was angry at them for it and 
 never stayed away very long. 
 
 With them he often skated on Duddington 
 51 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Loch or canoed on the Firth of Forth. One 
 summer he and Sir Walter yachted off the 
 west coast of Scotland, and still another year, 
 when longing for further wandering possessed 
 them, they made a trip in canoes through the 
 inland waters of Belgium from Antwerp to 
 Brussels, and then into France and by the 
 rivers Sambre and Oise nearly to Paris. 
 
 In the "Inland Voyage," where Steven- 
 son describes this trip, he calls Sir Walter 
 and his canoe "Cigarette" while he was 
 "Arethusa." Adventures were plentiful, and 
 they aroused much curiosity among the 
 dwellers on the banks, with whom they 
 made friends as they went along. 
 
 Once Arethusa was all but drowned, when 
 his canoe was overturned by the rapids; 
 and on several occasions, when they applied 
 for a night's lodging, they were suspected of 
 being tramps or peddlers because of their be- 
 draggled appearance. 
 
 One evening after a hard day's paddling 
 in the rain they landed tired, wet, and hun- 
 gry at the little town of La, Fere. "The 
 52 
 
EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 Cigarette and I could not sufficiently con- 
 gratulate each other on the prospect," says 
 the Arethusa, "for we had been told there 
 was a capital inn at La Fere. Such a dinner 
 as we were going to eat 1 Such beds as we 
 were going to sleep in ! and all the while the 
 rain raining on homeless folk over all the 
 poplared country-side. It made our mouths 
 water. The inn bore the name of some wood- 
 land animal, stag, or hart, or hind, I for- 
 get which. But I shall never forget how 
 spacious and how eminently comfortable it 
 looked as we drew near. ... A rattle of 
 many dishes came to our ears; we sighted a 
 great field of tablecloth; the kitchen glowed 
 like a forge and smelt like a garden of things 
 to eat. 
 
 "Into this . . . you are now to suppose 
 us making our triumphal entry, a pair of 
 damp rag-and-bone men, each with a limp 
 india-rubber bag upon his arm. I do not 
 believe I have a sound view of that kitchen; 
 I saw it through a sort of glory, but it seemed 
 to me crowded with the snowy caps of cook- 
 53 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 men, who all turned round from their sauce- 
 pans and looked at us with surprise. There 
 was no doubt about the landlady however; 
 there she was, heading her army, a flushed, 
 angry woman, full of affairs. Her I asked 
 politely — too politely, thinks the Ciga- 
 rette — if we could have beds, she surveying 
 us coldly from head to foot. 
 
 " 'You will find beds in the suburb,' she 
 remarked. 'We are too busy for the like of 
 you.' 
 
 "If we could make an entrance, change 
 our clothes, and order a bottle of wine 1 felt 
 sure we could put things right, so I said, ' If 
 we can not sleep, we may at least dine,' and 
 was for depositing my bag. 
 
 "What a terrible convulsion of nature was 
 that which followed in the landlady's face! 
 She made a run at us and stamped her foot. 
 
 " 'Out with you — out of the doorl' she 
 screeched. 
 
 "I do not know how it happened, but the 
 next moment we were out in the rain and 
 darkness. This was not the first time that 
 54 
 
EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 I have been refused a lodging. Often and 
 often I have planned what I would do if 
 such a misadventure happened to me again, 
 and nothing is easier to plan. But to put in 
 execution, with a heart boiling at the in- 
 dignity? Try it, try it only once, and tell 
 me what you did." 
 
 Frequently on this trip the Arethusa's odd 
 dress and foreign looks led him to be taken 
 for a spy. It was not long after the Franco- 
 Prussian war, and all sorts of rumors of sus- 
 picious characters were afloat. Once he was 
 actually arrested and thrown into a dungeon 
 because he could show no passport, and 
 the commissary refused to believe he was 
 English and puzzled his head over the 
 scraps of notes and verses found in his 
 knapsack. 
 
 He was rescued by the faithful Cigarette, 
 who finally convinced the officials that they 
 were British gentlemen travelling in this odd 
 way for pleasure, and the things in his friend's 
 bag were not plans against the government, 
 but merely scraps of poetry and notes on 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 their travels that he liked to amuse himself 
 by making as they went along.* 
 
 The canoe trips ended in a visit to the 
 artists' colony at Fontainebleau, where Bob 
 Stevenson and a brother of Sir Walter's 
 were spending their summer. This place 
 always had a particular attraction for Louis 
 and he spent many weeks both there and at 
 Grez near by during the next few years. 
 
 The free and easy life led by the artists 
 suited him exactly, although he found it 
 hard to accomplish any work of his own, but 
 dreamed and planned all sorts of essays, 
 verses, and tales which he never wrote, while 
 the others put their pictures on canvas. 
 
 " I kept always two books in my pocket," 
 he says, "one to read and one to write in. 
 As I walked my mind was busy fitting what 
 I saw with appropriate words; when I sat 
 by the roadside I would either read, or a 
 pencil and penny version-book would be in 
 my hand, to note down the features of the 
 
 *This incident is told in the " Epilogue to An In- 
 land Voyage." 
 
 56 
 
EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. 
 Thus I lived with words." 
 
 If there was little work to show after a 
 stop at Fontainebleau he had many mem- 
 ories of good-fellowship and some of the 
 friends he met there were to be the first to 
 greet him when he came to live on this side 
 of the water. 
 
 While on their "Inland Voyage" the two 
 
 canoemen had decided that the most perfect 
 
 mode of travel was by canal-boat. What 
 
 could be more delightful? "The chimney 
 
 smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks 
 
 of the canal slowly unroll their scenery to 
 
 contemplative eyes; the barge floats by great 
 
 forests and through great cities with their 
 
 public buildings and their lamps at night; 
 
 and for the bargee, in his floating home, 
 
 'travelling abed,' it is merely as if he were 
 
 listening to another man's story or turning 
 
 the leaves of a picture book in which he had 
 
 no concern. He may take his afternoon walk 
 
 in some foreign country on the banks of the 
 
 canal, and then come home to dinner at his 
 
 own fireside." 
 
 57 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 They grew most enthusiastic over the idea 
 and told one another how they would furnish 
 their "water villa" with easy chairs, pipes, 
 and tobacco, and the bird and the dog should 
 go along too. 
 
 By the time Fontainebleau was reached 
 they had planned trips through all the canals 
 of Europe. The idea took the artists' fancy 
 also, and a group of them actually pur- 
 chased a canal-boat called The Eleven 
 Thousand Virgins of Cologne. Furnishing a 
 water villa, however, was more expensive 
 than they had foreseen, and she came to a 
 sad end. " 'The Eleven Thousand Virgins 
 of Cologne' rotted in the stream where she 
 was beautified . . . she was never harnessed 
 to the patient track-horse. And when at 
 length she was sold, by the indignant car- 
 penter of Moret, there was sold along with 
 her the Arethusa and the Cigarette . . . now 
 these historic vessels fly the tricolor and are 
 known by new and alien names." 
 
 In 1873 Stevenson planned to try for ad- 
 mission to the English bar instead of the 
 58 
 
EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 Scottish and went to London to take the 
 examination. But his health, which had been 
 rather poor, became worse, and on reaching 
 London the doctor ordered him to Mentone 
 in the south of France, where he had been 
 before as a boy. 
 
 There he spent his days principally lying 
 on his back in the sun reading and playing 
 with a little Russian girl with whom he 
 struck up a great friendship. His letters to 
 his mother were full of her sayings and do- 
 ings. He was too ill to write much, although 
 one essay, "Ordered South," was the out- 
 come of this trip, the only piece of writing 
 in which he ever posed as an invalid or talked 
 of his ill health. 
 
 At the end of two months he improved 
 enough to return to Edinburgh, but gave up 
 the idea of the English bar. His illness and 
 absence seemed to have smoothed out some 
 of the difficulties at home, and after he re- 
 turned things went happier in every way. 
 
 On July 14, 1875, he passed his final law 
 examinations, and was admitted to the 
 59 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Scottish bar. He was now entitled to wear 
 a wig and gown, place a brass plate with his 
 name upon the door of 17 Heriot Row, and 
 "have the fourth or fifth share of the- ser- 
 vices of a clerk" whom it is said he didn't 
 even know by sight. For a few months he 
 made some sort of a pretense at practising, 
 but it amounted to very little. Gradually 
 he ceased paying daily visits to the Parlia- 
 ment House to wait for a case, but settled 
 himself instead in the room on the top floor 
 at home and began to write, seriously this 
 time — it was to be his life-work from now 
 on — and the law was forgotten. 
 
 His first essays were published in the 
 Cornhill Magaiine and The Portfolio under 
 the initials R. L. S., which signature in time 
 grew so familiar to his friends and to those 
 who admired his writings it became a second 
 name for him, and as R. L. S. he is often 
 referred to. 
 
 He was free now to roam as he chose and 
 spent much time in Paris with Bob. The 
 life there in the artists' quarter suited him 
 60 
 
EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 as well as it had at Fontainebleau. There, 
 among other American artists, he was as- 
 sociated with Mr. Will Low, a painter, whom 
 he saw much of when he came to New York. 
 
 One September he took a walking trip in 
 the Cevenne Mountains with no other com- 
 panion than a little gray donkey, Modestine, 
 who carried his pack and tried his patience 
 by turns with her pace, which was "as much 
 slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a 
 run," as he tells in the chronicle of the trip. 
 
 A visit at Grez in 1876 was to mark a 
 point in his life. Heretofore the artists' 
 colony had been composed only of men. 
 This year there were three new arrivals, 
 Americans, a Mrs. Osbourne and her young 
 son and daughter. Their home in Cali- 
 fornia had been broken up and the mother 
 had come to Grez to paint for the summer. 
 
 Those who had been there for a number of 
 years, R. L. S. among them, looked on the 
 newcomers as intruders and did not hesi- 
 tate to say so among themselves. Before 
 the summer was over, however, they were 
 61 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 obliged to confess that the newcomers had 
 added to the charms of Grez, and Louis 
 found in Mrs. Osbourne another companion 
 to add to his rapidly growing list. 
 
 When the artists scattered in the autumn 
 and he returned to Edinburgh and Mrs. 
 Osbourne to California, he carried with him 
 the hope that some time in the future they 
 should be married. 
 
 For the next three years he worked hard. 
 He published numerous essays in the Corn- 
 hill Magazine and his first short stories, 
 "A Lodging for the Night," "Will O' the 
 Mill," and the "New Arabian Nights." 
 These were followed by his first books of 
 travel, "An Inland Voyage," giving a 
 faithful account of the adventures of the 
 Arethusa and the Cigarette, and "Travels 
 with a Donkey in the Cevennes." 
 
 When the latter was published, Mr. Walter 
 Crane made an illustration for it showing 
 R. L. S. under a tree in the foreground in his 
 sleeping-bag, smoking, while Modestine con- 
 tentedly crops grass by his side. Above him 
 62 
 
EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 winds the path he is to take on his journey, 
 encouraging Modestine with her burden to a 
 livelier pace with his goad; receiving the 
 blessing of the good monks at the Monastery 
 of Our Lady of the Snows; stopping for a 
 bite and sup at a wayside tavern; conversing 
 with a fellow traveller by the way; and 
 finally disappearing with the sunset over the 
 brow of the hill. 
 
 Some time previous to all this he had 
 written in a letter: "Leslie Stephen, who 
 was down here to lecture, called on me, and 
 took me up to see a poor fellow, a poet who 
 writes for him, and who has been eighteen 
 months in our Infirmary, and may be for all 
 I know eighteen months more. Stephen and 
 I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fel- 
 low sat up in his bed with his hair and beard 
 all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he 
 had been in a king's palace of blue air." 
 
 This was William Ernest Henley, and his 
 
 brave determination to live and work, though 
 
 he knew he must ever remain in a maimed 
 
 condition, roused Stevenson's sincere admira- 
 
 63 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 tion. With his usual impetuous generosity, 
 he brought him books and other comforts 
 to make his prolonged stay in the infirmary 
 less wearisome and a warm friendship sprang 
 up between them. 
 
 As Henley grew stronger they planned to 
 work together and write plays. Stevenson 
 had done nothing of the kind since he was 
 nineteen. Now they chose to use the same 
 plot that he had experimented with at that 
 time. It was the story of the notorious 
 Deacon Brodie of Edinburgh, which both con- 
 sidered contained good material for a play. 
 
 "A great man in his day was the Deacon; 
 well seen in good society, crafty with his 
 hands as a cabinet-maker, and one who 
 could sing a song with taste. Many a citi- 
 zen was proud to welcome the Deacon to 
 supper, and dismiss him with regret . . . 
 who would have been vastly disconcerted 
 had he known how soon, and in what guise 
 his visitor returned. Many stories are told 
 of this redoubtable Edinburgh burgher. . . . 
 A friend of Brodie's . . . told him of a pro- 
 64 
 
EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 jected visit to the country, and afterward^ 
 detained by some affairs, put it off and stayed 
 the night in town. The good man had lain 
 some time awake; it was far on in the small 
 hours by the Tron bell; when suddenly 
 there came a crack, a jar, a faint light. 
 Softly he clambered out of bed and up to a 
 false window which looked upon another 
 room, and there, by the glimmer of a thieves' 
 lantern, was his good friend the Deacon in a 
 mask." 
 
 At length after a certain robbery in one 
 of the government offices the Deacon was 
 suspected. He escaped to Holland, but was 
 arrested in Amsterdam as he was about to 
 start for America. He was brought back to 
 Edinburgh, was tried and convicted and 
 hanged on the second of October, 1788, at 
 the west end of the Tol booth, which was the 
 famous old Edinburgh prison known as the 
 Heart of Midlothian. 
 
 This story of Brodie had always inter- 
 ested Stevenson since he had heard it as a 
 child, and a cabinet made by the clever 
 65 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Deacon himself formed part of the furniture 
 of his nursery. 
 
 "Deacon Brodie" and other plays were 
 finished and produced, but never proved 
 successful. Indeed, the money came in but 
 slowly from any of his writings and, aside 
 from the critics, it was many a long day 
 before he was appreciated by the people of 
 his own city and country. They refused to 
 believe that "that daft laddie Stevenson," 
 who had so often shocked them by his ec- 
 centric ways and scorn of conventions, could 
 do anything worth while. So by far his 
 happiest times were spent out of Scotland, 
 principally in London, where a membership 
 in the Savile Club added to his enjoyment. 
 Here he met several interesting men, among 
 them Edmund William Gosse and Sidney 
 Colvin, both writers and literary critics, with 
 whom he became very intimate. 
 
 "My experience of Stevenson," writes Mr. 
 Gosse, "during these first years was confined 
 to London upon which he would make sud- 
 den piratical descents, staying a few days or 
 66 
 
EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 weeks and melting into thin air again. He 
 was mucii at my house, and it must be told 
 that my wife and I, as young married people, 
 had possessed ourselves of a house too large 
 for our slender means immediately to furnish. 
 The one person who thoroughly approved of 
 our great bare absurd drawing room was 
 Louis, who very earnestly dealt with us on 
 the immorality of chairs and tables, and 
 desired us to sit always, as he delighted to 
 sit, upon hassocks on the floor. Neverthe- 
 less, as armchairs and settees straggled into 
 existence, he handsomely consented to use 
 them, although never in the usual way, but 
 with his legs thrown sidewise over the arms 
 of them, or the head of a sofa treated as a 
 perch. In particular, a certain shelf with 
 cupboards below, attached to a bookcase, is 
 worn with the person of Stevenson, who 
 would spend half an evening, while passion- 
 ately discussing some question . . . leaping 
 sidewise in a seated posture to the length of 
 this shelf and back again. 
 "... These were the days when he most 
 67 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 frequented the Savile Club, and the lightest 
 and most vivacious part of him there came 
 to the surface. He might spend the morn- 
 ing in work or business, and would then 
 come to the club for luncheon. If he were 
 so fortunate as to find a congenial compan- 
 ion disengaged, or to induce them to throw 
 over their engagements, he would lead him 
 off to the smoking-room, and there spend 
 an afternoon in the highest spirits and the 
 most brilliant and audacious talk. 
 
 "He was simply bubbling with quips and 
 jests. I am anxious that his laughter-loving 
 mood should not be forgotten, because later 
 on it was partly, but I think never wholly 
 quenched, by ill health, responsibility and 
 advance of years. 
 
 "His private thoughts and prospects must 
 often have been of the gloomiest, but he 
 seems to have borne his unhappiness with a 
 courage as high as he ever afterwards dis- 
 played." 
 
 Sidney Colvin he met some time previous 
 while visiting relatives in England, and their 
 68 
 
EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 friendship was renewed wlien they met again 
 in London; a friendship which lasted through- 
 out their lives and which even the distance 
 of two seas failed to obliterate. They kept 
 up a lively correspondence and Mr. Colvin 
 aided him with the publication of his writ- 
 ings while he was absent from his own coun- 
 try. After his death, according to Steven- 
 son's wishes, Mr. Colvin edited a large col- 
 lection of his letters and in the notes which 
 he added paid his friend many splendid 
 tributes which show him to be a fair critic 
 as well as an ardent admirer. " He had only 
 to speak," he says, " in order to be recognized 
 in the first minute for a witty and charming 
 gentleman, and within the first five minutes 
 for a master spirit and man of genius." 
 
 Louis's long absences from home often 
 troubled his mother and caused her to com- 
 plain when writing. In one answer to her 
 about this time he said: 
 
 "You must not be vexed at my absences, 
 you must understand I shall be a nomad, 
 more or less, until my days be done. You 
 69 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 don't know how much I used to long for it 
 in the old days; how I used to go and look at 
 the trains leaving, and wish to go with them. 
 And now, you know, that I have a little 
 more that is solid under my feet, you must 
 take my nomadic habit as a part of me. 
 Just wait till I am in swing and you will see 
 that I shall pass more of my life with you 
 than elsewhere; only take me as I am and 
 give me time. I must be a bit of a vaga- 
 bond." 
 
 For all so little of his writing was ever 
 done in his own country, nevertheless he 
 turned to Scotland again and again for the 
 setting of his stories and the subject of his 
 essays. Although he often spoke harshly of 
 Edinburgh when at home, he paid her many 
 loving tributes in writing of her in a foreign 
 land: "The quaint grey-castled city where 
 the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind 
 squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. 
 ... I do not even know if I desire to live 
 there, but let me hear in some far land a 
 kindred voice sing out 'Oh, why left I my 
 70 
 
EDINBURGH DAYS 
 
 hame?' and it seems at once as if no beauty 
 under the kind heavens, and no society of 
 the wise and good, can repay me for my 
 absence from my own country. And al- 
 though I think I would rather die elsewhere, 
 yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried 
 among good Scotch clods. I will say it 
 fairly, it grows on me with every year; there 
 are no stars so lovely as the Edinburgh street 
 lamps. When I forget thee, Auld Reekie, 
 may my right hand forget its cunning." 
 
 71 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 AMATEUR EMIGRANT 
 
 "Hope went before them 
 And the world was wide." 
 
 IN the summer of 1879 R. L. S. was once 
 more seized with the desire to roam 
 and to roam farther than ever before. Cali- 
 fornia had been beckoning to him for some 
 time, and in August he suddenly made up 
 his mind, and with scarcely a word of fare- 
 well to his family and friends he embarked 
 on the steamship Devonia, bound for New 
 York. 
 
 Partly for the sake of economy, for he 
 determined to pay his own way on this 
 venture, and partly because he was anxious 
 to experience emigrant life, he engaged pas- 
 sage in the second cabin, which in those days 
 differed very little from the steerage. The 
 main advantages were a trifle better food 
 72 
 
AMATEUR EMIGRANT 
 
 and a cabin to himself witli a table where 
 he could write. 
 
 In his usual way he soon made acquain- 
 tance with his fellow passengers and did them 
 many a friendly turn. They took him for 
 one of themselves and showed little curiosity 
 as to where he came from, who he was, or 
 where he was going. He says: "The sailors 
 called me 'mate,' the officers addressed me 
 as 'my man,' my comrades accepted me with- 
 out hesitation for a person of their own char- 
 acter and experience. One, a mason him- 
 self, believed I was a mason, several, among 
 these at least one of the seamen, judged me 
 to be a petty officer in the American navy; 
 and I was so often set down for a practical 
 engineer that at last I had not the heart to 
 deny it." 
 
 The emigrants were from many countries, 
 though the majority were Scotch and Irish 
 bound for the new world with the hope of 
 meeting with better fortune than they had 
 had in the old, and they whiled away the 
 days at sea in their several ways, making the 
 73 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 best of their discomforts and cheering one 
 another when they grew lonely or homesick 
 for those they had left behind. 
 
 When the weather was good their spirits 
 rose and there were many rounds of singing 
 and story-telling as they sat clustered to- 
 gether like bees under the lee of the deck- 
 house, and in all of these Stevenson joined 
 heartily. 
 
 "We were indeed a musical ship's com- 
 pany," he says, "and cheered our way into 
 exile with the fiddle, the accordion, and the 
 songs of all nations, good, bad or indifferent 
 
 — Scottish, English, Irish, Russian or Norse 
 
 — the songs were received with generous ap- 
 plause. Once or twice, a recitation, very 
 spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scotch 
 accent, varied the proceedings; and once we 
 sought in vain to dance a quadrille, eight 
 men of us together, to the music of the violin. 
 The performers were humorous, frisky fel- 
 lows, who loved to cut capers in private life; 
 but as soon as they were arranged for the 
 dance, they conducted themselves like so 
 
 74 
 
AMATEUR EMIGRANT 
 
 many mutes at a funeral. I have never seen 
 decorum pushed so far; and as this was not 
 expected, the quadrille was soon whistled off, 
 and the dancers departed. 
 
 "But the impulse to sing was strong, and 
 triumphed over modesty and even the in- 
 clemencies of the sea and sky. On one rough 
 Saturday night, we got together by the main 
 deck-house, in a place sheltered from the 
 wind and rain. Some clinging to the ladder 
 which led to the hurricane-deck and the rest 
 knitting arms or taking hands, we made a 
 ring to support the women in the violent 
 lurching of the ship, and when we were thus 
 disposed, sang to our hearts' content. 
 
 "There was a single chess-board and a 
 single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as 
 twenty of us would be playing dominoes for 
 love. There were feats of dexterity, puzzles 
 for the intelligence and a regular daily com- 
 petition to guess the vessel's progress; at 
 twelve o'clock when the result was published 
 in the wheel house, came to be a moment of 
 considerable interest. . . . We had beside, 
 75 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 romps in plenty. Puss in the Corner, which 
 we rebaptized, in more manly style, Devil 
 and Four Corners, was my favorite game; 
 but there were many who preferred another, 
 the humor of which was to box a person's 
 ears until he found out who cuffed him." 
 
 The voyage, which lasted ten days, was 
 uneventful except for some rough weather 
 when Stevenson found his cabin most stuffy 
 and uncomfortable. He was not really ill, 
 however, and spent much of the time finish- 
 ing a tale called "The Story of a Lie," while 
 his table played "Bob Jerry with the ink 
 bottle." On his arrival in New York the 
 story was sent back to London with the fol- 
 lowing letter to Sidney Colvin: 
 
 "On Board S. S. Devonia an hour or two 
 out of New York, Aug., 1879. 
 "My Dear Colvin: 
 
 "I have finished my story. The hand- 
 writing is not good because of the ship's mis- 
 conduct; thirty-one pages in ten days at sea 
 is not bad. I am not very well; bad food, 
 76 
 
AMATEUR EMIGRANT 
 
 bad air and hard work have brought me 
 down. But the spirits keep good. The 
 voyage has been most interesting and will 
 make, if not a series of Pall Mall articles, at 
 least the first part of a new book. The last 
 weight on me has been trying to keep notes 
 for this purpose. Indeed I have worked like 
 a horse and am tired as a donkey. If I 
 should have to push on far by rail, I shall 
 bring nothing but my fine bones to port. 
 
 "Goodbye to you all. I suppose it is now 
 late afternoon with you all across the seas. 
 What shall I find over here? I dare not 
 wonder. — Ever yours R. L. S." 
 
 As California was the goal he aimed for, 
 in spite of his fatigue after ten days of poor 
 living and the sea, he determined to push on 
 immediately in an emigrant train bound for 
 the Pacific coast. 
 
 On reaching port he and a man named 
 Jones, with whom he had had more in com- 
 mon than with any of his other fellow pas- 
 sengers, landed together. 
 77 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 "Jones and I issued into West Street, sit- 
 ting on some straw in tlie bottom of an open 
 baggage wagon. It rained miraculously, and 
 from that moment till on the following night 
 I left New York, there was scarce a lull, and 
 no cessation of the downpour. . . . 
 
 "It took but a few moments, though it 
 cost a good deal of money, to be rattled along 
 West Street to our destination: Reunion 
 House, No. 10 West Street, ' kept by one 
 Mitchell.' 
 
 "Here I was at last in America and was 
 soon out upon the New York streets, spying 
 for things foreign. . . . 
 
 "The following day I had a thousand and 
 one things to do; only the day to do them 
 in and a journey across the continent before 
 me in the evening. ... It rained with 
 potent fury; every now and then I had to 
 get under cover for a while in order, so to 
 speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for 
 under this continued drenching it began 
 to grow damp on the inside. I went to 
 banks, post-offices, railway offices, restau- 
 78 
 
AMATEUR EMIGRANT 
 
 rants, publishers, book sellers and money 
 changers. 
 
 " I was so wet when I got back to Mitch- 
 ell's toward evening, that I had simply to 
 divest myself of my shoes, socks and trousers, 
 and leave them behind for the benefit of 
 New York City. No fire could have dried 
 them ere I had to start; and to pack them in 
 their present condition was to spread ruin 
 among my other possessions. With a heavy 
 heart I said farewell to them as they lay a 
 pulp in the middle of a pool upon the floor 
 of Mitchell's kitchen. 1 wonder if they are 
 dry by now." 
 
 That night he joined a party of emigrants 
 bound for the West, the weight of his bag- 
 gage much increased by the result of his 
 day's purchases — Bancroft's "History of 
 the United States" in six fat volumes. So 
 in less than twenty-four hours after landing 
 on one coast he was on his way to the other. 
 
 If at times he had been uncomfortable on 
 the steamer he was ten times more so on the 
 train. It is hard to realize in these days of 
 79 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 easy travelling what the discomforts of riding 
 in the emigrant trains were; crowded to- 
 gether in badly lighted, badly ventilated 
 cars, with stiff wooden benches on either 
 side, which were most uncomfortable to sit on 
 and next to impossible to lie down upon. 
 Meals were taken as best they might when 
 they stopped at way stations while some 
 bought milk and eggs and made a shift to 
 cook themselves a meal or brew a cup of tea 
 on the stove at the end of the car. 
 
 Over a week of this sort of slow travelling 
 through the heat of the plains was enough 
 to tax the strength and courage of the most 
 robust man, let alone one in as delicate 
 health as Stevenson at that time, and it is 
 a wonder he ever lived through it. Indeed, 
 he was ill but kept cheerful in spite of all, 
 and was interested in the country and the 
 sights along the way. His own discomforts 
 seemed to dwindle when he contrasted them 
 with those the pioneers endured travelling 
 that same direction twenty years before; 
 crawling along in ox-carts with their cattle 
 80 
 
AMATEUR EMIGRANT 
 
 and family possessions; suffering hunger, 
 thirst, and infinite weariness, and living in 
 daily terror of attack from the Indians. 
 
 He made note of all he saw and the doings 
 of his fellow emigrants, to be used later on. 
 Letters to Henley and Colvin en route are 
 interesting. 
 
 " In the Emigrant Train from New York 
 to San Francisco, Aug., 1879. 
 
 Dear Colvin, — I am in the cars between 
 Pittsburg and Chicago, just now bowling 
 through Ohio. I am taking charge of a kid, 
 whose mother is asleep, with one eye while 
 I write you this with the other. I reached 
 N. Y. Sunday night, and by five o'clock 
 Monday was underway for the West. It 
 is now about ten on Wednesday morning, 
 so I have already been forty hours in the 
 cars. It is impossible to lie down in them, 
 which must end by being very wearying. . . . 
 
 "No man is any use until he has dared 
 everything; I feel just now as if I had, and 
 so might become a man. 'If ye have faith 
 81 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 like a grain of mustard seed.' That is so 
 true! Just now I have faith as big as a 
 cigar case, I will not say die, and I do not 
 fear man nor fortune. — R. L. S." 
 
 "Crossing Nebraska, Saturday, 
 Aug. 23, 1879. 
 "My dear Henley, — l am sitting on the 
 top of the cars with a mill party from Mis- 
 souri going west for his health. Desolate 
 flat prairie upon all hands. . . . When we 
 stop, which we do often, for emigrants and 
 freight travel together, the kine first, the 
 man after, the whole plain is heard singing 
 with cicadae. This is a pause, as you may 
 see from the writing. What happened to 
 the old pedestrian emigrants; what was the 
 tedium suffered by the Indians and trappers 
 of our youth, the imagination trembles to 
 conceive. This is now Saturday, 23rd, and I 
 have been steadily travelling since I parted 
 from you at St, Pancras. It is a strange 
 vicissitude from the Savile Club to this; I 
 sleep with a man from Pennsylvania who has 
 82 
 
AMATEUR EMIGRANT 
 
 been in the Navy Yard, and mess with him 
 artd the Missouri bird already alluded to. 
 We have a tin wash-bowl among four, I wear 
 nothing but a shirt and a pair of trousers 
 and never button my shirt. When I land 
 for a meal, I pass my coat and feel dressed. 
 This life is to last until Friday, Saturday or 
 Sunday next. It is a strange affair to be an 
 emigrant, as I hope you shall see in a future 
 work. I wonder if this will be legible; my 
 present station on the wagon roof, though 
 airy, compared to the cars, is both dirty 
 and insecure. I can see the track straight 
 before and straight behind me to either 
 horizon. . . . 
 
 "Our journey is through ghostly deserts, 
 sage brush and alkali, and rocks without 
 form or color, a sad corner of the world. I 
 confess I am not jolly, but mighty calm, in 
 my distresses. My illness is a subject of 
 great mirth to some of my fellow travel- 
 lers, and I smile rather sickly at their 
 jests. 
 
 "We are going along Bitter Creek just 
 83 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 now, a place infamous in the history of 
 emigration, a place I shall remember myself 
 among the blackest. — R. L. S." 
 
 When California was finally reached he 
 decided to rest and recover strength by 
 camping out for a few days in the Coast 
 Range Mountains beyond Monterey, but the 
 anxiety and strain of the long journey had 
 been greater than he realized, and he broke 
 down and became very ill. For two nights 
 he lay out under the trees in a kind of stupor 
 and at length was rescued by two frontiers- 
 men in charge of a goat-ranch, who took him 
 to their cabin and cared for him until he 
 partly recovered. 
 
 "Here is another curious start in my life," 
 he wrote to Sidney Colvin. "I am living 
 at an Angora goat-ranch, in the Coast Line 
 Mountains, eighteen miles from Monterey. 
 I was camping out, but got so sick that the 
 two rancheros took me in and tended me. 
 One is an old bear hunter, seventy-two years 
 old, and a captain from the Mexican War; 
 84 
 
AMATEUR EMIGRANT 
 
 the other a pilgrim, and one who was out 
 with the bear flag and under Fremont when 
 California was taken by the States. They 
 are both true frontiersmen, and most kind 
 and pleasant. Captain Smith, the bear 
 hunter, is my physician, and I obey him like 
 an oracle. . . . 
 
 "I am now lying in an upper chamber, 
 with the clinking of goat bells in my ears, 
 which proves to me that the goats are come 
 home and it will soon be time to eat. The 
 old bear hunter is doubtless now infusing 
 tea; and Tom the Indian will come in with 
 his gun in a few moments. . . . 
 
 "The business of my life stands pretty 
 nigh still. I work at my notes of the voyage. 
 It will not be very like a book of mine; but 
 perhaps none the less successful for that. 
 I will not deny that I feel lonely to-day. . . . 
 I have not yet had a word from England, 
 partly, I suppose, because I have not yet 
 written for my letters to New York; do not 
 blame me for this neglect, if you knew all 
 I have been through, you would wonder I 
 85 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 had done as much as I have. I teach the 
 ranch children reading in the morning, for 
 the mother is from home sick. 
 
 "Ever your affectionate friend 
 "R. L. S." 
 
 As soon as Stevenson was well enough he 
 returned to Monterey and fell to working 
 upon several short stories and the notes of his 
 voyage, which he brought together and pub- 
 lished later under the titles "The Amateur 
 Emigrant" and "Across the Plains." 
 
 Monterey in those days was a small Mex- 
 ican town; "a place of two or three streets 
 economically paved with sea-sand, and two 
 or three lanes, which were the water courses 
 in the rainy season. . . . The houses were, 
 for the most part, built of unbaked adobe 
 brick. . . . 
 
 "There was no activity but in and around 
 the saloons, where the people sat almost all 
 day playing cards. The smallest excursion 
 was made on horseback. You would scarcely 
 ever see the main street without a horse or 
 86 
 
AMATEUR EMIGRANT 
 
 two tied to posts, and making a fine figure 
 with their Mexican housings. In a place so 
 exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw 
 not only Mexican saddles, but true Vaquero 
 riding — men always at a hand gallop, up 
 hill and down dale, and round the sharpest 
 corners, urging their horses with cries and 
 gesticulations and cruel rotary spurs, check- 
 ing them dead, with a touch, or wheeling 
 them right about face in a square yard. 
 Spanish was the language of the street." 
 
 He lodged with a doctor and his wife, and 
 took his meals at the little restaurant kept 
 by Jules Simoneau, "a most pleasant old 
 boy," with whom he played chess and dis- 
 cussed the universe daily. 
 
 About the middle of December he pushed 
 on to San Francisco, and prepared to settle 
 down and work for an indefinite time. Though 
 he had known but few people in Monterey, 
 nevertheless it was a social little place in 
 comparison to a great city like San Fran- 
 cisco, where Stevenson found himself indeed 
 a stranger and friendless and learned for the 
 87 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 first time in his life wliat it really meant to 
 be lonely. 
 
 Funds were running low; so he secured 
 the cheapest possible lodging and took his 
 meals at various small restaurants, living 
 at the rate of seventy cents a day. 
 
 On December 26 he wrote: " For four days 
 I have spoken to no one but my landlady or 
 landlord or the restaurant waiters. This is 
 not a gay way to pass Christmas, is it?" 
 But some days later, nothing daunted, he 
 added: "I lead a pretty happy life, though 
 you might not think it. I have great fun 
 trying to be economical, which I find as 
 good a game of play as any other. I have 
 no want of occupation and though I rarely 
 see any one to speak to, have little time to 
 worry." 
 
 To make matters worse, letters containing 
 money went astray and word came that 
 some articles submitted to his publishers in 
 England, on which he had depended for 
 funds, were not satisfactory, and this forced 
 him to reduce his living expenses to forty- 
 
AMATEUR EMIGRANT 
 
 five cents a day. The letters from home 
 were most unsatisfactory and lacked the 
 kind of news he longed for. "Not one soul 
 ever gives me any news,'' he complained to 
 Sidney Colvin, "about people or things, 
 everybody writes me sermons; it is good for 
 me, but hardly the food necessary for a man 
 who lives all alone on forty-five cents a day, 
 and sometimes less, with quantities of hard 
 work and many heavy thoughts. If one of 
 you could write me a letter with a jest in it, 
 a letter like what is written to real people in 
 the world — I am still flesh and blood — I 
 should enjoy it. Simpson did the other day, 
 and it did me as much good as a bottle of 
 wine — man alive I want gossip." 
 
 Day in and day out he worked doggedly, 
 fighting discouragement, with little strength 
 or inspiration to write anything very worth 
 while. 
 
 To cap all, his landlady's little boy fell 
 
 ill, and Stevenson, who had a great love and 
 
 sympathy for all children, helped to nurse 
 
 him, and this proved too much in the nervous 
 
 89 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 and exhausted state he was in. The boy 
 recovered, but Stevenson fell ill again, and 
 for six weeks hovered between life and death. 
 
 This seems to have been the turning-point 
 in his ill luck. Toward the middle of Feb- 
 ruary, as he slowly began to mend, he was 
 cheered on by long letters from home, full 
 of anxiety for his health and advances of 
 money from his father, with strict instruc- 
 tions that from now on he was no longer to 
 stint and deny himself the bare necessities of 
 life, as he had been doing. Later, in April, 
 came a telegram from Thomas Stevenson 
 saying that in future Louis was to count on 
 an income of two hundred and fifty pounds 
 a year. 
 
 Cheered with the prospect of an easier 
 road ahead of him, he struggled back to life 
 once more with a strong resolve to work 
 harder and make those at home proud of him. 
 
 "It was a considerable shock to my pride 
 
 to break down," he wrote to a friend, "but 
 
 there it's done and can not be helped. Had 
 
 my health held out another month, I should 
 
 90 
 
AMATEUR EMIGRANT 
 
 have made a year's income, but breaking 
 down when I did, I am surrounded by un- 
 finished works. It is a good thing my father 
 was on the spot, or I should have had to 
 work and die." 
 
 Early in the spring he and Mrs. Osbourne 
 met again, and on May 19, 1880, they were 
 married in San Francisco. 
 
 For the rest of his life Stevenson had no 
 cause to complain of loneliness, for in his 
 wife he had an "inseparable sharer of all 
 his adventures; the most open-hearted of 
 friends to all those who loved him; the most 
 shrewd and stimulating critic of his work; 
 and in sickness, despite her own precarious 
 health, the most devoted and most efficient 
 of nurses." 
 
 Immediately after their marriage Steven- 
 son and his wife and stepson — and the dog 
 — went to the Coast Range Mountains and, 
 taking possession of an old deserted miner's 
 camp, practically lived out-of-doors for the 
 next few months, with no neighbors aside 
 from a hunter and his family. 
 91 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 This was healthy, but the life of a squatter 
 has its limitations, and their trials and tribu- 
 lations during these weeks Stevenson told 
 most amusingly in "The Silverado Squat- 
 ters." 
 
 Gradually a longing began to come to 
 R. L. S. to see those at home once more and 
 have them know his wife. This desire grew 
 so from day to day that July found them 
 bidding good-by to California, and on the 
 7th of August they sailed from New York 
 for Liverpool. 
 
 92 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 SCOTLAND AGAIN 
 
 "Bells upon the city are ringing in the night, 
 High above the gardens are the houses full of light. 
 On the heathy Pentlands is the curlew flying free, 
 And the broom is blowing bonnie in the north coun- 
 trie. 
 
 "We canna break the bonds that God decreed to bind, 
 
 Still we'll be the children of the heather and the wind. 
 
 Far away from home O, it's still for you and me 
 
 That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north coun- 
 
 trie." 
 
 ON his return to Scotland the spell of 
 his own land fell upon R. L. S. for the 
 first time. He realized now how he loved 
 it spite of its bad climate, how much there 
 was at home waiting for him. "After all," 
 he said, "new countries, sun, music, and all 
 the rest, can never take down our gusty, 
 rainy, smoky, grim old city out of the first 
 place it has been making for itself in the 
 bottom of my soul." 
 
 93 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 But he had returned only to be banished. 
 The doctors found his lungs too weak to risk 
 Edinburgh winters and advised him to try 
 the Alps. 
 
 Accordingly a cottage was rented in Davos 
 Platz, a health resort. There and at similar 
 places near by they spent the next few winters 
 with visits to England and France between. 
 Switzerland never suited Stevenson. He 
 disliked living among invalids, and with his 
 love for exploring the nooks and corners of 
 any spot he was in he felt like a prisoner 
 when he found himself shut in a valley 
 among continual snow with few walks pos- 
 sible for him to take. "The mountains are 
 about me like a trap," he complained. "You 
 can not foot it up a hillside and behold the 
 sea on a great plain, but live in holes and 
 corners and can change only one for the 
 other." 
 
 Tobogganing was the only sport of Davos 
 
 Platz he really enjoyed, and he pursued that 
 
 to his heart's content. "Perhaps the true 
 
 way to toboggan is alone and at night," he 
 
 94 
 
SCOTLAND AGAIN 
 
 said. " First comes the tedious climb dragging 
 your instrument behind you. Next a long 
 breathing space, alone with the snow and 
 pine woods, cold, silent and solemn to the 
 heart. Then you push off; the toboggan 
 fetches away, she begins to feel the hill, to 
 glide, to swim, to gallop. In a breath you 
 arcrout from under the pine-trees and the 
 whole heaven full of stars reels and flashes 
 overhead." 
 
 He accomplished little work at this time.' 
 Sometimes for days he would be unable to 
 write at all. But the little boy who had once 
 told his mother, "I have been trying to 
 make myself happy," was the same man 
 now who could say: "I was never bored in 
 my life." When unable to do anything else 
 he would build houses of cards or lie in bed 
 and model little figures in clay. Anything 
 to keep his hands busy and his mind dis- 
 tracted from the stories that crowded his 
 brain and he had not strength to put on 
 paper. His one horror, the fear that urged 
 him on to work feverishly when he was suf- 
 95 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 fering almost beyond endurance, was the 
 thought that his illness might one day make 
 him a helpless invalid. 
 
 The splendid part to think of is that no 
 hint of his dark days and pains crept into 
 his writings or saddened those who came to 
 see him. Complaint he kept to himself, 
 prayed that he might "continue to be eager 
 to be happy," lived with the best that was 
 in him from day to day, and the words that 
 went forth from his sick-room have cheered 
 and encouraged thousands. 
 
 When asked why he wrote so many 
 stories of pirates and adventurers with few 
 women to soften them he replied: "I sup- 
 pose it's the contrast; I have always ad- 
 mired great strength, even in a pirate. Cour- 
 age has interested me more than anything 
 else." 
 
 He and his stepson had grown to be great 
 chums. At Silverado Lloyd had been seized 
 with a desire to write stories and had set up 
 a toy printing-press which turned off several 
 tales. At Davos Platz they both tried their 
 96 
 
SCOTLAND AGAIN 
 
 hand at illustrating these stories with pic- 
 tures cut on wood-blocks and gayly colored. 
 Lloyd's room was quite a gallery of these 
 artistic attempts. But their favorite di- 
 version was to play at a war game with lead 
 soldiers. In after-years Lloyd wrote his 
 recollections of the days they spent together 
 enjoying this fun and he says: "The war 
 game was constantly improved and elabo- 
 rated, until from a few hours, a war took 
 weeks to play, and the critical operations in 
 the attic monopolized half our thoughts. 
 This attic was a most chilly and dismal spot, 
 reached by a crazy ladder, and unlit save for 
 a single frosted window; so low at the eaves 
 and so dark that we could seldom stand up- 
 right, nor see without a candle. Upon the 
 attic floor a map was roughly drawn in chalks 
 of different colors, with mountains, rivers, 
 towns, bridges, and roads of two classes. 
 Here we would play by the hour, with tin- 
 gling fingers and stiffening knees, and an in- 
 tentness, zest, and excitement that I shall 
 never forget. 
 
 97 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 "The mimic battalions marclied and 
 counter-marched, changed by measured evo- 
 lutions from column formation into line, 
 with cavalry screens in front and massed 
 support behind, in the most approved mili- 
 tary fashion of today." 
 
 Neither of them ever grew too old for this 
 sport. Year after year they went back to 
 the game. Even when they went to Samoa 
 they laid out a campaign room with maps 
 chalked on the floor. 
 
 In the spring of 1885 Thomas Stevenson 
 purchased a house at Bournemouth, England, 
 near London, as a present for his daughter- 
 in-law. 
 
 They named the cottage "Skerryvore," 
 after the famous lighthouse he had helped 
 to build in his young days, and it was their 
 home for the next three years — busy ones 
 for R. L. S. 
 
 It was a real joy to have his father and 
 mother and Bob Stevenson with them again 
 and his friends in London frequently drop in 
 for a visit. 
 
 98 
 
SCOTLAND AGAIN 
 
 His health was never worse than during 
 the Bournemouth days. He seldom went 
 beyond his own garden-gate but lived, as he 
 says, "like a weevil in a biscuit." Yet he 
 never worked harder or accomplished more. 
 He wrote in bed and out of bed, sick or well, 
 poems, plays, short stories, and verses. 
 
 He finished "Treasure Island," the book 
 that gained him his first popularity, and 
 wrote "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," which 
 made him famous at home and abroad. 
 
 "Treasure Island" had been started some 
 time previous to please Lloyd, who asked him 
 to write a "good story." It all began with 
 a map. Stevenson always loved maps, and 
 one day during a picture-making bout he 
 had drawn a fine one. "It was elaborately 
 and (I thought) beautifully colored," he 
 says. "The shape of it took my fancy be- 
 yond expression; it contained harbors that 
 pleased me like sonnets. ... I ticketed my 
 performance Treasure Island." 
 
 Immediately the island began to take life 
 and swarm with people, all sorts of strange 
 99 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 scenes began to take place upon it, and as 
 he gazed at his map Stevenson discovered 
 the plot for the "good story." 
 
 "It is horrid fun," he wrote, "and begins 
 in the Admiral Benbow public house on the 
 Devon coast; all about a map and a treasure 
 and a mutiny, and a derelict ship . . . and 
 a doctor and a sea-cook with one leg with 
 the chorus *yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.' 
 ... No women in the story, Lloyd orders." 
 
 Parts of the coast at Monterey flashed 
 back to his mind and helped him to picture 
 the scenery of his "Treasure Island." "It 
 was just such a place as the Monterey sand 
 hills the hero John Hawkins found himself 
 on leaving his mutinous shipmates. It was 
 just such a thicket of live oak growing low 
 along the sand like brambles, that he crawled 
 and dodged when he heard the voices of the 
 pirates near him and saw Long John Silver 
 strike down with his crutch one of his mates 
 who had refused to join in his plan for 
 murder." 
 
 As the story grew he read each new chapter 
 100 
 

SCOTLAND AGAIN 
 
 aloud to the family in the evening. He was 
 writing it for one boy, but found he had 
 more in his audience. "My father," he says, 
 "not only heard with delight the daily 
 chapter, but set himself actively to collabo- 
 rate. When the time came for Billy Bones' 
 chest to be ransacked, he must have passed 
 the better part of a day preparing on the 
 back of a legal envelope an inventory of its 
 contents, which I exactly followed, and the 
 name of Flint's old ship, the Walrus, was 
 given at his particular request." 
 
 When the map was redrawn for the book 
 it was embellished with "blowing whales and 
 sailing ships; and my father himself brought 
 into service a knack he had of various writ- 
 ing, and elaborately forged the signature of 
 Captain Flint and the sailing directions of 
 Billy Bones." 
 
 These daily readings were rare treats to 
 those at Skerryvore, for Stevenson was a 
 most dramatic reader. "When he came to 
 stand in the place of Silver you could almost 
 have imagined you saw the great one-legged 
 101 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 John Silver, joyous-eyed, on the rolling 
 sea." 
 
 The book was not long in springing into 
 popularity. Not only the boys enjoyed it 
 but all sorts of staid and sober men became 
 boys once more and sat up long after bed- 
 time to finish the tale. Mr. Gladstone caught 
 a glimpse of it at a friend's house and did 
 not rest the next day until he had procured 
 a copy for himself, and Andrew Lang said: 
 "This is the kind of stuff a fellow wants. I 
 don't know when, except Tom Sawyer and the 
 Odyssey, that I ever liked a romance so well." 
 
 It was translated into many different lan- 
 guages, even appearing serially in certain 
 Greek and Spanish papers. 
 
 "Kidnapped" followed; a story founded 
 on the Appan murder. David Balfour, the 
 hero, was one of his own ancestors; Alan 
 Breck had actually lived, and the Alison 
 who ferried Alan and David over to Torry- 
 burn was one of Cummie's own people. The 
 Highland country where the scenes were 
 laid, he had traversed many times, and the 
 102 
 
SCOTLAND AGAIN 
 
 Island of Earraid, where David was ship- 
 wrecked, was the spot where he had spent 
 some of his engineering days. 
 
 Stevenson had often said the "brownies" 
 in his dreams gave him ideas for his tales. 
 At Skerryvore they came to him with a 
 story that among all his others is counted 
 the greatest. 
 
 "In the small hours one morning," says 
 his wife, " I was awakened by cries of horror 
 from Louis. Thinking he had a nightmare 
 I awakened him. He said angrily, 'Why 
 did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine 
 bogey tale.' " 
 
 The dream was so vivid that he could not 
 rest until he had written off the story, and it so 
 possessed him that the first draft was finished 
 within three days. It was called "The 
 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." 
 
 This story instantly created much discus- 
 sion. Articles were written about it, ser- 
 mons were preached on it, and letters poured 
 in from all sorts of people with their theories 
 about the strange tale. Six months after it 
 103 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 was published nearly forty thousand copies 
 were sold in England alone; but its greatest 
 success was in America where its popularity 
 was immediate and its sale enormous. 
 
 One day he was attracted by a book of 
 verses about children by Kate Greenaway, 
 and wondered why he could not write some 
 too of the children he remembered best of 
 all. Scenes and doings in the days spent 
 at Colinton with his swarm of cousins; the 
 games they had played and the people they 
 had known all trooped back with other 
 memories of Edinburgh days. As he re- 
 called these children, they tripped from his 
 pen until he had a delightful collection of 
 verses and determined to bring them to- 
 gether in a book. 
 
 First he called it "The Penny Whistle," 
 but soon changed the title to "A Child's 
 Garden of Verses" and dedicated it, with 
 the following poem, to the only one he said 
 who would really understand the verses, the 
 one who had done so much to make his child- 
 hood days happy: 
 
 104 
 
SCOTLAND AGAIN 
 TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM 
 
 FROM HER BOY 
 
 "For the long nights you lay awake 
 And watched for my unworthy sake; 
 For your most comfortable hand 
 That led me through the uneven land; 
 For all the story-books you read; 
 For all the pains you comforted; 
 For all you pitied, all you bore 
 In sad and happy days of yore; — 
 My second Mother, my first wife, 
 The angel of my infant life — 
 From the sick child, now well and old. 
 Take, nurse, the little book you hold! 
 
 "And grant it. Heaven, that all who read, 
 May find as dear a nurse at need. 
 And every child who lists my rhyme. 
 In the bright fireside, nursery clime, 
 May hear it in as kind a voice 
 As made my childish days rejoice." 
 
 "Of course," he said, speaking of this 
 dedication when he wrote to Cummie 
 about the book, "this is only a flourish, like 
 taking off one's hat, but still a person who 
 has taken the trouble to write things does 
 not dedicate them to anyone without meaning 
 105 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 it; and you must try to take this dedication 
 in place of a great many things that I might 
 have said, and that I ought to have done; to 
 prove that I am not altogether unconscious 
 of the great debt of gratitude I owe you." 
 
 If Thomas Stevenson had been one of the 
 first to doubt his boy's literary ability, he 
 was equally quick to acknowledge himself 
 mistaken. He was proud of his brilliant son, 
 keenly interested in whatever he was work- 
 ing on and, during the days spent together at 
 Skerryvore, gave him valuable aid in his 
 writing. 
 
 To have this old-time comradeship with 
 his father, to enjoy his sympathy and under- 
 standing once more was Stevenson's greatest 
 joy at this time; a joy which he sorrowfully 
 realized he must soon part with forever as 
 his father's health was failing rapidly. 
 
 Thomas Stevenson remained at Skerry- 
 vore until April, 1887, when he left for a 
 short visit to Edinburgh. While there he 
 became suddenly worse and died on the 8th 
 of May. 
 
 106 
 
SCOTLAND AGAIN 
 
 Louis's greatest reason for remaining in 
 England was gone now, and he determined 
 to cross the ocean with his family once more. 
 
 His mother willingly gave up her home, 
 her family, her friends, and the comforts 
 she had always enjoyed to go with him to 
 a new country, on any venture he might 
 propose if his health could only be improved 
 thereby. 
 
 On August 21, 1887, Louis bade good-by 
 to Scotland for the last time and sailed away 
 from London on the steamship Ludgate Hill 
 for New York. 
 
 107 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 
 
 "Tis a good land to fall in with men, and a pleasant 
 land to see." 
 
 — {Words spoken by Hendrih Hudson when 
 he first brought his ship through the Nar- 
 rows and saw the Bay of New York.) 
 
 STEVENSON'S second landing in New 
 York was a great contrast to his first. 
 The "Amateur Emigrant" had no one to 
 bid him welcome and Godspeed but a West 
 Street tavern-keeper, and now when Mr. 
 Will Low, his old friend of Fontainebleau 
 days, hastened to the dock to welcome him 
 on the Ludgate Hill, he found the author of 
 "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" already sur- 
 rounded by reporters. 
 
 The trip had done him good in spite of 
 
 their passage having been an unusually 
 
 rough one, with numerous discomforts. The 
 
 Ludgate Hill was not an up-to-date liner and 
 
 lOS 
 
SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 
 
 she carried a very mixed cargo. The very 
 fact of her being a tramp ship and that the 
 passengers were free to be about with the 
 men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, 
 and enjoy a real sea life, delighted Stevenson, 
 and he wrote back to Sidney Colvin: 
 
 "I enjoyed myself more than I could have 
 hoped on board our floating menagerie; stal- 
 lions and monkeys and matches made our 
 cargo; and the vast continent of the incon- 
 gruities rolled the while like a haystack; and 
 the stallions stood hypnotized by the motion, 
 looking through the port at our dinner table, 
 and winked when the crockery was broken; 
 and the little monkeys stared at one another 
 in their cages . . . and the big monkey, 
 Jacko, scoured about the ship and rested 
 willingly in my arms . . . the other pas- 
 sengers, when they were not sick, looked on 
 and laughed. Take all this picture, and 
 make it roll till the bell shall sound unex- 
 pected notes and the fittings shall break 
 loose in our state rooms, and you have the 
 voyage of the Ludgate Hill. She arrived in 
 109 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 the port of New York without beer, porter, 
 soda-water, curagoa, fresh meat, or fresh 
 water, and yet we lived and we regret her." 
 
 After a short visit with friends in New- 
 port they returned to New York and settled 
 down for a time in the Hotel St. Stephen, on 
 11th Street, near University Place, to make 
 plans for their winter's trip. 
 
 Soon after their arrival "Jekyll and Hyde" 
 was dramatized and produced with great 
 success. When it was known that the 
 author of this remarkable story was in the 
 city, people flocked from all sides to call on 
 him, and fairly wearied him with their at- 
 tentions, although he liked to see them and 
 made many interesting acquaintances at the 
 time. 
 
 Washington Square was one of his favorjte 
 spots in New York, and he spent many hours 
 there watching the children playing about. 
 A day he always recalled with special plea- 
 sure was the one when he had spent a whole 
 forenoon in the Square talking with Mark 
 Twain. 
 
 110 
 
SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 
 
 Among those who were anxious to know 
 Stevenson was the American sculptor Au- 
 gustus St. Gaudens. He had been delighted 
 with his writings and regretted he had not 
 met him in Paris when he and Mr. Low had 
 been there together. "If Stevenson ever 
 comes to New York," he said to Mr. Low, 
 "I want to meet him," and added that he 
 would consider it a great privilege if Steven- 
 son would permit him to make his por- 
 trait. 
 
 It was with much pleasure, therefore, that 
 Mr. Low brought them together, and they 
 took to one another immediately. " I like 
 your sculptor. What a splendid straight- 
 forward and simple fellow he is," said Steven- 
 son; and St. Gaudens's comment after their 
 first meeting was: "Astonishingly young, not 
 a bit like an invalid and a bully fellow." 
 
 Stevenson readily consented to sit for his 
 portrait, and they spent many delightful 
 hours together while the sketches were being 
 made for it. 
 
 One day the sculptor brought his eight- 
 Ill 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 year-old son, Homer, with him, and years 
 afterward gave the following description of 
 the child's visit: 
 
 "On the way I endeavored to impress on 
 the boy the fact that he was about to see a 
 man whom he must remember all his life. 
 It was a lovely day and as I entered the room 
 Stevenson lay as usual on rather a high bed. 
 I presented Homer to him . . . but since 
 my son's interest, notwithstanding my in- 
 junctions, was to say the least far from en- 
 thusiastic, I sent him out to play. 
 
 " I then asked Stevenson to pose but that 
 was not successful ... all the gestures being 
 forced and affected. Therefore I suggested 
 to him that if he would try to write, some 
 natural attitude might result. He assented 
 and taking a sheet of paper ... he pulled 
 his knees up and began. Immediately his 
 attitude was such that I was enabled to 
 create something of use and continued draw- 
 ing while he wrote with an occasional smile. 
 Presently I finished and told him there was 
 no necessity for his writing any more. He 
 112 
 
ip 
 < 
 
SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 
 
 did not reply but proceeded for quite a while. 
 Then he folded the paper with deliberation, 
 placed it in an envelope, addressed it, and 
 handed it to me. It was to 'Master Homer 
 St. Gaudens.' 
 
 "I asked him: 'Do you wish me to give 
 this to the boy?' 
 
 "'Yes.' 
 
 '"When? Now?' 
 
 " 'Oh, no, in five or ten years, or when I 
 am dead.' 
 
 "I put it in a safe and here it is: 
 
 "May 27, 1888. 
 "Dear Homer St. Gaudens — Your fa- 
 ther has brought you this day to see me 
 and tells me it is his hope you may remem- 
 ber the occasion. I am going to do what 
 I can to carry out his wish; and it may amuse 
 you, years after, to see this little scrap of 
 paper and to read what I write. I must 
 begin by testifying that you yourself took no 
 interest whatever in the introduction, and in 
 the most proper spirit displayed a single- 
 113 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 minded ambition to get back to play, and 
 this I thought an excellent and admirable 
 point in your character. You were also, — I 
 use the past tense with a view to the time 
 when you shall read rather than to that 
 when I am writing, — a very pretty boy, 
 and to my European views startlingly self- 
 possessed. My time of observation was so 
 limited that you must pardon me if I can 
 say no more . . . but you may perhaps like 
 to know that the lean, flushed man in bed, 
 who interested you so little, was in a state 
 of mind extremely mingled and unpleasant; 
 harassed with work which he thought he was 
 not doing well, troubled with difficulties to 
 which you will in time succeed, and yet look- 
 ing forward to no less a matter than a voyage 
 to the South Seas and the visitation of savage 
 and desert islands. 
 
 "Your father's friend, 
 
 "Robert Louis Stevenson." 
 
 The portrait was finished in bas-relief and 
 many copies were made of it. The most 
 114 
 
SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 
 
 familiar is the one giving only Stevenson's 
 head and shoulders, but the splendid big one 
 placed as a memorial to him in St. Giles's 
 Cathedral in Edinburgh shows him as he 
 must have looked that day lying in bed, 
 writing to Homer St. Gaudens. 
 
 Another man in New York whom Steven- 
 son had admired for years and longed to 
 meet was General Sherman. The war was 
 long past, and he was then an old gentleman 
 living very quietly. One day St. Gaudens 
 took Stevenson to call on him, and he was 
 asked afterward if he was at all disappointed 
 in his hero. 
 
 "Disappointed," he exclaimed. "It was 
 simply magnificent to stand in the presence 
 of one who has done what he has, and then 
 to find him so genial and human. It was the 
 next thing to seeing Wellington, and I dare 
 say the Iron Duke would not have been half 
 so human." 
 
 The anticipation of a train trip across the 
 continent was so distasteful that a proposed 
 visit to Colorado was given up, and they de- 
 115 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 cided to try the climate of the Adirondacks 
 for the winter instead. 
 
 They chose Saranac, not far from the 
 Canadian border, and rented a cottage there. 
 
 The climate was as unpleasant as possible. 
 It rained, snowed, sleeted, and froze con- 
 tinually. The cold at times was arctic, the 
 thermometer dropping thirty degrees below 
 zero in January. "Venison was crunching 
 with ice after being an hour in the oven, and 
 a large lump of ice was still unmelted in a 
 pot where water was steaming all around it." 
 
 Their cottage was dubbed "Hunter's 
 Home." It was far from the railroad, few 
 luxuries were to be had, and they lived a 
 simple life in earnest. 
 
 Of course, they had a dog; no "hunter's 
 home" would be complete without one, but 
 Louis scouted the idea of adding things as 
 unfitting as plush table-covers and uphol- 
 stered footstools. The table went bare, and 
 he fashioned a footstool for his mother out 
 of a log, in true backwoods fashion. 
 
 His wife and mother found the cold hard 
 116 
 
SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 
 
 to bear, but he stood it remarkably well and 
 benefited by it. Saranac reminded him of 
 Scotland, he said, without the smell of peats 
 and the heather: 
 
 Dressed in a buffalo coat, astrakhan cap, 
 and Indian boots, he and Lloyd walked, 
 skated, or went sleighing every day. 
 
 His pen was kept busy also. A new novel, 
 "The Master of Ballantrae," was started, and 
 he contributed a series of articles to Scrib- 
 nefs Magaiine. For these he was paid a 
 regular sum offered by the publishers and 
 agreed upon in advance — a new experience. 
 It made him feel "awfu' grand," he told a 
 Scotch friend. 
 
 A venture he had been longing to make 
 since a boy was a cruise among the islands of 
 the South Seas. While enduring the bitter 
 cold of Saranac such hazy ideas as he had had 
 about such a trip began to form themselves 
 into a definite scheme. He was anxious for 
 a long voyage; perhaps the warm sea air 
 might cure him after all else had failed. 
 
 So night after night he and Lloyd eagerly 
 117 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 pored over books and maps, and the family 
 discussed plans for such an expedition. 
 
 When spring came Mrs. Stevenson started 
 for San Francisco to secure, if possible, a 
 yacht in which they might undertake such a 
 cruise. If all went well Louis and his mother 
 and Lloyd would follow. 
 
 While they waited for results they spent 
 the time at Manasquan, on the New Jersey 
 coast. There Stevenson and his son enjoyed 
 the sailing, and their New York friends came 
 often to see them. 
 
 Mr. Low tells of the day at Manasquan 
 when word was received from Mrs. Steven- 
 son that she had found a schooner-yacht 
 satisfactory for the voyage. 
 
 An answer must be sent at once. Her 
 husband telegraphed that they would come, 
 but it was not without misgivings that he 
 made this final decision. There was much 
 at stake in an uncertain venture of the kind. 
 It meant a sacrifice of comfort for his wife 
 and mother, big expense, and perhaps no 
 better health in the end. 
 118 
 
SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 
 
 However, it seemed worth the risk, and 
 having decided to go he began to look for- 
 ward to the trip with boyish delight. "It 
 will be horrid fun," he said, "to be an invalid 
 gentleman on board a yacht, to walk around 
 with a spy-glass under your arm, to make 
 landings and trade beads and chromos for 
 cocoanuts, and to have the natives swim 
 out to meet you." 
 
 He and Lloyd spent hours laying their 
 course and making out lists of stores with 
 which to furnish the schooner, regardless of 
 the doubt expressed by their friends as to 
 the capacity of the boat. "They calmly 
 proceeded with their interminable lists and 
 scorned the criticism of a mere land-lubber. 
 All conversation that was not of a nautical 
 character failed to hold their interest." 
 
 Cheered with strong hopes for Louis's 
 future, the family departed for San Francisco 
 on the 28th of May, 1888. Their one regret 
 was the good friends they were leaving be- 
 hind. This particularly affected Louis, but 
 he tried to hide his feelings by making all 
 119 
 
ROBERT I>OUIS STEVENSON 
 
 sorts of lively and impossible proposals for 
 their joining him later on. 
 
 His parting words to Mr. Low were: 
 "There's England over there ^ and I've left 
 it — perhaps I may never go back — and 
 there on the other side of this big continent 
 there's another sea rolling in. I loved the 
 Pacific in the days when I was at Monterey, 
 and perhaps now it will love me a little. I 
 am going to meet it; ever since I was a boy 
 the South Seas have laid a spell upon me." 
 
 120 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 "Since long ago, a child at home, 
 I read and longed to rise and roam. 
 Where'er I went, what'er I willed, 
 One promised land my fancy filled. 
 Hence the long road my home I made; 
 Tossed much in ships; have often laid 
 Below the uncurtained sky my head. 
 Rain-deluged and wind buffeted; 
 And many a thousand miles I crossed. 
 And corners turned — love's labor lost. 
 Till, Lady, to your isle of sun 
 I came, not hoping, and like one 
 Snatched out of blindness, rubbed my eyes, 
 And hailed my promised land with cries." 
 
 ONCE, while Louis was a discontented 
 student at the University of Edin- 
 burgh, the premier of New Zealand, Mr. 
 Seed, spent an evening with his father and 
 talked about the South Sea Islands until the 
 boy said he was "sick with desire to go 
 there." 
 From that time on a visit to that out-of- 
 121 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 the-way corner of the earth was a cherished 
 dream, and he read everything he could lay 
 hands on that told about it. 
 
 While in California, the first time, Mr. 
 Virgil Williams, an artist, aroused his inter- 
 est still more by the accounts of his own trip 
 in the South Seas. 
 
 Now his opportunity to see them had 
 actually come. He already knew much of 
 the kind of places and people they were go- 
 ing among. 
 
 Three thousand miles across the open sea 
 lay the Marquesas Islands, the first group 
 they hoped to visit, and it was for that port 
 their schooner, the Casco, turned her head 
 when she was towed out of the Golden Gate 
 at dawn on the 28th of June. 
 
 Besides the family and a servant, Valen- 
 tine Roch, who had been with them since 
 Bournemouth days, the party consisted of 
 the skipper, Captain Otis, who was well 
 acquainted with the Pacific, a crew of four 
 deck-hands, and a Japanese cook. 
 
 The Casco was a fore-and-aft schooner, 
 122 
 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 ninety-five feet in length, of seventy tons' 
 burden. "She had most graceful lines and 
 with her lofty masts, white sails and decks, 
 and glittering brass work, was a lovely craft 
 to the eye as she sat upon the water." 
 
 " I must try to describe the vessel that is 
 to be our home for so long," Mrs. Stevenson, 
 senior, wrote to her sister at Colinton. 
 "From the deck you step down into the 
 cockpit, which is our open air drawing room. 
 It has seats all around, nicely cushioned, and 
 we sit or lie there most of the day. The 
 compass is there, and the wheel, so the man 
 at the wheel always keeps us company. . , . 
 At the bottom of the stairs on the right 
 hand side is the captain's room. Straight 
 ahead is the main — or after — cabin, a nice 
 bright place with a skylight and four port- 
 holes. There are four sofas that can be 
 turned into beds if need be, and there are 
 lockers under them in which our clothes are 
 stored away. Above and behind each sofa 
 is a berth concealed by white lace curtains 
 on brass rods, and in these berths we three 
 123 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 women are laid away as on shelves each 
 night to sleep. 
 
 "Opposite the entrance is a mirror let into 
 the wall, with two small shelves under it. 
 On each side of this is a door. The one to 
 the right leads ... to Lloyd's cabin, and 
 beyond that again is the forward cabin, or 
 dining room. The door to the left opens 
 into . . . Louis' sleeping-room. It is very 
 roomy with both a bed and a sofa in it, so 
 that he will be very comfortable. . . . 
 
 "The dining room has a long table and 
 chairs. Between the doors a very ugly pic- 
 ture of fruit and cake. Louis would fain 
 cover it up if we could spare a flag with which 
 to do it. The doors at the further end lead 
 to the pantry and galley and beyond these 
 are the men's quarters." 
 
 No expense had been spared in building 
 the Casco to make her comfortable. She was 
 intended, however, for cruising in the Cali- 
 fornia waters and was hardly suited^toHiie 
 rough handling she received during the 
 squally weather of the next few months. 
 124 
 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 Fortunately she stood the test well and her 
 passengers suffered few discomforts. 
 
 Once under way and settled for living, the 
 trip proved quite uneventful. The long days 
 were spent on deck reading or working, and 
 Stevenson began to gather material for a 
 book on the South Seas. The ship's life 
 suited him admirably; every strange fish and 
 new star interested him, and he grew stronger 
 hourly in the warm air. 
 
 "Since the fifth day," he wrote, "we were 
 left behind by a full-rigged English ship . . . 
 bound round the Horn, we have not spied a 
 sail, nor a land bird, nor a shred of sea-weed. 
 In impudent isolation, the toy schooner has 
 plowed her path of snow scross the empty 
 deep, far from all track of commerce, far 
 from any hand of help; now to the sound of 
 slatting sails and stamping sheet blocks, 
 staggering in the turmoil of that business 
 falsely called a calm, now, in the assault of 
 squalls burying her lee-rail in the sea. . . . 
 Flying fish, a skimming silver rain on the 
 blue sea; a turtle fast asleep in the early 
 125 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 morning sunshine; the Southern Cross hung 
 thwart the forerigging lil<e the frame of a 
 wrecked kite — the pole star and the familiar 
 plough dropping ever lower in the wake; 
 these build up thus far the history of our 
 voyage. It is singular to come so far and see 
 so infinitely little." 
 
 The squalls that came very quickly, fre- 
 quently broke the monotony of the trip. 
 One moment the Casco would be sailing along 
 easily and the "next moment, the inhabi- 
 tants of the cabin were piled one upon an- 
 other, the sea was pouring into the cockpit 
 and spouting in fountains through forgotten 
 deadlights, and the steersman stood spinning 
 the wheel for his life in a halo of tropical 
 rain." 
 
 After twenty-two days at sea they sighted 
 their first island, Nukahiva, one of the Mar- 
 quesan group, and were all on deck before 
 dawn anxiously watching for it. They not 
 only looked forward eagerly to the sight of 
 land again after so many days on the open 
 ocean, but it was indeed an adventure to 
 126 
 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 come to a country totally strange to all of 
 them, where few white people had been be- 
 fore. 
 
 "Not one soul aboard the Casco had set 
 foot upon the Islands," says Stevenson, "or 
 knew except by accident one word of any of 
 the island tongues; and it was with something 
 perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as 
 thrilled the bosom of the discoverers that 
 we drew near these problematic shores. 
 
 "Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe 
 was already paddling from the hamlet. It 
 contained two men: one white, one brown 
 and tattooed across the face with bands of 
 blue, both immaculate with white European 
 clothes. . . . Canoe followed canoe till the 
 ship swarmed with stalwart, six foot men in 
 every stage of undress . . . the more con- 
 siderable tattooed from head to foot in awful 
 patterns ... all talking and we could not 
 understand one word; all trying to trade 
 with us who had no thought of trading, or 
 offering us island curios at prices palpably 
 absurd." 
 
 127 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 All this charmed and delighted Stevenson, 
 who had dreamed many times of witnessing 
 just such a scene. He wrote to Cummie that 
 he was living all over again many of the 
 stories she had read to him and found them 
 coming true about himself. 
 
 For six weeks they cruised about among 
 these islands, frequently dropping anchor and 
 going ashore for several days. When the 
 natives were convinced that they had neither 
 come to trade or to make trouble, but were 
 simply interested in them and their country, 
 they made the visitors most welcome and 
 showered presents of fruit, mats, baskets, 
 and fans upon them. 
 
 All were eager to visit the schooner, which 
 they called Pahi Mani, meaning the shining 
 or the silver ship. The chiefs tried to mea- 
 sure its dimensions with their arms. The 
 liveliest curiosity was shown about every- 
 thing; the red velvet cushions, the looking- 
 glasses, and the typewriter pleased par- 
 ticularly. A photograph of Queen Victoria 
 hung in the fore-cabin and was always de- 
 128 
 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 scribed to the island callers as Vahine Haka- 
 iki Beritano, which meant literally, woman- 
 great-chief Britain. It was a surprise to 
 find how much many of them already knew 
 about her. 
 
 Some afternoons the Casco swarmed with 
 these strange visitors who were always de- 
 lighted at the refreshments of ship's biscuits 
 and pineapple syrup and water offered them. 
 A certain chief was particularly taken with 
 a pair of gloves belonging to Mrs. Stevenson, 
 senior. He smelled of them, called them 
 British tattooing, and insisted on her putting 
 them on and off a great many times. 
 
 The entire family fell quickly into the 
 island mode of living; dressed as the white 
 inhabitants did; ate all the strange kinds of 
 native food; and when ashore lived in the 
 native houses, which resembled bird-cages on 
 stilts. The climate suited them to perfec- 
 tion, and Stevenson particularly benefited by 
 it, bathing daily in the warm surf and taking 
 long walks along the beach in search of 
 strange shells. 
 
 129 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 "Here we are," his mother wrote to Cum- 
 mie, "in a little bay surrounded by green 
 mountains, on which sheep are grazing, and 
 there are birds very like our own 'blackies' 
 singing in the trees. If it were not for the 
 groves of cocoa-nut palms, we might almost 
 fancy ourselves in our own dear land. But 
 the climate here is simply perfect. Of course 
 it is hot, but there are always fresh breezes. 
 . . . We have our principal meal at twelve 
 o'clock, and spend the after part of the day 
 on shore . . . bathing, gathering shells, knit- 
 ting, or reading. Our Japanese cook and 
 steward just sets out the table with cold 
 meats, fruit, and cake so that we can take 
 our other meal at any time in the evening 
 that suits us. 
 
 "Fanny and I are dressed like natives, in 
 two garments. As we have to wade to and 
 from the boat in landing and coming back, 
 we discard stockings, and on the sands we 
 usually go barefoot entirely. Louis wears 
 only a shirt and trousers with the legs and 
 arms rolled up as far as they will go, and he 
 is always barefooted. You will therefore 
 130 
 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 not be surprised to hear that we are all as 
 red as lobsters. It is a strange irresponsible 
 half savage life, and I sometimes wonder if 
 we shall ever be able to return to civilized 
 habits again. 
 
 "The natives are very simple and kindly 
 people. The Roman Catholic priests have 
 persuaded them to give up their constant 
 wars and the practice of cannibalism, though 
 only within recent years. . . . 
 
 "Louis has learned a good many words of 
 the language, and with the help of signs can 
 contrive to carry on a conversation, but I 
 have stuck fast with two words: 'ka-oha' 
 which means 'How do you do?' 'thank you,' 
 and 'good bye,' and I am not quite sure how 
 much else, and 'Mitai,' meaning good, nice, 
 pretty, kind. I don't expect to get beyond 
 these, but it is wonderful how much one can 
 express with them. . . . 
 
 "The natives have got names for us all. 
 Louis was at first 'the old man,' much to his 
 distress; but now they call him 'Ona' mean- 
 ing owner of the yacht, a name he greatly 
 prefers to the first. Fanny is Vahine, or 
 131 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 wife; I am the old woman, and Lloyd rejoices 
 in the name of Mate Karahi, the young man 
 with glass eyes (spectacles). Perhaps it is 
 a compliment here to be called old, as it is 
 in China, at any rate, one native told Louis 
 that he himself was old, but his mother was 
 not! . . . 
 
 "A native dance was got up for our bene- 
 fit. None of the dancing-women appeared, 
 but five men dressed in shirt and trousers, 
 danced together with spirit and grace. The 
 music was provided by a drum, made out of 
 an old tin box. Many of the steps reminded 
 me of a Highland reel, but were curiously 
 mixed up with calisthenic, and even gym- 
 nastic exercises; the hands in particular were 
 used very gracefully, and they often took 
 off their hats and waved them to and fro. 
 But they also climbed on each other's 
 shoulders, and did other strange things. 
 After dancing for some time, they sang 
 songs to us in a curious, low, weird kind of 
 crooning. Altogether it was a strange sort 
 of afternoon party!" 
 
 132 
 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 The Marquesas Islands belong to the 
 French, and the commandant in charge was 
 most cordial to Stevenson, inviting him to 
 his house frequently during his stay in the 
 islands. When at the expiration of six 
 weeks it was time for the Casco to weigh 
 anchor and the party sailed on to explore 
 still farther, they left behind them many 
 friends who regretted their departure. Here 
 as elsewhere in the South Seas, Stevenson 
 showed his sympathy and kindliness toward 
 the island people regardless of who they 
 were or their rank. White or half-caste 
 priest, missionary, or trader, all were treated 
 the same. No bribe, he said, would induce 
 him to call the natives savages. 
 
 Mr. Johnstone, an English resident in the 
 South Seas at the time of Stevenson's visit, 
 says: "His inborn courtesy more than any 
 of his other good traits, endeared him to his 
 fellows in the Pacific ... in the hearts of 
 our Island people he built a monument more 
 lasting than stone or brass." 
 
 The recollection of the history of his own 
 133 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 wild Scottish Islands, the people and con- 
 ditions his grandfather found among them, 
 helped him to understand these people and 
 account for many of their actions. Though 
 at opposite ends of the earth, many of their 
 customs and legends corresponded. The 
 dwellers in the Hebrides in the old days 
 likewise lived in clans with their chief and 
 struggled to retain their independence against 
 an invading power. 
 
 Tahiti, one of the group of Society Islands, 
 was their next stopping place. Before start- 
 ing a new mate was shipped, who was more 
 familiar with the course, which lay through 
 the Dangerous Archipelago — a group of low, 
 badly lighted islands. 
 
 The Society Islands are most beautiful, 
 Tahiti probably the gem of them all, but on 
 arriving Stevenson was in no condition to 
 appreciate their loveliness. A cold contracted 
 on the trip made him quite ill. The trip had 
 proved very dangerous even with the aid of 
 a pilot, and twice they gave themselves up 
 for lost when they were becalmed and 
 134 
 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 drifted in toward the shore. "The reefs 
 were close in," wrote Stevenson, "with my 
 eye! What a surf! The pilot thought we 
 were gone and the captain had a boat cleared, 
 when a lucky squall came to our rescue." 
 
 After landing his condition became so 
 much worse his wife grew desperate and 
 determined to find a comfortable spot for 
 him. After much trouble a Chinaman with 
 a team was secured, who agreed to drive the 
 entire family to Tautira, the largest village, 
 sixteen miles away over a road crossed by 
 no less than twenty-one streams. On this 
 uncertain venture they started, with the head 
 of the family in a state of collapse, know- 
 ing nothing of the village they were going to 
 or the living it would afford them. 
 
 None of them ever regretted the persever- 
 ance which led them on, however, for in all 
 their wanderings in the South Seas before 
 or after no place ever charmed them more, 
 or were they received with greater hospital- 
 ity than in Tautira. 
 
 The day after their arrival, Moe, an is- 
 135 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 land princess and an ex-queen, visited them. 
 When she found Stevenson ill she insisted 
 he and his family be moved to her own 
 house where they could have more comforts. 
 The house at the time was occupied by Ori, 
 a subchief, a subject and relative of the 
 princess. But he and his family gladly 
 turned out to make room for the visitors and 
 lived in a tiny house near by. 
 
 "Ori is the very finest specimen of native 
 we have seen yet," wrote Mrs. Stevenson. 
 "He is several inches over six feet, of perfect 
 though almost gigantic proportions." 
 
 As soon as her husband was strong enough 
 to be about again he and Ori became great 
 friends. Finally, according to an island cus- 
 tom, Stevenson was adopted into Ori's clan 
 and became his brother. This likewise meant 
 exchanging names and Ori became Rui, the 
 nearest possible approach to Louis since there 
 is no L or S in the Tahitian language. Louis 
 in turn became Terii-Tera (pronounced Te- 
 r^^terah), which was Ori's Christian name, 
 Ori standing merely for his clan title. 
 136 
 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 To show their gratitude for the hospital- 
 ity shown them by Ori and the people of the 
 village, Stevenson decided to give a public 
 feast. 
 
 The feast day was set for Wednesday, and 
 the previous Sunday a chief issued the in- 
 vitations from the Farehau, a house resem- 
 bling an enormous bird-cage in the centre of 
 the village, from which all the news was read 
 aloud to the people once a week. 
 
 A feast of such size necessitated much 
 preparation. 
 
 "The chief, who was our guide in the 
 matter," wrote Mrs. Stevenson, "found four 
 large fat hogs, which Louis bought, and four 
 cases of ship's biscuit were sent over from the 
 Casco, which is lying at Papeete for repairs. 
 . . . Our hogs were killed in the morning, 
 washed in the sea, and roasted whole in a 
 pit with hot stones. When done they were 
 laid on their stomachs in neat open coffins of 
 green basket work, each hog with his case of 
 biscuits beside him. Early in the morning 
 the entire population began bathing, a bath 
 137 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 being the preliminary to everything. At 
 about three o'clock — four was the hour set 
 — there was a general movement toward our 
 premises, so that I had to hurry Louis into 
 his clothes, all white even to his shoes. 
 Lloyd was also in white, but barefoot. . . . 
 The chief, who speaks French very well, 
 stood beside Louis to interpret for him. By 
 the time we had taken our respective places 
 on the veranda in front of our door, an im- 
 mense crowd had assembled. They came in 
 five detachments. . . . Each set of people 
 came bending under the weight of bamboo 
 poles laden with fruits, figs, fowls, etc. All 
 were dressed in their gayest and many had 
 wreaths of leaves or flowers on their heads. 
 The prettiest sight of all was the children, 
 who came marching two and two abreast, 
 the bamboo poles lying lengthwise across 
 their shoulders. 
 
 "When all the offerings had been piled in 
 
 five great heaps upon the ground, Louis 
 
 made his oration to the accompaniment of 
 
 the squealing of pigs, the cackling of hens, 
 
 138 
 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 and the roar of the surf. ... A speech was 
 made in return on behalf of the village. . . . 
 Each speaker finished by coming forward 
 with one of the smaller things in his hand, 
 which he offered personally to Louis, and 
 then shook hands with us all and retired. 
 Among these smaller presents were many 
 fish-hooks for large fishing, laboriously carved 
 from mother-of-pearl shell. One man came 
 with one egg in each hand saying 'carry 
 these to Scotland with you, let them hatch 
 into cocks, and their song shall remind you 
 of Tautira.' The schoolmaster, with a leaf- 
 basket of rose apples, made his speech in 
 French." 
 
 While overhauling the Casco two or three 
 days before they planned to leave Tautira, 
 Captain Otis was shocked to find the whole 
 upper half of the main masthead completely 
 eaten out by dry-rot. This necessitated tak- 
 ing the schooner around to Papeete, on the 
 other side of the island, for repairs. Under 
 ordinary circumstances the setting of a new 
 masthead need to have delayed them but a 
 139 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 few days; in the South Seas, however, it 
 was a different matter. Only after searching 
 for days in Papeete was he able to find a 
 man who knew anything of ship-carpenter- 
 ing, and when found he worked according to 
 his own sweet will. So it was five weeks 
 before the Casco was ready to return for her 
 passengers, who in the meantime were in a 
 state of anxiety as to her whereabouts. 
 
 During their enforced stay Ori treated the 
 entire family like a brother indeed, doing 
 everything in his power to make their visit 
 pleasant. 
 
 At last, on Christmas Day, they were ready 
 to depart. The entire population of Tautira 
 came to the beach to bid them farewell, and 
 as the Casco swung out of the harbor one of 
 the French officials fired a salute of twenty- 
 one guns with his army rifle and the schooner 
 returned it with a heavy-tongued Win- 
 chester. 
 
 Tautira had grown to seem like a real 
 home to all of them. To leave it with very 
 little hope of ever returning to see such good 
 140 
 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 friends as Princess Moe and Ori was a real 
 grief, while they in their turn were quite 
 heart-broken. Stevenson's friendship had 
 brought something into their lives they had 
 never had before. 
 
 Honolulu was the goal of the Casco now, 
 and all eagerly looked forward to the letters 
 waiting for them there — the first word from 
 home since leaving San Francisco. 
 
 Bad weather attended the Casco all the 
 way. They were delayed by a succession of 
 hurricanes and calms until the supply of 
 food ran very low and they were reduced to 
 a diet of "salt-horse" and ship-biscuit. 
 
 The last forty-eight hours of their run was 
 made in the very teeth of a furious gale when 
 the captain took big risks by carrying full 
 sail, with the hope of making port before their 
 supply of food and water was entirely ex- 
 hausted. In spite of the danger, Stevenson 
 enjoyed this daring run hugely. Later, when 
 he and Lloyd wrote "The Wrecker" to- 
 gether, this very episode figured in the story, 
 Captain Otis under the name of Captain 
 141 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Nares performing a similar sail-carrying feat 
 on the schooner Norah Creina. 
 
 Mrs. Strong, Stevenson's stepdaughter, 
 and her family were waiting in Honolulu 
 and gave them a warm welcome. The 
 travellers soon found themselves the centre 
 of interest among Mrs. Strong's large circle 
 of friends and it was with difficulty Steven- 
 son found time to finish the last chapters of 
 "The Master of Ballantrae," which he had 
 been working on since leaving Saranac. 
 
 Honolulu, with its street-cars, shops, elec- 
 tric lights, and mixture of native and foreign 
 population, seemed strangely crowded and 
 modern after the scenes they had recently 
 left; too modern by far to suit Stevenson, who 
 preferred the unconventional wild life of the 
 islands they had come from. 
 
 At the Royal Palace in Honolulu, Kala- 
 kaua, the last of the Hawaiian kings, still held 
 court. He enjoyed R. L. S. and invited him 
 often to the palace and told him the history 
 and legends of many of the islands of the 
 South Seas. It was from Kalakaua he first 
 142 
 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 learned to know the troubled history of the 
 Samoan Islands and of Apia, which was to 
 be his future home. 
 
 The Island of Molokai, the leper colony, 
 lay not far off. While in Honolulu he spent 
 several days there, in the place where Fa- 
 ther Damien had lately done his splendid 
 work. 
 
 According to their original scheme they 
 were to return home from Honolulu, but 
 having come so far they were eager to see 
 more. They had tasted the dangers and fas- 
 cination of the life among the wild islands, 
 each so different, and it had only whetted 
 their appetites for what lay still beyond. 
 The chances of coming so far again were 
 slight; it seemed too good an opportunity 
 to miss. So Stevenson wrote to the friends 
 at home, whom he longed daily to see: 
 "Yes — I own up — I am untrue to friend- 
 ship and (what is less, but still considerable) 
 to civilization. I am not coming home for 
 another year. . . . But look here and judge 
 me tenderly. I have had more fun and 
 143 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 pleasure of my life these past months than 
 ever before, and more health than any time 
 in ten long years. . . . And this precious 
 deep is filled with islands which we may still 
 visit, and though the sea is a dreadful place, 
 I like to be there, and like squalls (when they 
 are over) and to draw near to a new island 
 I can not say how much I like. . . . 
 
 "Remember me as I was at home, and 
 think of me sea-bathing and walking about, 
 as jolly as a sand boy; you will own the 
 temptation is strong; and as the scheme, bar 
 fatal accidents, is bound to pay into the bar- 
 gain, sooner or later, it seems it would be 
 madness to come home now, with an imper- 
 fect book . . . and perhaps fall sick again 
 by autumn. 
 
 " It is a singular thing that as I was pack- 
 ing up old papers ere I left Skerryvore, I 
 came on the prophecies of a drunken High- 
 land sibyl, when I was sixteen. She said I 
 was to be very happy, — to visit America 
 and to be much upon the sea. ... I can 
 not say why I like the sea . . . my poor 
 144 
 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 grandfather it is from liim I inherit the 
 taste I fancy, and he was around many 
 islands in his day; but I, please God, 
 shall beat him at that before the recall is 
 sounded." 
 
 So the Casco was shipped back to San 
 Francisco, Mrs. Stevenson, senior, returned 
 to Scotland for a visit, and the trading 
 schooner Equator was chartered for a trip 
 among the Marshall, Gilbert, and Samoan 
 Islands. 
 
 Just before leaving, the following letter 
 came from Ori, which Stevenson says he 
 would rather have received than written 
 "Red Gauntlet" or the "Sixth ^neid." 
 
 " I make you to know my great affection. 
 At the hour when you left us, I was filled 
 with tears; my wife Rui Telime, also, and all 
 my household. When you embarked I felt 
 great sorrow. It is for this that I went upon 
 the road, and you looked from that ship, and 
 I looked at you on the ship with great grief 
 until you had raised the anchor and hoisted 
 the sail. When the ship started I ran along 
 145 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 the beach to see you still; and when you were 
 in the open sea I cried out to you ' Farewell 
 Louis,' and when I was coming back to my 
 house I seemed to hear your voice crying, 
 *Rui, farewell.' Afterwards I watched the 
 ship as long as I could until the night fell; 
 and when it was dark I said to myself: 'If 
 I had wings I should fly to the ship to meet 
 you.' ... I wept then . . . telling my- 
 self continually, 'Teriitera returns to his own 
 country and leaves his dear Rui in grief.' . . . 
 I will not forget you in my memory. Here is 
 the thought: I desire to meet you again. 
 It is my Teriitera makes the only riches I 
 desire in this world. It is your eyes that I 
 desire to see again. It must be that your 
 body and my body shall eat together at one 
 table, there is what would make my heart 
 content. But now we are separated. May 
 God be with you all. May His word and 
 His mercy go with you, so that you may 
 be well and we also, according to the words 
 of Paul. 
 
 "Ori a Ori, that is to say, Rui." 
 14G 
 
IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 "All told," said Stevenson, "if my books 
 have enabled or helped me to make this 
 voyage, to know Rui, and to have received 
 such a letter, they have . . . not been writ 
 in vain." 
 
 147 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 VAILIMA 
 
 "We thank Thee for this place in which we dwell; 
 for the love that unites us; for the peace accorded us 
 this day; for the hope with which we expect the mor- 
 row; for the health, the work, the food, and the bright 
 skies that make our lives delightful; for the friends in 
 all parts of the earth, and our friendly helpers in this 
 foreign isle. . . . Give us courage and gaiety and the 
 quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our 
 enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent 
 endeavors. If it may not, give us strength to encounter 
 that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, 
 constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in 
 all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of 
 death, loyal and loving one to another." R. L. S. 
 — Prayer used with the household at Vailima. 
 
 ON the 7th of December, when the fam- 
 ily landed at Upolu, the chief of the 
 Samoas or Samoan Islands, they little dreamed 
 it was to be their home for the next four years 
 and the last the master of the house was ever 
 to know. 
 
 It had been frequently borne upon Steven- 
 son, however, while cruising among the Mar- 
 148 
 
VAILIMA 
 
 shall and Gilbert Islands during the past 
 months, that a home in either England or 
 Scotland again was a vain dream for him. 
 
 "I do not ask for health," he said, "but I 
 will go anywhere and live in any place 
 where I can enjoy the existence of a human 
 being." He seldom complained and it is 
 rare to find even the brave sort of cry he 
 made against fate to a friend at this time. 
 
 "For fourteen years I have not had a 
 day's real health. I have wakened sick and 
 gone to bed weary, and I have done my work 
 unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and 
 written out of it, written in hemorrhages, 
 written in sickness, written torn by cough- 
 ing, written when my head swam for weak- 
 ness, and for so long, it seems to me I have 
 won my wager and recovered my glove. I 
 am better now, have been, rightly speaking, 
 since I first came to the Pacific; and still 
 few are the days when I am not in some 
 physical distress. And the battle goes on 
 — ill or well, is a trifle; so as it goes. I was 
 made for a contest, and the Powers have so 
 149 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 willed that my battlefield shall be this dingy 
 inglorious one of the bed and the physics 
 bottle." 
 
 Here in the tropics he might hope to live 
 and work years longer — a return to a cold 
 climate, he now knew, would be fatal. 
 
 Why not turn traders? Often on starry 
 nights, drifting among the low islands, he 
 and Lloyd and the captain of the Equator 
 had lain out on deck and planned what a 
 lark it would be to buy a schooner, cruise 
 among the islands, and trade with the natives. 
 They would write stories, too, about these 
 strange island dwellers with their many 
 weird superstitions and of the white men 
 who drifted from all corners of the globe to 
 make their home there. 
 
 Already Captain Reid had told them many 
 such tales which Stevenson wove into stories. 
 The "Beach of Falesa" and the "Isle of 
 Voices" are probably the two most famous, 
 while "the strange story of the loss of the 
 brigantine Wandering Minstrel and what 
 men and ships do in that wild and beautiful 
 150 
 
VAILIMA 
 
 world beyond the American continent" 
 formed a plot for the story called "The 
 Wrecker," which he and Lloyd Osbourne 
 wrote together later on. 
 
 Samoa was a place he was eager to visit. 
 King Kalakaua at Honolulu had already 
 told him much of its troubled history. The 
 group of thirteen islands lay about four 
 thousand two hundred miles southwest of 
 San Francisco. At that time they were 
 under the control of England, Germany, and 
 the United States according to a treaty 
 entered into in 1889. These countries ap- 
 pointed a chief justice, a president of the 
 municipal council, three consuls, and three 
 land commissioners. A native king was 
 likewise recognized on each island. 
 
 This triple control proved most unsatis- 
 factory and for years past there had been 
 constant friction among the officials and 
 warlike outbreaks among the natives. 
 
 These complications interested Stevenson. 
 His first idea had been to stop there but a 
 short time. He now found he wanted to 
 151 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 remain in Samoa long enougli to write its 
 history. 
 
 The Samoans are true Polynesians; a 
 strong and handsome race whose reputation 
 is high among all the people of the Pacific. 
 The large majority have become Christians, 
 but in spite of the influence of the mission- 
 aries and the foreign powers who control 
 them, they retain many of their old customs 
 and habits. They are naturally peace-loving 
 in spite of their many wars. Fighting does 
 not appeal to them for its own sake, and they 
 enjoy a good family life, treating their 
 women with great respect and lavishing af- 
 fection upon their children. 
 
 Stevenson wanted those at home to know 
 these people better; his sympathy, which 
 was ever with the weaker side, was instantly 
 aroused in behalf of the natives, and he 
 wanted to tell their side of the story. 
 
 If they were to make a home anywhere in 
 
 the South Seas there could be no better spot 
 
 than Apia, the principal port and capital 
 
 of these islands, as it had a good mail service, 
 
 152 
 
VAILIMA 
 
 a most important feature to a writer. Tiie 
 monthly mail-steamers between San Fran- 
 cisco and Sydney, as well as other Australian 
 mail-boats, stopped there. 
 
 So he purchased four hundred acres on the 
 hills three miles from Apia and preparations 
 were immediately made for clearing the 
 ground and building a house. Lloyd Osbourne 
 left for England to bring back the household 
 treasures from Skerryvore, to make a real 
 home, and Stevenson and his wife lived 
 gypsy fashion meanwhile in a four-room 
 wooden house. 
 
 The new home was named Vailima, which 
 is Samoan for "Five Waters," there being 
 five streams running through the property. 
 
 The house was built of wood, painted dark 
 green with a red roof. When finished its 
 chief feature was the great hall within, 
 sixty feet long, lined and ceiled with Cali- 
 fornia redwood. Here among the home 
 treasures — his own portrait, war dresses, 
 corselets, fans, and mats presented to him 
 by island kings — the marble bust of grand- 
 153 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 father Stevenson smiled down with approval 
 on many a motley gathering. Louis often 
 wondered if they reminded the old gentleman 
 of some of the strange people he had enter- 
 tained years ago in Baxter Place. 
 
 All about was dense, tropical undergrowth, 
 only paths led to the house, and these must 
 continually be cut out. All carrying was 
 done by two big New Zealand pack-horses. 
 
 A large garden was planted — Mrs. Steven- 
 son's special hobby. Cocoanuts, oranges, 
 guavas, and mangoes already grew on the 
 estate. The ground was very fertile, and 
 kava, the root of which is used for the Samoan 
 national drink, pineapples, sweet potatoes, 
 and eggplants were soon flourishing among 
 other things. Limes were so plentiful that 
 they formed the hedge about the place; 
 citrons were so common that they rotted on 
 the trees. 
 
 All this ground-breaking, house-building, 
 and gardening were new to Stevenson, and he 
 revelled in them to the neglect of his writing. 
 
 "This is a hard and interesting and beauti- 
 154 
 
VAILIMA 
 
 ful life we lead now," he wrote to Sidney 
 Colvin. "Our place is in a deep cleft of 
 Vaea Mountain; some six hundred feet above 
 the sea, embowered in forest, which is our 
 strangling enemy, and which we combat 
 with axes and dollars. I am crazy over out- 
 door work, and had at last to confine myself 
 to the house, or literature must have gone 
 by the board. Nothing is so interesting as 
 weeding, clearing, and pathmaking; the over- 
 sight of laborers becomes a disease; it is 
 quite an effort not to drop into the farmer; 
 and it does make you feel so well. To come 
 down covered with mud and drenched with 
 sweat and rain after some hours in the bush, 
 change, rub down, and take a chair in the 
 verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience." 
 
 Before his arrival in Apia, Stevenson's tale 
 of "The Bottle Imp" had been translated 
 into Samoan by the missionaries. When the 
 natives discovered he was its author they im- 
 mediately named him Tusitala, The Teller- 
 of-Tales. He still owned the bottle, they 
 said; it was that gave him the wealth to cruise 
 155 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 about in a great boat and build a fine house. 
 The family often wondered why native visit- 
 ors were curious to see the inside of the great 
 safe in the hall at Vailima until they found 
 that it was the belief among the islanders 
 that the safe was the bottle's hiding-place. 
 
 Mrs. Stevenson, senior, returned with 
 Lloyd from England, and later Mrs. Strong 
 and her small son, Austin, came from Hono- 
 lulu to make the family complete. 
 
 The servants were all natives, "boys" as 
 they called themselves. There were usually 
 about half a dozen about the house, with a 
 boy for the garden and to look after the cows 
 and pigs, besides a band of outside laborers, 
 varying from half a dozen to thirty, under 
 Lloyd's direction. 
 
 Sosimo was Stevenson's particular boy. 
 He waited upon him hand and foot, looked 
 after his clothes and his pony "Jack," and 
 was devoted in every way. His loyalty to 
 his master lasted to the end of his own life. 
 
 The servants were governed on something 
 very like the clan system. A Vailima tartan 
 156 
 
VAILIMA 
 
 was adopted for special occasions and Steven- 
 son encouraged tiiem to think of tiie house- 
 hold as a family, to take interest and pride 
 in all its doings. 
 
 On Sunday evenings the entire household 
 was assembled. A chapter of the Samoan 
 Bible was read and Samoan hymns sung. 
 Then a prayer in English written by Steven- 
 son was read, concluding with the Lord's 
 Prayer in Samoan. 
 
 If the master had cause to be displeased 
 with any one of them, they were all sum- 
 moned and reprimanded or fined. 
 
 His stories delighted them. They were 
 never tired of looking at the picture of 
 Skerryvore Light and hearing about the 
 rugged coasts of Tusitala's native island and 
 of his father and grandfather who built 
 lighthouses. The latter impressed them 
 greatly, since building of any kind in Samoa 
 is considered a fine art. The deeds of Gen- 
 eral Gordon, the Indian Mutiny, and Luck- 
 now were likewise favorite tales when 
 Tusitala showed them a treasure he prized 
 157 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 highly: a message written by General Gor- 
 don from Khartoum. It was in Arabic on a 
 small piece of cigarette-paper which might 
 be easily swallowed should the messenger 
 be captured. Stevenson always believed it 
 to be the last message sent before the great 
 general's death. 
 
 They came to him for everything and he 
 was ever ready with help and advice. They 
 were quick to appreciate his justice and 
 kindliness, and to a man were devoted to 
 him. "Once Tusitala's friend, always Tusi- 
 tala's friend," they said. 
 
 With his customary energy he threw him- 
 self heart and soul for a time into the political 
 troubles of the island, making himself the 
 champion of the natives' cause. He wrote 
 a series of letters to the papers at home 
 stating his idea of the injustice shown the 
 Samoans under their present government. 
 It was a most delicate situation, and at times 
 led to very strained relations between himself 
 and the officials in Apia. 
 
 Those at home wondered why Stevenson 
 158 
 
VAILIMA 
 
 tampered with island politics at all. Why 
 did he not simply leave them to the powers 
 in charge? 
 
 His answer was, he had made Samoa his 
 home, the Samoans were his people, and he 
 could not fail to resent any injustice shown 
 them. 
 
 Lloyd Osbourne says: "He was consulted 
 on every imaginable subject. . . . Gov- 
 ernment chiefs and rebels consulted him 
 with regard to policy; political letters were 
 brought to him to read and criticise. . . . 
 Parties would come to hear the latest news 
 of the proposed disarming of the country, 
 or to arrange a private audience with one of 
 the officials; and poor war-worn chieftains, 
 whose only anxiety was to join the winning 
 side and who wished to consult with Tusi- 
 tala as to which that might be. Mr. Steven- 
 son would sigh sometimes as he saw these 
 stately folks crossing the lawn in single file, 
 their attendants following behind with pres- 
 ents and baskets, but he never failed to meet 
 or hear them." 
 
 159 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 He aided one party of chieftains in prison, 
 and to show their gratitude on regaining 
 their freedom they cleared and dug a splen- 
 did road leading to his house. All the labor 
 and expense they bore themselves, which 
 amounted to no small matter. Ala Loto 
 Alofa, they called it, the Road of the Loving 
 Hearts. 
 
 Warlike outbreaks were not infrequent 
 near Vailima. The woods were often full of 
 scouting parties and the roll of drums could 
 be heard. One day as Stevenson and Mrs. 
 Strong were writing together they were in- 
 terrupted by a war party crossing the lawn. 
 Mrs. Strong asked: "Louis, have we a pistol 
 or gun in the house that will shoot?" and he 
 answered cheerfully without stopping his work: 
 "No, but we have friends on both sides." 
 
 With all their political differences he and 
 the officials retained friendly feeling. He 
 paid calls on them at Apia and attended 
 various town gatherings, while they were 
 often entertained at Vailima. 
 
 Always hospitable, it was a delight to him 
 160 
 
VAILIMA 
 
 now to keep open house. Not only the chief 
 justice, the consuls, the doctor, the mission- 
 aries, and the traders were in the habit of 
 dropping in to Vailima, but from every ship 
 that docked at Apia came some visitor who 
 was anxious to meet Stevenson and his 
 family; from the war-ships came the officers 
 and sailors. 
 
 The bluejackets were always particularly 
 welcome. Mrs. Strong tells of a party who 
 came from H. M. S. Wallaroo on one Thanks- 
 giving Day, when "the kitchen department 
 was in great excitement over that foreign 
 bird the turkey" and all was confusion. 
 "But Louis kept his sailors on all the after- 
 noon. He took them over the house and 
 showed them ... the curiosities from the 
 Islands, the big picture of Skerry vore light- 
 house, ... the treasured bit of Gordon's 
 handwriting from Khartoum, in Arabic let- 
 ters on a cigarette paper, . . . and the li- 
 brary, where the Scotchmen gathered about 
 an old edition of Burns, with a portrait. 
 Louis gave a volume of Underwoods (Steven- 
 161 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 son's poems) with an inscription to Grant, 
 the one who hailed from Edinburgh, and the 
 man carried it carefully wrapped in his 
 handkerchief. They went away waving their 
 hats and keeping step." 
 
 A croquet-ground and tennis-court were 
 laid out, and Vailima was the scene of balls, 
 dinners, and parties of all kinds. No birth- 
 day or holiday, English, American, or Sa- 
 moan, was allowed to pass unnoticed, and 
 the natives were included in these festivities 
 whenever possible. 
 
 The first Christmas at Vailima they had 
 a party for the children who had never before 
 seen a Christmas tree. 
 
 Tusitala's birthday was always a special 
 event to his island friends. The feast was 
 served in native style; all seated about on the 
 floor. Rather large gatherings they must 
 have been, to judge from Mrs. Strong's ac- 
 count. "We had sixteen pigs roasted whole 
 underground, three enormous fish (small 
 whales, Lloyd called them), four hundred 
 pounds of beef, ditto of pork, 200 heads of 
 162 
 
VAILIMA 
 
 taro, great bunches of bananas, native 
 delicacies done up in bundles of //leaves, 800 
 pineapples, many weighing fifteen pounds, 
 all from Lloyd's patch. Among the presents 
 for Tusitala, besides flowers and wreaths, 
 were fans, native baskets . . . and cocoa- 
 nut cups beautifully polished." 
 
 On these occasions the hosts were often 
 entertained with dances and songs. All the 
 Samoans are great singers. They composed 
 songs about everything and everybody, so 
 that one could judge the standing a person 
 held by the songs that were sung about him. 
 
 Those sung at Vailima parties were usually 
 written by one of the house "boys" and 
 "they were danced and acted with great 
 spirit. . . . Sometimes every member of the 
 family would be represented . . . but the 
 central figure, the heart of the song was al- 
 ways Tusitala." 
 
 It is a marvel with the many demands 
 made upon him, his varied interests, and fre- 
 quent visits to neighboring islands, Steven- 
 son still found time to write stories, poems, 
 163 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 prayers, notes of the South Sea Islands, 
 Samoan history, and many, many letters. 
 " It is a life that suits me but absorbs me like 
 an ocean," he said. Through it all his health 
 continued fairly good. He was able to take 
 long tramps and rides that would have been 
 physically impossible two years before. 
 
 Mrs. Strong acted as his secretary and the 
 majority of his writing now was done by dic- 
 tation. "He generally makes notes early in 
 the morning," she wrote, "which he elabo- 
 rates as he reads them aloud ... he never 
 falters for a word, but gives me the sentence 
 with capital letters and all the stops as 
 clearly and steadily as though he were reading 
 from an unseen book." 
 
 The two South Sea books occupied much 
 of his time, but it was of his own land and 
 people so far away that he had so little 
 hope of ever seeing again, he loved best to 
 write. 
 
 " It is a singular thing," he wrote to James 
 Barrie, "that I should live here in the South 
 Seas, and yet my imagination so continually 
 164 
 
VAILIMA 
 
 inhabit the cold old huddle of grey hills from 
 which we came." 
 
 He finished and sent away further adven- 
 tures of David Balfour and Alan Breck 
 under the title of "David Balfour." "St. 
 Ives" followed with its scenes laid around 
 Edinburgh Castle, Swanston Cottage, and 
 the Pentland Hills. In his last book, "Weir 
 of Hermiston," the one he left unfinished, 
 broken off in the midst of a word, he roamed 
 the streets of Auld Reekie again with a hero 
 very like what he had once been himself, who 
 was likewise an enthusiastic member of the 
 "Spec." 
 
 Something which pleased him greatly at 
 this time was the news from his friend 
 Charles Baxter in Edinburgh that a com- 
 plete edition of his works was to be pub- 
 lished in the best possible form with a limited 
 number of copies, to be called the "Edin- 
 burgh Edition." 
 
 " I suppose it was your idea to give it that 
 name," Stevenson wrote, thanking him. "No 
 other would have affected me in the same 
 165 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 manner. . . . Could a more presumptuous 
 idea have occurred to us in those days when 
 we used to search our pockets for coppers, 
 too often in vain, and combine forces to pro- 
 duce the threepence necessary for two glasses 
 of beer, than that I should be strong and well 
 at the age of forty three in the island of 
 Upolu, and that you should be at home 
 bringing out the 'Edinburgh Edition'?" 
 
 In spite of the many interests in his pres- 
 ent life, his love for the people and the coun- 
 try, the yearning for the friends far away 
 grew daily. 
 
 How he longed to have them see Vailima 
 with all its beauties 1 To talk over old times 
 again. Such visits were continually planned, 
 but they were never realized. 
 
 He seldom complained and those who were 
 with him every day rarely found him low in 
 spirits. It was into the letters to his old 
 intimates that these longings crept when it 
 swept over him that, though a voluntary exile 
 in a pleasant place, he was an exile none the 
 less, with the fate of him who wrote: 
 166 
 
VAILIMA 
 
 "There's a track across the deep, 
 And a path across the sea, 
 But for me there's nae return 
 To my ain countree." 
 
 "When the smell of the good wet earth" 
 came to him it came "with a kind of High- 
 land tone." A tropic shower found him in a 
 "frame of mind and body that belonged to 
 Scotland." And when he turned to write 
 the chronicle of his grandfather's life and 
 work, the beautiful words in which he de- 
 scribed the old gentleman's farewell to 
 "Sumbraugh and the wild crags of Skye" 
 meant likewise his own farewell to those 
 shores. No more was he to "see the topaz 
 and ruby interchange on the summit of Bell 
 Rock," no more to see "the castle on its 
 hills," or the venerable city which he always 
 thought of as his home. 
 
 "Like Leyden," he wrote, "I have gone 
 into a far land to die, not stayed like Burns 
 to mingle in the end with Scottish soil." 
 
 It was drawing near the close of their 
 fourth year in Apia. On November 13 his 
 167 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 birthday had been celebrated with the 
 usual festivities, and on Thanksgiving Day 
 he had given a dinner to his American friends 
 — and then the end of all his wanderings and 
 working came suddenly. 
 
 "He wrote hard all that morning of the 
 last day," says Lloyd Osbourne, "on his half- 
 finished book Hermiston. ... In the after- 
 noon the mail fell to be answered; not busi- 
 ness correspondence — but replies to the 
 long, kindly letters of distant friends, re- 
 ceived but two days since, and still bright in 
 memory. 
 
 "At sunset he came downstairs. ... He 
 was helping his wife on the verandah, and 
 gaily talking, when suddenly he put both 
 hands to his head, and cried out, 'What's 
 that?' Then he asked quickly, 'Do I look 
 strange?' Even as he did so he fell on his 
 knees beside her. He was helped into the 
 great hall, between his wife and body-servant, 
 Sosimo, losing consciousness instantly, as he 
 lay back in the arm-chair that had once been 
 his grandfather's. Little time was lost in 
 168 
 
VAILIMA 
 
 bringing the doctors, Anderson of the man- 
 of-war, and his friend Dr. Funk. They 
 looked at him and shook their heads . . , 
 he had passed the bounds of human skill. . . . 
 
 "The dozen and more Samoans that formed 
 part of the clan of which he was chief, sat in 
 a wide semicircle on the floor, their reverent, 
 troubled, sorrow-stricken faces all fixed upon 
 their dying master. Some knelt on one knee 
 to be instantly ready for any command that 
 might be laid upon them. . . . 
 
 "He died at ten minutes past eight on 
 Monday evening the 3rd of December, in 
 the forty-fifth year of his age. 
 
 "The great Union Jack that flew over the 
 house was hauled down and laid over the 
 body, fit shroud for a loyal Scotsman. He 
 lay in the hall which was ever his pride, 
 where he had passed the gayest and most 
 delightful hours of his life. ... In it were 
 the treasures of his far off Scottish home. . . . 
 The Samoans passed in procession beside his 
 bed, kneeling and kissing his hand, each in 
 turn, before taking their places for the long 
 169 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 night watch beside him. No entreaty could 
 induce them to retire, to rest themselves for 
 the painful arduous duties of the morrow. 
 It would show little love for Tusitala, they 
 said, if they did not spend their last night 
 beside him. Mournful and silent, they sat 
 in deep dejection, poor, simple, loyal folks, 
 fulfilling the duty that they owed their 
 chief. 
 
 "A messenger was dispatched to a few 
 chiefs connected with the family, to announce 
 the tidings and bid them assemble their men 
 on the morrow for the work there was to 
 do. . , . 
 
 "The morning of the 4th of December 
 broke cool and sunny. ... A meeting of 
 chiefs was held to apportion the work and 
 divide the men into parties. Forty were 
 sent with knives and axes to cut a path up 
 the steep face of the mountain, and the 
 writer himself led another party to the sum- 
 mit — men chosen from the immediate fam- 
 ily — to dig the grave on the spot where it 
 was Robert Louis Stevenson's wish that he 
 170 
 
VAILIMA 
 
 should lie. . . . Nothing more picturesque 
 can be imagined than the ledge that forms 
 the summit to Vaea, a place no wider than a 
 room, and flat as a table. On either side 
 the land descends precipitously; in front lies 
 the vast ocean and surf -swept reefs; to the 
 right and left green mountains rise. . . . 
 
 "All the morning Samoans were arriving 
 with flowers, few of these were white, for 
 they have not learned our foreign custom, 
 and the room glowed with the many colors. 
 There were no strangers on that day, no ac- 
 quaintances; those only were called who 
 would deeply feel the loss. At one o'clock a 
 body of powerful Samoans bore away the 
 coffin, hid beneath a tattered red ensign that 
 had flown above his vessel in many a remote 
 corner of the South Seas. A path so steep 
 and rugged taxed their strength to the ut- 
 most, for not only was the journey difficult 
 in itself, but extreme care was requisite to 
 carry the coffin shoulder high. . . . 
 
 "No stranger hand touched him. . . . 
 Those who loved him carried him to his last 
 171 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 home; even the coffin was the work of an 
 old friend. The grave was dug by his own 
 men." 
 
 Tusitala had left them, and his friends in 
 the South Seas had lost a faithful friend and 
 companion, a wise and just master. 
 
 His family and friends the world over had 
 lost not only these but far more. His life 
 had been a chivalrous one with all the best 
 that chivalry stands for, "loyalty, honesty, 
 generosity, courage, courtesy, and self-de- 
 votion; to impute no unworthy motives and 
 to bear no grudges; to bear misfortune with 
 cheerfulness and without a murmur; to 
 strike hard for the right and to take no mean 
 advantage; to be gentle to women and kind 
 to all that are weak; to be rigorous with one- 
 self and very lenient to others — these . . . 
 were the traits that distinguished Steven- 
 son." 
 
 "They do not make life easy as he fre- 
 quently found." 
 
 His resting-place on the crest of Vaea 
 Mountain is covered by a tomb of gray 
 172 
 
VAILIMA 
 
 stone. On one side is inscribed in English 
 the verses he had written for his own re- 
 quiem: 
 
 A ROBERT LOUIS Q 
 
 1850 STEVENSON 1894 
 
 "Under the wide and starry sky, 
 Dig the grave and let me lie. 
 Glad did I live and gladly die. 
 And I laid me down with a will. 
 
 "This be the verse you grave for me: 
 Here he lies where he longed to be; 
 Home is the sailor, home from the sea. 
 And the hunter home from the hill." 
 
 On the other side, written in Samoan and 
 surrounded by carvings of thistles, his native 
 flowers, and the hibiscus flowers, emblem of 
 the South, are the words from the Bible: 
 
 "Whither thou goest I will go, and where thou 
 lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people; 
 and thy God my God; where thou diest will I die, 
 and there will I be buried." 
 
 The Samoan chiefs have forbidden the use 
 of firearms upon Vaea hillside, "that the 
 173 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 birds may live there undisturbed, and raise 
 above iiis grave tiie songs he loved so well." 
 
 "Tusitala, the lover of children, the teller of tales, 
 Giver of counsels and dreams, a wonder, a world's 
 
 delight, 
 Looks o'er the labours of men in the plain and the 
 
 hills; and the sails 
 
 Pass and repass on the sea that he loved, in the day 
 
 and the night." 
 
 — Andrew Lang. 
 
 174 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Some Works in relation to Stevenson's 
 LIFE, Written by Himself and Others 
 
 GENERAL BIOGRAPHY 
 
 Balfour, Graham: "Life of Robert Louis Stevenson." 
 Two vols. 
 
 Colvin, Sidney, ed. : "Letters of Robert Louis Steven- 
 son," with biographical notes and an introduction 
 by the editor. 
 
 Simpson, E. Blantyre: "The Robert Louis Steven- 
 son Originals." 
 
 Strong, Mrs. Isobel: "Robert Louis Stevenson." 
 
 Watts, Lauchlan Maclean: "Hills of Home" — with 
 Pentland Essays by R. L. Stevenson. 
 
 Watts: " Robert Louis Stevenson." 
 
 ANCESTORS 
 
 Stevenson, R. L.: "A Family of Engineers." 
 
 "Thomas Stevenson" — in "Memories and Por- 
 traits." 
 
 Stevenson: "Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh" — in 
 "Essays of Travel and in the Art of Writing." 
 
 Talbot, P. A.: "Lig'Rtships and Lighthouses." Chap- 
 ters relating to the building of Bell Rock and Skerry- 
 vore. 
 
 Poems by Stevenson: "To My Father." " Skerry vore." 
 
 175 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOL-DAYS 
 
 Stevenson, R. L.: "The Manse" — in "Memories and 
 
 Portraits." 
 "Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured" — in 
 
 "Memories and Portraits." 
 
 "Child's Play" — in "Virginibus Puerisque." 
 
 "The Lantern Bearers" — in "Across the Plains." 
 
 "Child's Garden of Verses." 
 
 THE STUDENT AND WANDERER 
 
 Simpson, E. Blantyre: "Robert Louis Stevenson's 
 Edinburgh Days." 
 
 Stevenson, R. L.: "An Apology for Idlers" — in "Vir- 
 ginibus Puerisque." 
 
 "Crabbed Age and Youth" — in "Virginibus 
 
 Puerisque." 
 
 "Walking Tours" — in "Virginibus Puerisque." 
 
 "Some College Memories" — in "Memories and 
 
 Portraits." 
 
 "Old Mortality" — in "Memories and Portraits." 
 
 "A College Magazine" — in "Memories and Por- 
 traits." 
 
 "Pastoral" — in "Memories and Portraits." 
 
 "An Old Scotch Gardener" — in "Memories and 
 
 Portraits." 
 
 "Books Which Have Influenced Me" — in "Later 
 
 Essays." 
 
 "Memories of an Islet" — in "Memories and Por- 
 traits." 
 
 "Random Memories" — in "Across the Plains." 
 
 "Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin." 
 
 176 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 "An Inland Voyage." 
 
 "Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes." 
 
 Low, Will H.: "A Chronicle of Friendships." Chap- 
 ters dealing with Stevenson's days in the artists' 
 colonies of Fontainebleau and Paris. 
 
 Poems by Stevenson: "The Vagabond." 
 
 "The Song of the Road." 
 
 "Bright is the Ring of Words." 
 
 "Youth and Love," II. 
 
 "The Canoe Speaks." 
 
 "A Camp." 
 
 "The Country of the Camisards." 
 
 "Our Lady of the Snows." 
 
 "To a Gardener." 
 
 "To Will H. Low." 
 
 "To Andrew Lang." 
 
 FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA 
 
 Shipman, L. E.: "First Landing in New York" — in 
 
 Book Buyer, vol. 13, p. 13. 
 Stevenson, R. L.: "The Amateur Emigrant." 
 
 "Across the Plains." 
 
 "The Old Pacific Capital (Monterey)" — in 
 
 "Across the Plains." 
 "The Silverado Squatters." 
 
 SCOTLAND AGAIN 
 
 Gosse, Edmund: "Personal Memories of Stevenson" 
 
 — in Century, vol. 28, p. 447. 
 Osbourne, Lloyd: "Stevenson at Play" — in Scribner's 
 
 Magazine, vol. 24, p. 709. 
 
 177 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Stevenson, Mrs. R. L. : Preface to Biographical edition 
 
 of "Treasure Island." 
 Stevenson, R. L.: "My First Book, 'Treasure Island'" 
 — in McClure's Magazine, vol. 3, p. 283. 
 
 "Chapter on Dreams" — in "Across the Plains." 
 
 Stevenson, Mrs. R. L.: Preface to the Biographical 
 
 edition of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." 
 Poems by Stevenson: "Skerryvore, the Parallel." 
 
 "Bells upon the City are Ring- 
 ing in the Night." 
 "I Know Not How It Is With 
 
 You." 
 "Ticonderoga — a Legend of the 
 
 West Highlands." 
 "Heather Ale — a Galloway 
 Legend." 
 
 SECOND VISIT TO AMERICA 
 
 Low, Will H.: "Chronicle of Friendships." Chapters 
 relating to Stevenson's second visit to New York 
 and his meeting with General Sherman and the 
 sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. 
 
 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus: "Reminiscences of Saint- 
 Gaudens." Chapters dealing with Mr. Saint- 
 Gaudens's recollections of Stevenson at the time he 
 made his portrait. 
 
 Stevenson, Mrs. Margaret: "Letters — From Saranac 
 to the Marquesas and Beyond." 
 
 Poems by Stevenson: "In the States." 
 "Winter." 
 
 178 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 IN THE SOUTH SEAS 
 
 Stevenson, Mrs. Margaret: "Letters — From Saranac 
 
 to the Marquesas and Beyond." 
 Stevenson, R. L.: "In the South Seas." 
 Stevenson, Mrs. R. L.: "Cruise of the Janet Nichol 
 
 Among the South Sea Islands — a Diary." 
 Stevenson, R. L.: " Beach of Falesa," " Isle of Voices," 
 "Bottle Imp" — in " Island Nights' Entertainments." 
 
 "The Wrecker." 
 
 "The Ebb Tide." 
 
 Letters Dealing with Pacific Voyages and Life 
 
 in Samoa — in his collected letters edited by Sid- 
 ney Colvin. 
 Stevenson, Mrs. Margaret: "Letters from Samoa." 
 Stevenson, R. L.: "A Foot-Note to History. Eight 
 
 Years of Trouble in Samoa." 
 Strong, Mrs. Isobel, and Osbourne, Lloyd: "Memories 
 
 of Vailima." 
 Stevenson, R. L.: "Prayers Written at Vailima." 
 Poems by Stevenson: "The Song of Rahero — a Legend 
 of Tahiti." 
 "The Feast of Famine — Mar- 
 
 quesan Manners." 
 "To an Island Princess." 
 "To Kalakaua." 
 "To Princess Kaiulani." 
 "The House of Tembinoka." 
 "The Woodman." 
 "Tropic Rain." 
 "To My Wife." 
 "To My Wife" (a fragment). 
 179 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Poems of Farewell: "The Morning Drum-Call on My 
 
 Eager Ear." 
 "In the Highlands, in the Country 
 
 Places." 
 "To My Old Familiars." 
 "The Tropics Vanish." 
 "To S. C." 
 "To S. R. Crockett." 
 " Evensong." 
 "We Uncommiserate Pass into the 
 
 Night." 
 "I Have Trod the Upward and 
 
 Downward Slope." 
 "An End of Travel." 
 "The Celestial Surgeon." 
 "Home No More Home to Me, 
 
 Whither Must I Wander?" 
 "Farewell, Fair Day and Fading 
 
 Light." 
 " Requiem." 
 Lang, Andrew: "Tusitala" — in "Later Collected 
 Verses." 
 
 180 
 
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