answer -. Perish the thought of it.
"'Here am I on the threshold of another year, when, according to

all human foresight, I should long ago have been resolved into my
elements: here am I, who you were persuaded was born to disgrace

you - and, I will do you the justice to add, on no such
insufficient grounds - no very burning discredit when all is done;

here am I married, and the marriage recognised to be a blessing of
the first order. A1 at Lloyd's. There is he, at his not first

youth, able to take more exercise than I at thirty-three, and
gaining a stone's weight, a thing of which I am incapable. There

are you; has the man no gratitude? . . .
"'Even the Shorter Catechism, not the merriest epitome of religion,

and a work exactly as pious although not quite so true as the
multiplication table - even that dry-as-dust epitome begins with a

heroic note. What is man's chief end? Let him study that; and ask
himself if to refuse to enjoy God's kindest gifts is in the spirit

indicated.'
"As may be judged from this half-playful, half-serious

remonstrance, Stevenson's relation to his parents was eminently
human and beautiful. The family dissensions above alluded to

belonged only to a short but painful period, when the father could
not reconcile himself to the discovery that the son had ceased to

accept the formulas of Scottish Calvinism. In the eyes of the
older man such heterodoxy was for the moment indistinguishable from

atheism; but he soon arrived at a better understanding of his son's
position. Nothing appears more unmistakably in these letters than

the ingrained theism of Stevenson's way of thought. The poet, the
romancer within him, revolted from the conception of formless

force. A personal deity was a necessary character in the drama, as
he conceived it. And his morality, though (or inasmuch as) it

dwelt more on positive kindness than on negative lawlessness, was,
as he often insisted, very much akin to the morality of the New

Testament."
Anyway it is clear that much in the interminglings of blood we CAN

trace, may go to account for not a little in Stevenson. His
peculiar interest in the enormities of old-time feuds, the

excesses, the jealousies, the queer psychological puzzles, the
desire to work on the outlying and morbid, and even the unallowed

and unhallowed, for purposes of romance - the delight in dealing
with revelations of primitive feeling and the out-bursts of the

mere natural man always strangely checked and diverted by the
uprise of other tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable, vague, weird

and horrible. There was the undoubted Celtic element in him
underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of

conventionality in one phase, and the falling under it in another -
the reaction and the retreat from what had attracted and interested

him, and then the return upon it, as with added zest because of the
retreat. The confessed Hedonist, enjoying life and boasting of it

just a little, and yet the Puritan in him, as it were, all the time
eyeing himself as from some loophole of retreat, and then

commenting on his own behaviour as a Hedonist and Bohemian. This
clearly was not what most struck Beerbohm Tree, during the time he

was in close contact with Stevenson, while arranging the production
of BEAU AUSTIN at the Haymarket Theatre, for he sees, or confesses

to seeing, only one side, and that the most assertive, and in a
sense, unreal one:

"Stevenson," says Mr Tree, "always seemed to me an epicure in life.
He was always intent on extracting the last drop of honey from

every flower that came in his way. He was absorbed in the business
of the moment, however trivial. As a companion, he was

delightfully witty; as a personality, as much a creature of romance
as his own creations."

This is simple, and it looks sincere; but it does not touch 'tother
side, or hint at, not to say, solve the problem of Stevenson's

personality. Had he been the mere Hedonist he could never have
done the work he did. Mr Beerbohm Tree certainly did not there see

far or all round.
Miss Simpson says:

"Mr Henley recalls him to Edinburgh folk as he was and as the true
Stevenson would have wished to be known - a queer, inexplicable

creature, his Celtic blood showing like a vein of unknown metal in
the stolid, steady rock of his sure-founded Stevensonian pedigree.

His cousin and model, 'Bob' Stevenson, the art critic, showed that
this foreign element came from the men who lit our guiding lights

for seamen, not from the gentle-blooded Balfours.
"Mr Henley is right in saying that the gifted boy had not much

humour. When the joke was against himself he was very thin-skinned
and had a want of balance. This made him feel his honest father's

sensible remarks like the sting of a whip."
Miss Simpson then proceeds to say:

"The R. L. Stevenson of old Edinburgh days was a conceited,
egotistical youth, but a true and honest one: a youth full of fire

and sentiment, protesting he was misunderstood, though he was not.
Posing as 'Velvet Coat' among the slums, he did no good to himself.

He had not the Dickens aptitude for depicting the ways of life of
his adopted friends. When with refined judgment he wanted a figure

for a novel, he went back to the Bar he scorned in his callow days
and then drew in WEIR OF HERMISTON."

CHAPTER V - TRAVELS
HIS interest in engineering soon went - his mind full of stories

and fancies and human nature. As he had told his mother: he did
not care about finding what was "the strain on a bridge," he wanted

to know something of human beings.
No doubt, much to the disappointment and grief of his father, who

wished him as an only son to carry on the traditions of the family,
though he had written two engineering essays of utmost promise, the

engineering was given up, and he consented to study law. He had
already contributed to College Magazines, and had had even a short

spell of editing one; of one of these he has given a racy account.
Very soon after his call to the Bar articles and essays from his

pen began to appear in MACMILLAN'S, and later, more regularly in
the CORNHILL. Careful readers soon began to note here the presence

of a new force. He had gone on the INLAND VOYAGE and an account of
it was in hand; and had done that tour in the Cevennes which he has

described under the title TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CEVENNES,
with Modestine, sometimes doubting which was the donkey, but on

that tour a chill caught either developed a germ of lung disease
already present, or produced it; and the results unfortunately

remained.
He never practised at the Bar, though he tells facetiously of his

one brief. He had chosen his own vocation, which was literature,
and the years which followed were, despite the delicacy which

showed itself, very busy years. He produced volume on volume. He
had written many stories which had never seen the light, but, as he

says, passed through the ordeal of the fire by more or less
circuitous ways.

By this time some trouble and cause for anxiety had arisen about
the lungs, and trials of various places had been made. ORDERED

SOUTH suggests the Mediterranean, sunny Italy, the Riviera. Then a
sea-trip to America was recommended and undertaken. Unfortunately,

he got worse there, his original cause of trouble was complicated
with others, and the medicaltreatment given was stupid, and

exaggerated some of the symptoms instead of removing them, All
along - up, at all events, to the time of his settlement in Samoa -

Stevenson was more or less of an invalid.
Indeed, were I ever to write an essay on the art of wisely "laying-

to," as the sailors say, I would point it by a reference to R. L.
Stevenson. For there is a wise way of "laying-to" that does not

imply inaction, but discreet, well-directed effort, against
contrary winds and rough seas, that is, amid obstacles and

drawbacks, and even ill-health, where passive and active may
balance and give effect to each other. Stevenson was by native

instinct and temperament a rover - a lover of adventure, of strange
by-ways, errant tracts (as seen in his INLAND VOYAGE and TRAVELS