innocent of lustre, and wear the natural hue of the material turned

up with caked and venerable slush. The youngest child of his
landlady remarks several times a day, as this strange occupant

enters or quits the house, 'Dere's de author.' Can it be that this
bright-haired innocent has found the true clue to the mystery? The

being in question is, at least, poor enough to belong to that
honourable craft."

Here are a few letters belonging to the winter of 1887-88, nearly
all written from Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks, celebrated by

Emerson, and now a most popular holidayresort in the United
States, and were originally published in SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE. . .

"It should be said that, after his long spell of weakness at
Bournemouth, Stevenson had gone West in search of health among the

bleak hill summits - 'on the Canadian border of New York State,
very unsettled and primitive and cold.' He had made the voyage in

an ocean tramp, the LUDGATE HILL, the sort of craft which any
person not a born child of the sea would shun in horror.

Stevenson, however, had 'the finest time conceivable on board the
"strange floating menagerie."'" Thus he describes it in a letter

to Mr Henry James:
"Stallions and monkeys and matches made our cargo; and the vast

continent of these incongruities rolled the while like a haystack;
and the stallions stood hypnotised by the motion, looking through

the port at our dinner-table, and winked when the crockery was
broken; and the little monkeys stared at each other in their cages,

and were thrown overboard like little bluish babies; and the big
monkey, Jacko, scoured about the ship and rested willingly in my

arms, to the ruin of my clothing; and the man of the stallions made
a bower of the black tarpaulin, and sat therein at the feet of a

raddled divinity, like a picture on a box of chocolates; and the
other passengers, when they were not sick, looked on and laughed.

Take all this picture, and make it roll till the bell shall sound
unexpected notes and the fittings shall break loose in our

stateroom, and you have the voyage of the LUDGATE HILL. She
arrived in the port of New York without beer, porter, soda-water,

curacoa, fresh meat, or fresh water; and yet we lived, and we
regret her."

He discovered this that there is no joy in the Universe comparable
to life on a villainous ocean tramp, rolling through a horrible sea

in company with a cargo of cattle.
"I have got one good thing of my sea voyage; it is proved the sea

agrees heartily with me, and my mother likes it; so if I get any
better, or no worse, my mother will likely hire a yacht for a month

or so in the summer. Good Lord! what fun! Wealth is only useful
for two things: a yacht and a string quartette. For these two I

will sell my soul. Except for these I hold that 700 pounds a year
is as much as anybody can possibly want; and I have had more, so I

know, for the extra coins were of no use, excepting for illness,
which damns everything. I was so happy on board that ship, I could

not have believed it possible; we had the beastliest weather, and
many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp ship gave

us many comforts. We could cut about with the men and officers,
stay in the wheel-house, discuss all manner of things, and really

be a little at sea. And truly there is nothing else. I had
literally forgotten what happiness was, and the full mind - full of

external and physical things, not full of cares and labours, and
rot about a fellow's behaviour. My heart literally sang; I truly

care for nothing so much as for that.
"To go ashore for your letters and hang about the pier among the

holiday yachtsmen - that's fame, that's glory - and nobody can take
it away."

At Saranac Lake the Stevensons lived in a "wind-beleaguered hill-
top hat-box of a house," which suited the invalid, but, on the

other hand, invalided his wife. Soon after getting there he
plunged into THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE.

"No thought have I now apart from it, and I have got along up to
page ninety-two of the draught with great interest. It is to me a

most seizing tale: there are some fantastic elements, the most is
a dead genuine human problem - human tragedy, I should say rather.

It will be about as long, I imagine, as KIDNAPPED. . . . I have
done most of the big work, the quarrel, duel between the brothers,

and the announcement of the death to Clementina and my Lord -
Clementina, Henry, and Mackellar (nicknamed Squaretoes) are really

very fine fellows; the Master is all I know of the devil; I have
known hints of him, in the world, but always cowards: he is as

bold as a lion, but with the same deadly, causeless duplicity I
have watched with so much surprise in my two cowards. 'Tis true, I

saw a hint of the same nature in another man who was not a coward;
but he had other things to attend to; the Master has nothing else

but his devilry."
His wife grows seriously ill, and Stevenson has to turn to

household work.
"Lloyd and I get breakfast; I have now, 10.15, just got the dishes

washed and the kitchen all clean, and sit down to give you as much
news as I have spirit for, after such an engagement. Glass is a

thing that really breaks my spirit; and I do not like to fail, and
with glass I cannot reach the work of my high calling - the

artist's."
In the midst of such domestic tasks and entanglements he writes THE

MASTER, and very characteristically gets dissatisfied with the last
parts, "which shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning."

Of Mr Kipling this is his judgment - in the year 1890:
"Kipling is by far the most promising young man who has appeared

since - ahem - I appeared. He amazes me by his precocity and
various endowments. But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste.

He should shield his fire with both hands, 'and draw up all his
strength and sweetness in one ball.' ('Draw all his strength and

all his sweetness up into one ball'? I cannot remember Marvell's
words.) So the critics have been saying to me; but I was never

capable of - and surely never guilty of - such a debauch of
production. At this rate his works will soon fill the habitable

globe, and surely he was armed for better conflicts than these
succinct sketches and flying leaves of verse? I look on, I admire,

I rejoice for myself; but in a kind of ambition we all have for our
tongue and literature I am wounded. If I had this man's fertility

and courage, it seems to me I could heave a pyramid.
"Well, we begin to be the old fogies now, and it was high time

SOMETHING rose to take our places. Certainly Kipling has the
gifts; the fairy godmothers were all tipsy at his christening.

What will he do with them?"
Of the rest of Stevenson's career we cannot speak at length, nor is

it needful. How in steady succession came his triumphs: came,
too, his trials from ill-health - how he spent winters at Davos

Platz, Bournemouth, and tried other places in America; and how, at
last, good fortune led him to the South Pacific. After many

voyagings and wanderings among the islands, he settled near Apia,
in Samoa, early in 1890, cleared some four hundred acres, and built

a house; where, while he wrote what delighted the English-speaking
race, he took on himself the defence of the natives against foreign

interlopers, writing under the title A FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY, the
most powerful EXPOSE of the mischief they had done and were doing

there. He was the beloved of the natives, as he made himself the
friend of all with whom he came in contact. There, as at home, he

worked - worked with the same determination and in the enjoyment of
better health. The obtaining idea with him, up to the end, as it

had been from early life, was a brave, resolute, cheerful endeavour
to make the best of it.

"I chose Samoa instead of Honolulu," he told Mr W. H. Trigg, who
reports the talk in CASSELLS' MAGAZINE, "for the simple and

eminently satisfactory reason that it is less civilised. Can you
not conceive that it is awful fun?" His house was called

"Vailima," which means Five Waters in the Samoan, and indicates the