and although his first connection with the pupil was due to truancy, the professor loved Stevenson best of all his friends. Stevenson, on the other hand, writing a memoir of Jenkin, found it a great pleasure, when digging into the past of his friend, "to find him at every spadeful shine brighter." His own sunny disposition and pervading charm gained for him other notable and lasting friendships, including, among men of letters, Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, the poet W. E. Henley, and closest of all, Sidney Colvin, professor at Oxford.

Early Writings. Stevenson's first published work, a magazine article on Roads, attracted no attention. Various essays and short stories in magazines, including some of his very best, appeared from 1877 to 1883 without marked success. His first story, A Lodging for the Night, ranked, not only by critics but by short-story writers as one of the finest specimens in all literature, did not bring him before the public as the greatest successor of Poe and Hawthorne. Not even when the essays and stories were gathered into dignified volumes did the public realize that a real genius had appeared.

First Successes. His popularity began with Treasure Island, published in 1883, and still enjoying, a full generation later, great favor among young and old alike. One can scarcely think of its ever losing its hold. It is a pirate story, a blood-and-thunder story, but one "with a difference" from all other pirate stories. Of its two most surely immortal 'characters, Pew and Long John Silver, Professor Phelps well says that it was no "trifling feat to make a blind man and a one-legged man so formidable that even the reader is afraid of them." Three years after Treasure Island the work appeared which established Stevenson's position and brought him an income commensurate with his merit. This work was Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a setting forth in

story form of the dual nature in man

one struggling upward

toward good, the other downward to evil.

Wanderings, and Marriage. We must turn back some years to resume the thread of his life aside from his writings. From 1873 to 1891 Stevenson made a succession of moves in search of health, living in southern France, Switzerland, Bournemouth (south coast of England), California, the Adirondacks. On one of the visits to France he met and fell in love with an American lady, Mrs. Osbourne, whom he married in 1880 at her home in San Francisco.

"The Amateur Emigrant." - When he decided to go to California, his finances were low, and he made the trip as an emigrant. His experiences are recorded in two delightful volumes The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains. The first is perhaps more entertaining, with its humorous yet sympathetic portraits of steerage types, and its account of steerage life. Stevenson made himself thoroughly at home in the motley crowd; enjoyed himself and added to their enjoyment; and made some shrewd observations on life.

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He rightly called himself an amateur emigrant; for he was not born to such associations as the journey furnished. The uniform failure of his fellow-passengers to recognize him as a gentleman (from an Englishman's point of view) was notable. One took him to be a mason, another a seaman, another a practical engineer, and so on. From all these guesses," says Stevenson,

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"I drew one conclusion, which told against the insight of my companions. They might be close observers in their own way, and read the manners in the face; but it was plain that they did not extend their observation to the hands."

Home in Samoa.

The union of Stevenson and Mrs. Osbourne appears, from testimony of many kinds, to have

been one of those ideal unions which all too seldom bless men of genius. In 1891, after sailing the Pacific in a yacht for three years, the Stevensons settled at Apia, Samoa. Here he built a home, and here he lived to the full the three years left to him. Besides writing much he interested himself in the

natives and in the bad government provided for them by their European masters; and became, with the title of "Tusitala," general counsellor to all classes of people on all sorts of subjects. Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson's stepson and literary partner, says:

"Government chiefs and rebels consulted him with regard to policy; political letters were brought to him to read and

criticise; his native following was so widely divided in party that he was often kept better informed on current events than any person in the country. An armed party would come from across the island with gifts, and a request that Tusitala would take charge of the funds of the village and buy the roof-iron of a proposed church. 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 Tusitala as to which that might be. Mr. Stevenson would sigh sometimes as he saw these stately folk crossing the lawn in single file, their attendants following behind with presents and baskets, but he never failed to meet or hear them."

Death and Epitaph. At the end of a hard day's writing in December, 1894, Stevenson was taken suddenly ill, lost consciousness immediately, and passed away in two hours. Natives cut a path up the steep side of Mount Vaea, and bore his body to a spot on its summit which he had chosen for his final resting-place. On one side of his tomb is his own Requiem:

"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 sea,

And the hunter home from the hill."

Stevenson wrote poems, plays, long romances, romantic short stories, travel sketches, essays on various subjects, and a great number of letters which make almost, if not quite, as good reading as anything else he wrote. His plays were not successful on the stage, and may be entirely disregarded in an estimate of his work. If his achievement in essay and romance were not so high, his three volumes of poetry might

claim some attention; but under the circumstances, only a few poems in his Child's Garden of Verse seem likely to live.

Stevenson the Romancer. It is in the field of romance that Stevenson's achievement has long been recognized, a field for which he had an inborn liking, and in which he produced several unquestioned masterpieces. When realism had been long dominant in prose narrative, when "the novel of society" had come to be synonymous with the novel, Stevenson set out to write the romance of man."

STEVENSON.

cause in a good romance

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His Creed as Romancer. In A Gossip on Romance, he deliberately takes issue with the public who have come to look somewhat down on incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever," said he, "to write a novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one." He argues the superiority of romance because tion is to the grown man what play is to the child; " and be

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"fic

the game so chimes with the grown man's fancy that he can join in it with his whole heart, and it pleases him with every turn, and he loves to recall it and dwell upon its recollection with entire delight."