SELECTIONS FROM 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 CANBY AND PIERCE 
 

 CORNELL.- 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 BEQUEST 
 
 OF 
 
 STEWART HENRY BURNHAM 
 1943 
 
Date Due 
 
 -jsn^ 
 
 N9VJ^r«^T 
 
 or 
 
 \ 
 
 ...... Cofnell University Library 
 
 PR 5482.C21 
 
 Selections. 
 
 3 1924 013 553 577 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013553577 
 
SELECTIONS FROM 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
SELECTIONS FROM 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 HENRY SEIDEL CANBY 
 
 AND 
 
 FREDERICK ERASTUS PIERCE 
 
 Assistant Professors of English in Yale University 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 NEW TOKK CHICAGO BOSTON 
 
05 , i-^ 9^ 
 
 COP«UCBT, 1911, BT 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 Published April, 1911 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 L^ Introdxtction: p^oj, 
 
 I. UFE OF STEVENSON vil 
 
 n. OUTLINE OF THE MAIN EVENTS IN STEVEN- 
 
 son's UFE . . , . xiii 
 
 ra. LIST OF Stevenson's publications , . . xiv 
 
 IV. BIBUOGEAPHT XV 
 
 V. STEVENSON THE WUITKB . > • . . . . Xvi 
 
 Letters I 
 
 The Amateur Emigrant 47 
 
 Essays: 
 
 c an apologt for idlers 133 ~ 
 
 c aes triplex 145 4- 
 
 el dorado 156 
 
 c^-truth of intercou^e 160-^ 
 
 talk and talkers 170 
 
 BEGGARS 178 
 
 , pulvis et umbra .......... 185 
 
 Father Damien 193 
 
 Stories: 
 
 > a lodging for the night ....... 215 
 
 will o' the mill 240 ^ 
 
 rrt^'LTHE SIRE DE MALETROIT's DOOR 272 
 
 , ^/•'^THE MERRY MEN 298 
 
 MARKHEIM 358 ^■ 
 
 STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR, HYDE . 379 \ \ 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 I.— LIFE OF STEVENSON 
 
 The life of Robert Louis Stevenson is almost coextensive 
 with the last half of the nineteenth century. He was bom 
 in the middle of that century (Nov. 13, 1850), and died a 
 little before its end (Dec. 3, 1894). His birthplace was 
 Edinburgh; and in spite of many journeys hither and thither, 
 this city may be considered his permanent home imtil he left 
 Scotland for the Western Hemisphere. 
 
 Almost from the cradle he showed that tendency to physi- 
 cal weakness and insidious disease which pursued him all his 
 life. As a result of delicate health his schooUng was irregu- 
 lar, and his early education chiefly drawn from wide general 
 reading at home. Furthermore, in that harsh northern cli- 
 mate he was forced to spend much of his time indoors. This 
 restriction must have been a heavy disappointment to the 
 boy; for his spirit was as ambitious as his body was frail, and 
 more than one clever prank of his boyhood shows the love of 
 adventure which later produced Treasure Idand. 
 
 Stevenson's father, uncle, and grandfather before him had 
 been civil en^eers, famous for their work in building light- 
 houses. The love of this bold, out-of-door life with its great 
 possibilities of accomplishment had become a family tradi- 
 tion; and, as a result, Stevenson himself was intended for the 
 same career. But though he was full of enthusiasm for his 
 father's work and wondered later in life if he had not made a 
 mistake in substituting literature for it, he never showed any 
 strong inclination to become an en^eer. Unquestionably 
 Stevenson had some of the scientific ability hereditary in the 
 family as well as some of the family love for danger and 
 
VUl 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 achievement and the mysterious fascination of flie ocean; but 
 his precarious health and inborn passion for writing drew 
 him too powerfully another way. His attempt to become 
 a lawyer was equally unsatisfactory. He was admitted to 
 the Scottish Bar in 1875, but made ahnost no attempt to 
 practice. His heart was elsewhere. 
 
 Fortunately, his family were in comfortable circimistances; 
 and his father, though disappointed at the boy's attitude tow- 
 ard engineering, was loving and generous. Hence, Steven, 
 son was not forced by want into a distasteful profession, but 
 was allowed to mature at leisure his natural gift as an author. 
 His first works were short essays, setting forth his own orig- 
 inal views on the most widely diflermg topics, from the char- 
 acteristics of a landscape to the dangers of fallmg in love. 
 Although some of these essays have since won a high rank by 
 their literary polish and vivid individuality, they attracted 
 but little notice at the time. Then came a series of travel- 
 sketches, in which the author's success was due to the very 
 ill health that pursued him. His tendency to lung disease 
 forced him frequently to flee out of the inclement air of Scot- 
 land to some wanner region, France, or Italy, or Belgium, 
 These trips not only fulfilled his romantic longings to see men 
 and countries, they also gave him a great fund of interesting 
 material, which he worked up into such delightfully pictu- 
 resque narratives as the Inland Voyage and Travels with a 
 Donkey, his first published books. Gradually various essays 
 and stories of his foimd places in different magazines; and, al- 
 though theywon little notice from the general public, they did 
 make an impression on a few discerning critics, and thereby 
 laid a foundation for Stevenson's future success. By degrees, 
 also, he made the acquaintance of literary men older and 
 more prominent than himself, who by their criticism aided 
 him in his work and by their influence helped him to find pub- 
 lishers and readers. Among these was Sidney Colvin, re- 
 cently elected Slade professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge Uni- 
 versity, who later became Stevenson's lifelong friend; the 
 poet, W. E. Henley; and the well-known critics and autiiors, 
 Edmund Gosse and Andrew Lang. 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 Before he was thirty, Stevenson began to drift away from 
 essays and travel-sketches into the field of story-writing. No 
 doubt this change was partly a step to meet the demands of 
 the public; but partly also it was a response to the man's own 
 nature. There was, as one American critic has put it, a 
 troll in his blood, a restless, adventurous, romance-loving 
 spirit, which was debarred from its natural development by 
 the weakness of his body and found expression instead in the 
 exciting creations of his mind. It must not be assumed that 
 he abandoned his old field of work altogether; on the con- 
 trary some of his finest essays had still to be written; but from 
 now on their number dwindles, and narrative forms more and 
 more the bulk of the author's output. 
 
 In France, in 1876, Stevenson first met the woman who 
 was to be his future wife. She was a Mrs. Osboume, an 
 American, who after an unhappy marriage had left her Cali- 
 fomian home to live with her two children in a foreign coun- 
 try. Acquaintance soon deepened into friendship; but on ac- 
 count of financial and other reasons it was nearly four years 
 before they were married. The marriage finally took place 
 May 19, 1880, in California, whither Stevenson had gone to 
 join his future wife. It was while sailing from Scotland to 
 New York on this trip that the author encountered thos^ 
 experiences which he afterward embodied in The Amateur 
 Emigrant. 
 
 Shortly after their marriage Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson re- 
 turned to Scotland. But it soon became evident that if 
 Stevenson was to live long he could not remain permanently 
 in that bleak and trying climate. Consequently, during the 
 next seven years we find them experimenting with temporary 
 homes in various parts of Europe. Two years were spent 
 mainly at Davos in the Swiss Alps, two more in Southern 
 France near Marseilles, neither residence proving wholly 
 satisfactory, and finally three years at Bournemouth on the 
 English coast. During all this time the strong affection be- 
 tween Stevenson and his parents brought the young people on 
 frequent trips to the Stevenson home in Edinburgh. In the 
 middle of this period (1883) appeared Treasure Island, the 
 
X INTRODUCTION 
 
 first of its author's books which became really popular and 
 brought in a substantial income. In 1886, shortly before 
 leaving Bournemouth, he published the Strange Case of Dr. 
 Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which gained a sale and a popularity 
 far beyond that of anything that he had previously produced. 
 From this time on Stevenson had an international reputation 
 and a comfortable income from his writings. From this time 
 on, also, his productions were no longer mainly essays, as 
 they had been during his first period, or mamly short stories, 
 as they had been more recently, but chiefly novels and tales 
 of considerable lengtt, like The Wrecker and The Beach of 
 Falesd. 
 
 In 1885 appeared A Child's Garden of Verse, Stevenson's 
 first published volume of poetry. Two other volumes of 
 verse came out during his life, and one after his death. Each 
 of these contained poems written within a period of sev- 
 eral years. As a whole Stevenson's poetry does not rank as 
 high as his prose; it seldom has the subtle melody or in- 
 explicable charm of the great masters. But his songs for chil- 
 dren have a sunny kindliness and his other poems a narrative 
 swing which lift them far above mediocrity and reveal the 
 same gifted story-teller and loving friend who delights us 
 in his tales. 
 
 In 1887 his father, Thomas Stevenson, died. That death 
 snapped one of the strongest links which bound the son 
 to his birthplace; and in a few months he left Europe, plan- 
 ning, perhaps, to return, but destined never to do so. The 
 demand of his invalid body for health and the craving of 
 his adventurous spirit for new experience alike drew him to 
 the Western Hemisphere. The rest of his life was a series of 
 wanderings or short sojourns in America and the islands of the 
 Pacific. His companions were his wife, his step-son, Lloyd 
 Osboume, to whom he was deeply attached, and part of the 
 time his mother. 
 
 Stevenson entered America the second time, not obscurely, 
 as he had come ten years before, but as an author whose repu- 
 tation was assured. Several of his works had already been 
 published by Scribner; now almost immediately he was en- 
 
INTRODUCTION a 
 
 gaged bj them to fumisli twelve monthly articles for their 
 magazine. From this time on he was in close relation with 
 that well-known house. For the sake of the bracing cli- 
 mate, he spent the winter of 1887-88 at Saranac among the 
 Adirondack Moimtains of New York State. It is in this 
 region that the tragic end of The Master of BaUantrae is 
 pictured as occurring; and Stevenson tells us that he coit 
 ceived that dramatic scene at this time, amid scenery as wild 
 and on a night as cold as when Secundra dug up his buried 
 master. But, although Saranac proved bracing for the in- 
 valid and convenient for the author it did not keep him long. 
 Deep in his nature was the love of the ocean with its ex- 
 citement and mystery, that ocean with which his ancestors 
 had wrestled for generations; and he tells us that he would 
 gladly have exchanged his fame as an author for a yacht and 
 a voyage at sea. Consequently, the following summer the 
 party crossed the continent, and, chartering the yacht Casco 
 at San Francisco, sailed out into the romantic island world 
 of the Pacific. 
 
 For nearly three years after this Stevenson and his com- 
 panions voyaged to and fro between different groups of isl- 
 ands which lie hundreds of miles apart, now visiting the Ha- 
 waiian group far north of the equator, where he saw the dreary 
 leper settlement at Molokai, now, as far south of the equator, 
 to the Society Islands and New Caledonia. It was a chan- 
 ging panorama of differing surroundings and differing peoples, 
 a life of variety and novel experience. It had its spice of 
 danger, too; for more than once nothing but good luck and 
 the utmost efforts of the crew prevented shipwreck. Finally, 
 more by accident than design, the wanderers made them- 
 selves a permanent home at Apia in the Samoan group. 
 
 Almost four years, the last four of his life, Stevenson lived 
 at Samoa. He built his home, called YaiUma, or the Five 
 Hivers, a little outside of the town of Apia, and not far from 
 the mountain where he was afterward buried. He was never an 
 indolent man, and his life here was one of surprising activity. 
 Not only did he turn out an amoimt of literary work aston- 
 ishing in a man of such frail physique, but he also took an 
 
xii mTRODUCTION 
 
 active and unselfish part in the politics of the island, fearlessly 
 criticised the misgovemment of the European representatives 
 therey and won the love and respect of the natives as few white 
 men Wve done. A monument to the affection which he in- 
 spired in the Samoans is found in the road which their chiefs 
 built to his house, built by their own toil and at their own ex- 
 pense, and which they significantly christened Ala Loto Alof a. 
 The Road of the Loving Heart. Here at VaiUma he died sud- 
 denly and almost painlessly, December 3, 1894. He had 
 been working hard all day on the last (and what would have 
 been the greatest) of his novels. Weir of Hermiston. At sun- 
 set he had come downstairs for rest and the company of his 
 wife, when the blow fell. He lost consciousness almost im- 
 mediately; and in an hour or two all was over. He was buried 
 by his loving friends, Europeans and Samoans, on the summit 
 of Mt. Vaea, a narrow ledge of rock, which from a height 
 of thirteen hundred feet overlooks Samoa and the sea. On 
 one of the panels of his tomb is engraved the Requiem wluch 
 he himself composed years before: 
 
 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. 
 
 The character of Stevenson is one which deservedly com- 
 mands not only respect but love. The gentle kindliness of 
 his nature was unalterable, except by occasional outbursts 
 of righteous indignation at some act of cruelty. And these 
 outbursts themselves came from the warmth of his heart. 
 Yet,^ though tactful and sympathetic as a woman, he was es- 
 sentially a masculme spirit, strong and courageous. The 
 buoyant cheerfubess with which he laughed aside the disease 
 that he never could conquer, and the determination with which 
 he clung to his work when stronger men were idle is evidence 
 
INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 enough of this. Though chivalrous always aad an affec- 
 tionate son and husband, he usually cared less for the soci' 
 ety of women than for that of men. His novels, too, appeal 
 more to men than women. Much of the charm of his writing 
 is due to a childlike freshneS"m~his feeling, which" he ne ver 
 lost. It was his rare good fortune to outgrow the immatunty ' 
 of boyhood without losing its romance and its enthusiasm in 
 the process. Genius, according to the definition of a French 
 critic, is nothing but the power to live over our childhood at 
 will; and it is this quality in Stevenson which has immortal- 
 ised Treasure Island. Furthermore, as he appeals to our 
 hearts by his boyishness and sympathy, so he appeals to our 
 minds by his ingenious and versatile brain. True, he never 
 saw into life as deeply as Shakespeare or Browning; but he 
 saw life from many points of view, and hence all that he says 
 has the fascination of variety and novelty. He said once that 
 he was fifty-five per cent artist and forty-five per cent ad- 
 venturer; and both artists and adventurers are interesting 
 people. They may have a dash of the Bohemian in them, 
 as Stevenson himself did; but their very eccentricities are 
 refreshing. In one sense of the word, his genius was made 
 rather than bom, for it was only by long and patient effort 
 that he made himself a better writer than those around him. 
 But this fact merely increases our respect for him as a man, for 
 it brings him into the list of that gallant army who are using 
 all their efforts to make the world happier. While other 
 writers have too often wasted the splendid gifts that nature 
 gave them in dissipation or inaction, Stevenson can claim our 
 affection and reverence because all his natural powers wer^ 
 used bravely and to the utmost for the good of humanity. 
 
 F. E. P. 
 
 II.— OUTLINE OF THE MAIN EVENTS IN 
 STEVENSON'S LIFE 
 
 1850. Stevenson bom. 
 
 1859-67. Attends various schools, mostly in Edinburgh, 
 
 1863. Trip to Italy with parents. 
 
XIV 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 1865-66. Part of the time spent at Torquay In Devonshire 
 England. 
 
 1867-73. Studies at Edinburgh University. 
 
 1873. First published work (Roads) printed in Portfolio maga- 
 zine. 
 " Goes to Southern France for health. 
 
 1874-79. Various trips to the continent of Europe. 
 
 1875. Called to the Scottish Bar. 
 
 1876. First meets his future wife in Prance. 
 
 1877. His first story {A Lodging for the Night) printed in Temfie 
 
 Bar magazine. 
 
 1878. His first book (Inland Voyage) published. 
 
 1879. First voyage to America. 
 
 1880. Married. 
 
 " Returns to Scotland. 
 
 1880-82, At Davos in the Swiss Alps. 
 1882-84. In Southern France. 
 
 1883. Treasure Island (Stevenson's first popular success) pub- 
 lished. 
 1884-87. At Boumeroouth. 
 
 1886. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde published, ^ving the author an 
 
 international reputation. 
 
 1887. Stevenson's father dies. 
 1887-88. Second journey to America. 
 188S-91. Voyages in the Pacific 
 1891-94. Life at Samoa. 
 
 1894 Stevenson's death. 
 
 III.— LIST OF STEVENSON'S PUBLICATIONS 
 
 This list includes all of Stevenson's more important pub- 
 lications, with the date of their first appearance in book form, 
 and also a few less important works which help to give an 
 idea of the author's versatility. 
 
 1878. An Inland Voyage. 
 
 1879. Travels with a Donkey. 
 
 1881. Viiginibus Puerisque. 
 
 1882. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 
 
 1882. New Arabian Nights. 
 
 1883. The Silverado Squattera. 
 
INTRODUCTION » 
 
 1883. 
 
 Treasure Island. 
 
 1885. 
 
 Prince Otto. 
 
 M 
 
 A Chad's Garden of Verses. 
 
 - 
 
 More New Arabian Nights. The Dynamiter. 
 
 1886. 
 
 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 
 
 1886. 
 
 Kidnapped. 
 
 1887. 
 
 The Meny Men. 
 
 M 
 
 Underwoods (verse). 
 
 « 
 
 Memories and Portraits. 
 
 1888. 
 
 The Black Arrow. 
 
 1889. 
 
 The Master of Ballantiae. 
 
 « 
 
 The Wrong Box. 
 
 1890. 
 
 Father Damien. 
 
 1891. 
 
 Ballads (verse). 
 
 1892. 
 
 Across the Plains. 
 
 •4 
 
 The Wrecker. 
 
 U 
 
 Three Plays (Deacon Brodie, Beau Austin, Admiral i 
 
 
 Guinea). 
 
 1893. 
 
 Island Nights' Entertainments. 
 
 <• 
 
 Catriona (in America entitled David Balfour). 
 
 1894. 
 
 The Ebb Tide. 
 
 1895. 
 
 Vailima Letters. 
 
 1896. 
 
 Weir of Henniston. 
 
 1898. 
 
 St Ives. 
 
 1899. 
 
 Letters, Two Volumes. 
 
 1911. 
 
 Letters, Four Volumes. 
 
 IV.— BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The fonowmg editions and biographical studies should be 
 first consulted by those wishing to gain more knowledge of 
 ^tevenson than these Selections can g^ve. 
 
 EDITIONS 
 
 The Thistle Edition, 26 vols. A complete collection of 
 Stevenson's writings. 
 
 The Biographical Edition, 32 vols. These volumes are of 
 especial interest because of the introductions by Mrs. Stev- 
 enson. 
 
 The Scribner Popular Edition, 10 vols. 
 
xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 BIOGEAPHICAL 
 
 Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, 2 Tols. By Graham Bat 
 four. Published m the Thistle Edition but sold separately. 
 
 The Vailima Letters, 2 vols. Edited by Sidney Colvin, 
 published separately and in the Thistle Edition. 
 
 The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 4 vols. Edited 
 jby Sidney Colvin. 
 
 ,' A Chronicle of Friendships, by Will H. Low. Especially 
 valuable for its account of Stevenson's life in Paris and Fon- 
 tainebleau. 
 
 V.-STEVENSON THE WRITER 
 
 Salient's well-known portrait of the slender Stevenson, in 
 his velveteen jacket, with cigarette Ln hand, while a whimsi- 
 cal look softens the glow of his cavernous eyes, emphasises 
 too strongly perhaps the Bohemian in Stevenson's nature, 
 and yet suggests imforgettably his most characteristic traits. 
 The air of one wl^o seeks the romantic in life breathes from the 
 figure; the serious eyes and the glance belong to a humourist 
 who loves a world which both pains and amuses him; and 
 "artist" is as indelibly imprinted upon the whole as if it had 
 been written in upon the picture. Romanticist, humourist, 
 artist,— these, in truth, were the attributes of Robert Louis 
 Stevenson. 
 
 First, last, and always he was a romanticist in the good, 
 broad sense of the word; that is, he was a lover of all that stirs 
 the imagination. Romantic ages such as the fifteenth cen- 
 , tury in Prance; romantic men like the Stuart Pretenders; 
 romantic moments like the terrible hours after a great crime, 
 or a momentous resolution;— all these interested him and 
 found their way into his books. Love, which makes the 
 most romantic romance of them all, did not, strangely enough^ 
 appeal so strongly, perhaps because, as with many men who 
 lack physical strength, it was the masculme in life which 
 stirred his fancy. But he fed his mind upon everything else 
 that was strange, or splendid, and his acts and works were 
 
INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 oft^i moulded hj romaniie deslies. He loved the sea better 
 than the land; the mountains more than the plains; when he 
 set out upon his exile it was to the uttennost islands of the 
 Pacific; even when most discouraged he would not let life 
 seem trivial, or otherwise than full of the possibilities of charm 
 and wonder. Few men have been so sure of the eternal value 
 of whatsoever frees the imagination from &e commonplace, 
 and so convinced that nothing pushes back the horizons, 
 nothing stiis the heart like romance. 
 
 Next to romance humour was the quality which Stevenson 
 best understood, and this is not surprising, for the great ro- 
 manticists have all been humourists. Humour is not the same 
 as wit. Humoiur is a power which comes to kindly people who 
 can grasp the truth about human nature, yet still retain their 
 love for it. They see the inconsistencies, the incongruities, 
 the weaknesses of mankind, and since they love their fellow- 
 men can make these follies a cause of mirth, a reason for com- 
 prehension and sympathy. Without humour a writer of ro- 
 mances loses touch with human nature, and we, his readers, 
 feel ill at ease in his world, where there is little humanity and 
 only stage-laughs. 
 
 This saving grace of humour was Stevenson's, but it did 
 more than sweeten his romance; it made him a preacher. AH 
 great humourists are preachers. They cannot avoid preach- 
 ing except by silence, for they have only to describe the world 
 as they see it to ^ve the fiveliest perceptions of its errors and 
 mistakes. And they are oUea the best of preacheis because 
 they are content to make clear the absurdity of error, leaving 
 the remedy to time who takes care of proved absurdities. 
 Indeed, as one reads certain essays in this volume, for example 
 the throbbing Aea TrijUex, where the writer wars upon all 
 cowardly fear of death, Stevenson^s preaching i& so serious 
 that one may easily overlook the humour underlying it. But 
 Aes Triplex, like nearly all the rest, is fundamentally hur 
 morous. It was the work of a thinker who saw the man-floqk 
 scurrying hither and thither in trivial terror, though the grass 
 was tender, the water sweet, and little time at best to enjoy 
 ifaem; a thinker who saw man, like a blind horse in a cider* 
 
xvui INTRODUCTION 
 
 press, plodding on and on, unconscious that he never left his 
 appomted rut. These sights filled him with mingled pity and 
 mirth. He spoke out, and such fine preachmg as is to be 
 found in the essays of this volume resulted. But very rarely, 
 and only when the tragic entered his stories, or when, as in 
 his more sombre essays, his native cheerfulness fought for 
 its right to exist, did Stevenson cease to be essentially humor- 
 ous in his attitude toward the world. 
 
 Such humourist's preaching differs, of course, m a very im- 
 portant fashion from the usual pulpit variety. It is tolerant, 
 it is never dogmatic. Stevenson could not be intolerant of 
 other men's opmions for he saw but too clearly how fallible 
 are all opinions; he could not be dogmatic for he knew that all 
 programmes of conduct might lead somewhere or somehow to 
 error. He pitied, or smiled at, the follies of the world in- 
 stead of abusing them. One sees this in An Apology for 
 Jdfers,, where he holds up for mirth the sordid individual who 
 thinks that his own business is the only thing that matters, 
 or in Aea Triplex, where he pictures Death creeping upon a 
 life so shaken by fear of him as to be scarcely worth ending. 
 One sees it also in work where he was not preaching; some- 
 what grimly, for example, in his story. The Merry Men, where 
 the conscience-stricken uncle is haimted by his fears; more 
 lightly in WUl o' the Mill, when the sluggish youth who gives 
 to that story its title decides that it is better to be comfortable 
 than in love. His travel-sketches, too, are full of this humor- 
 ous spirit; his charming letters are alight with the keenest, but 
 the most sympathetic perceptions of mortal folly, mortal weak- 
 ness (his own as much as anybody's), and mortal shame. 
 There have been far greater humourists than Stevenson, men, 
 who, better than he, saw deeply, felt truly, and gave us human 
 nature with the lovable and unlovable qualities of the flesh. 
 But no writer in English of our period has done all these 
 things so well for the readers of this generation. 
 
 And, finally, R. L. S., as he liked to sign himself, was to 
 the finger-tips an artist. The true artist, whether painter, 
 musician, or writer of literature, is content only when his 
 work is as true as he can make it to the conceptions shaped by 
 
INTRODUCTION xix 
 
 his imagination. He labours incessantly at what he calls his 
 technique. Stevenson was a true artist, who never willingly 
 and knowingly did less than his best. He wrote for money, as 
 all artists should, since the need of making one's work desira- 
 ble is the best preventive of morbid, imnatural, useless art; but 
 he wrote, as he says in one of his letters, first of all for him- 
 self. The results are to be seen in the dignity, depth, and sin- 
 cerity of his books, but most of all in his style. Stevenson's 
 style, which, at its finest, is of remarkable force and beauty, 
 was the product of a determination to express his ideas in the 
 best possible manner. It is like the glaze which the potter 
 bakes upon his already modelled clay, or the colour and final 
 form which the painter gives to his sketch for a picture. 
 Stevenson's carefully chosen words, Ms delicately modulated 
 sentences, the melodious rhythm of his paragraphs serve to 
 express to perfection the nicety, or the profundity, or the 
 beauty of his thought. His style, therefore, is the best result 
 as well as the best evidence of a lifelong devotion to the high- 
 est ideals of art. 
 
 Stevenson b so much a part of our own generation that we 
 cannot, even if it were desirable, label him, and place him 
 upon his proper shelf in literary history. Nevertheless, it is 
 already evident that he was a leader in some very definite 
 tendencies of his times. 
 
 The first of these was the smng toward romance. In the 
 seventies and eighties, when R. L. S. began to write, science, 
 much more than now, was affecting men's imaginations. Dis- 
 coveries in physics, in chemistry, and in mechanics, most of all 
 ' the then new theories of man's evolution from lower forms of 
 life were emphasising the importance W/ocib. Fiction speed- 
 ily responded to this scientific movement. In France, Zola 
 was writmg his careful studies of the ills of humanity; in 
 England, Hardy was pessimistically narrating the truth, as he 
 saw it, of country life, and (for all reaUstic fiction b not either 
 squalid or pessimistic) TroUope was pouring out matter-of- 
 fact stories of amusing but very commonplace people. Ro- 
 mance is a reaction against thb realbtic attitude. It b a pro- 
 
XX INTRODUCTION 
 
 test that the soul needs to dream as well as to understand. 
 Romance does not deny the ugly and the commonplace, it 
 temporarily ignores them. Stevenson was unfamiliar neither 
 with science nor with misery and pain, but in such books as 
 Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and The Master of BaUantrae, 
 such stories as The Sire de Maletroifs Door and A Lodging 
 for the Night he led away from them into regions where a 
 I man could be a boy again, could let loose his fancy, and give 
 his heart a chance to beat. In these narratives Stevenson 
 headed the romantic reaction, which has given us a series of 
 tales of adventure or strange situation to place beside the 
 novels of scientific realism that have also been produced 
 throughout our period. But Stevenson's followers have none 
 of them equalled the master. Indeed, no writer, since the 
 great romanticists of an earlier generation, has flung himself 
 with Stevenson's ardour into the pursuit of romance. "You 
 just indulge the pleasure of your heart," he said of writing 
 Treasure Island, "just drive along as the words come and the 
 pen will scratchl" 
 
 Treasure Island is pure romance, like Ivanhce, or As You 
 Like It, but elsewhere Stevenson did more than revive ro- 
 mance, he linked it to the scientific spirit of the time. Dr. 
 JekyU and Mr. Hyde, for example, is conducted like an ex- 
 periment in the new science of psychology; The Merry Men 
 is first of all a romantic picture of the landsman's terror of 
 the sea, but it is also a psychological study of a guilty imag- 
 ination. And in such essays as Pvlms el Umbra those prob- 
 lems with which scientists were wrestling are fearlessly handled 
 ' by a romantidst, with admirable results. 
 
 Stevenson reacts against opposing tendencies not only in 
 his romance but also in his humour. He came from Scotland, 
 where Puritanical dogmatism kept the tightest of grips upon 
 belief and conscience. In his youth he broke away in agmiy 
 from the dogma of his father's church, sufferii^ and giving 
 pain in order to be free. And in his manhood he not less de- 
 cisively broke away from the writers who still dominated Eng- 
 lish literature. Tte great preacher-essayists, Carlyle, Arnold, 
 Ruskin, had made laws for conduct, for culture, for art Stev- 
 
INTRODUCTION xxi 
 
 enson, though never in dispute with them, presents the other 
 side. Being humourist, he deprecates taking oneself too seri- 
 ously; he points to the good things of God, the dawn, the for- 
 est, friendship, love, and even a pipe of tobacco, which may be 
 forgotten while men are pulling one another's ears; he leads 
 the way to tolerance, and a cheerful determination to get the 
 best from living. This is humour of the kind that Charles 
 Lamb practised before the days of reform and modem science. 
 It is most useful as an offset to the overpositive preachers of 
 the middle of the century. 
 
 In this, strangely enough, Stevenson is at one with those 
 same scientists whose matter-of-fact theories of life had driven 
 him to romance. His tolerance, his distrust of dogmatism 
 would meet with their approval, for they experiment before 
 they assert. But his distrust of dogma goes deeper than theirs. 
 If he smiles at the philosopher or theologian who, from his 
 little pin-head in the imiverse, declares that only thus or so 
 shall a man's life be led or his soul be saved, his humour 
 makes him smile no less at the pretensions of the scientist 
 who deduces from experiments that man is a machine and life 
 a chemical compound of dust. 
 
 Stevenson's position and his influence as an artist are by no 
 means so clear as his place in humour and romance. A great 
 refiner of language, a perfecter of phrases even to the verge 
 of affectation, it is true that he gave to English prose a solemn 
 and beautiful music. It is true that he gave to the short story, 
 which he among British authors of our period was the first 
 to write with success, a dignity and a beauty which it had not 
 been given since the days of Hawthorne and Poe. But, after 
 all, the chief importance of Stevenson's art is to be sought else- 
 where. It is chiefly valuable not so much for its possible 
 influence as because, by means of it, form and expression were 
 given to the romantic imaginings and the humorous thoughts 
 of a very rare, very sweet, and very wise spirit embodied in 
 one of the most lovable of men. 
 
 H. S. C. 
 
IJETTEBS 
 
LETTERS 
 
 STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH' 
 
 To Alison Cunningham 
 
 The folloving is the first of many letters to the admirable nurse 
 whose care, during his ailing childhood, had done so much both to 
 preserve Stevenson's life and awaken his love of tales and poetry, 
 and of whom imtil his death he thought with the utmost constancy 
 of affection. The letter bears no sign of date or place, but by the 
 handwriting would seem to belong to this year. 
 
 [1871?] 
 Mt Dear Cummt, — I was greatly pleased by your let- 
 ter in many ways. Of course, I was glad to hear from 
 you; you know you and 1 have so many old stories be- 
 tween us, that even if there was nothing else, even if 
 there was not a very sincere respect and affection, we 
 
 J Stevenson's published correspondence has imtil recently been 
 chiefly contained in three volumes, Letters, vols. I and II, and the 
 Vailima Letters. The latter comprises all those sent from Samoa, 
 during the author's residence there, to Sidney Colvin. As mail steam- 
 ers are rare in the Pacific islands, Stevenson wrote these letters to 
 Colvin in the form of a journal, sending out long consignments at rare 
 intervals. They were written after he had become famous and when 
 he knew that much of his personal MSS. would eventually be pub- 
 lished; hence the contents of the Yailima volume are more polished 
 and less frankly informal, as a whole, than the rest. The remaining 
 letters, including those sent from Vailima to other friends than Colvin, 
 were published chronologically in the two volumes already referred to. 
 Our selections include extracts from all three volumes, arranged in 
 the order in which they were written, only those dating from Samoa 
 and addressed to Simiey Colvin being from the Vailima Letters, 
 k new and revised edition of Stevenson's letters has just appeared 
 in four voliunes. All the letters are arranged in chronological order, 
 and these new volumes will be the definitive and complete form of 
 the collection. 
 
4 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 should always be glad to pass a nod. I say "even if 
 there was not." But you know right well there is. Do 
 not suppose that I shall ever forget those long, bitter 
 nights, when I coughed and coughed and was so unhappy, 
 and you were so patient and loving with a poor, sick 
 child. Indeed, Cummy, I wish I might become a man 
 worth talking of, if it were only that you should not have 
 thrown away your pains. 
 
 Happily, it is not the result of our acts that makes 
 them brave and noble, but the acts themselves and the 
 unselfish love that moved us to do them. "Inasmuch 
 as you have done it unto one of the least of these." My 
 dear old nurse, and you know there is nothing a man 
 can say nearer his heart except his mother or his wife — 
 my dear old nurse, God will make good to you all the 
 good that you have done, and mercifully forgive you all 
 the evil. And next time when the spring comes round, 
 and everything is beginning once again, if you should 
 happen to think that you might have had a child of 
 your own, and that it was hard you should have spent so 
 many years taking care of some one else's prodigal, just 
 you think this — ^you have been for a great deal in my 
 life; you have made much that there is in me, just as 
 surely as if you had conceived me; and there are sons 
 who are more ungrateful to their own mothers than I am 
 to you. For I am not ungrateful, my dear Cummy, and 
 it is with a very sincere emotion that I write myself your 
 little boy, 
 
 Louis. 
 
LETTERS 5 
 
 FIRST JOURNEY TO AMERICA 
 To Edmund Gosse» 
 
 With reference to the "tenn of reproach," it must be explained 
 that Mr. Gosse, who now signs with only one initial, used in these 
 days to sign with two, E. W. G. The nickname Weg was fastened 
 on him by Stevenson, partly under a false impression as to the order 
 of these initials, partly in friendly derision of a passing fit of lameness, 
 which called up the memory of Silas Wegg, the immortal literary gen- 
 tleman "with a wooden leg" of Our Mutual Friend. 
 
 17 ^EEioT Row,^ Edinburgh [Jtdy 29, 1879]. 
 My Deae Gosse, — Yours was delicious; you are a 
 young person of wit; one of the last of them; wit being 
 quite out of date, and humour confined to the Scotch 
 Church and the Spectator in unconscious survival. You 
 will probably be glad to hear that I am up again in 
 the world; I have breathed again, and had a frolic on 
 the strength of it. The frolic was yesterday, Sawbath; 
 the scene, the Royal Hotel, Bathgate; I went there with 
 a humorous friend to lunch. The maid soon showed 
 herself a lass of character. She was looking out of win- 
 dow. On being asked what she was after, "I 'm look- 
 in' for my lad," says she. "Is that him?" "Weel, I've 
 been lookin' for him a' my life, and I 've never seen him 
 yet," was the response. I wrote her some verses in the 
 vernacular; she read them. "They 're no bad for a be- 
 ginner," said she. The landlord's daughter. Miss Stewart, 
 was present in oil colour; so I wrote her a declaration 
 in verse, and sent it by the handmaid. She (Miss S.) 
 was present on the stair to witness our departure, in a 
 
 ' See page viii. 
 
 ' The home of Stevenson's parents, where miM of his boyhood 
 had been passed. This letter was written less than a fortnight 
 before the author's first voyage to America. 
 
6 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 warm, suffused condition. Damn it, Gosse, you needn't 
 suppose that you 're the only poet in the world. 
 
 Your statement about your initials, it will be seen, I pass 
 over in contempt and silence. "When once I have made up 
 my mind, let me tell you, sir, there lives no pock-pudding 
 who can change it. Your anger I defy. Your unmanly 
 reference to a well-known statesman I puff from me, sir, 
 like so much vapour. Weg is your name; Weg. W E G. 
 
 My enthusiasm has kind of dropped from me. I 
 envy you your wife, your home, your child — I was 
 going to say your cat. There would be cats in my 
 home too if I could but get it. I may seem to you 
 "the impersonation of life," but my life is the imper- 
 sonation of waiting, and that 's a poor creature. God 
 help us all, and the deil be kind to the hindmost! Upon 
 my word, we are a brave, cheery crew, we human be- 
 ings, and my admiration increases daily — primarily for 
 myself, but by a roundabout process for the whole 
 crowd; for I dare say they have all their poor little se- 
 crets and anxieties. And here am I, for instance, v^rit- 
 ing to you as if you were in the seventh heaven, and 
 yet I know you are in a sad anxiety yourself. I hope 
 earnestly it will soon be over, and a fine pink Gosse 
 sprawling in a tub, and a mother in the best of health 
 and spirits, glad and tired, and with another interest in 
 life. Man, you are out of the trouble when this is 
 through. A first child is a rival, but a second is only 
 a rival to the first; and the husband stands his ground 
 and may keep married all his life — a consummation 
 heartily to be desired. Good-bye, Gosse. Write me a 
 witty letter with good news of the mistress. 
 
 XV. L. S. 
 
LETTERS 
 
 To Edmund Gossk 
 
 A poetical counterpart to this letter will be found in the piece be- 
 ginning "Not yet, my soul, these friendly fields desert," which was 
 composed at the same time and is printed in Underwoods, p. 30. 
 
 San Francisco, Cal., A-prU 16 [1880].* 
 Mt Deab Gosse, — You have not answered my last; 
 and I know you will repent when you hear how near 
 I have been to another world. For about six weeks I 
 have been in utter doubt; it was a toss-up for life or 
 death all that time; but I won the toss, sir, and Hades 
 went ofiF once more discomfited. This is not the first 
 time, nor will it be the last, that I have a friendly game 
 with that gentleman. I know he will end by cleaning 
 me out; but the rogue is insidious, and the habit of that 
 sort of gambling seems to be a part of my nature; it was, 
 I suspect, too much indulged in youth; break your chil- 
 dren of this tendency, my dear Gosse, from the first. It 
 is, when once formed, a habit more fatal than opium 
 — I speak, as St. Paul says, like a fool. I have been 
 very very sick; on the verge of a galloping consumption, 
 cold sweats, prostrating attacks of cough, sinking fits in 
 which I lost the power of speech, fever, and all the ugli- 
 est circumstances of the disease; and I have cause to 
 bless God, my wife that is to be, and one Dr. Bamford 
 (a name the Muse repels), that I have come out of all 
 this, and got my feet once more upon a little hilltop, 
 with a fair prospect of life and some new desire of liv- 
 ing. Yet I did not wish to die, neither; only I felt 
 unable to go on farther with that rough horseplay of 
 human life: a man must be pretty well to take the busi- 
 ness in good part. Yet I felt all the time that I had 
 done nothing to entitle me to an honourable discharge; 
 
 ' Written about a month before Stevenson's marriage. 
 
8 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 that I had taken up many obligations and begun many 
 friendships which I had no right to put away from me; 
 and that for me to die was to play the cur and slink- 
 ing sybarite, and desert the colours on the eve of the 
 decisive fight. Of course I have done no work for I 
 do not know how long; and here you can triumph. I 
 have been reduced to writing verses for amusement. 
 A fact. The whirligig of time brings in its revenges, 
 after all. But I '11 have them buried with me, I think, 
 for I have not the heart to burn them while I live. 
 Do write. I shall go to the mountains as soon as the 
 weather clears; on the way thither, I marry myself; 
 then I set up my family altar among the pinewoods, 
 3000 feet, sir, from the disputatious sea. — I am, dear 
 Weg, most truly yours, 
 
 XV. L. o. 
 
 DAVOS IN SWITZERLAND 
 To Charles Baxter' 
 
 [Chalet am Stein], Davos, December 5, 1881. 
 
 Mt Dear Charles, — We have been in miserable case 
 here; my wife worse and worse; and now sent away 
 with Lloyd ^ for sick-nurse, I not being allowed to go 
 down. I do not know what is to become of us; and 
 you may imagine how rotten I have been feeling, and 
 feel now, alone with my weasel-dog and my German 
 maid, on the top of a hill here, heavy mist and thin snow 
 all about me, and the devil to pay ijn general. I don't 
 care so much for solitude as I used to; results, I sup- 
 pose, of marriage. 
 
 Pray write me something cheery. A little Edinburgh 
 
 . .',4 ^"??4 °^ *® author's student days. Stevenson speaks verv 
 nighly of his tact and judgment as an adviser. 
 ' lioyd Osboume, his step-son, to whom he was much attached. 
 
LETTERS 9 
 
 gossip, in Heaven's name. Ah! what would I not give 
 to steal this evening with you through the big, echoing 
 college archway, and away south under the street lamps, 
 and away to dear Brash's,' now defunct! But the old 
 time is dead also, never, never to revive. It was a sad 
 time too, but so gay and so hopeful, and we had such 
 sport with all our low spirits and all our distresses, that it 
 looks like a kind of lamplit fairyland behind me. O for 
 ten Edinburgh minutes — sixpence between us, and the 
 ever-glorious Lothian Road, or dear mysterious Leith 
 Walk! But here, a sheer hulk, lies poor Tom Bowling; 
 here in this strange place, whose very strangeness would 
 have been heaven to him then; and aspires, yes, C. B., 
 with tears, after the past. See what comes of being 
 left alone. Do you remember Brash ? the sheet of glass 
 that we followed along George Street? Granton? the 
 night at Bonny mainhead? the compass near the sign 
 of the Twinkling Eye f the night I lay on the pavement 
 in misery? 
 
 I swear it by the eternal sky 
 Johnson — ^nor Thomson — ne'er shall die ! 
 
 Yet I fancy they are dead too; dead like Brash. 
 
 A. L. o. 
 
 ' Peter Brash, an innkeeper of Edinburgh, the subject of many of 
 Stevenson's early jokes. 
 
10 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 SOUTHERN FRANCE 
 
 To W. E. Henley* 
 
 The "new dictionary" means, of course, the first instahnents of the 
 great Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, edited by Dr. J. 
 A. H. Murray. 
 
 Htebes " [June, 1883]. 
 
 Deak Lad, — I was delighted to hear the good news 
 about . Bravo, he goes uphill fast. Let him be- 
 ware of vanity, and he will go higher; let him be still 
 discontented, and let him (if it might be) see the mer- 
 its and not the faults of his rivals, and he may swarm 
 at last to the topgallant. There is no other way. Ad- 
 miration is the only road to excellence; and the critical 
 spirit kills, but envy and injustice are putrefaction on 
 its feet. 
 
 Thus far the moralist. The eager author now begs to 
 know whether you may have got the other Whistles, 
 and whether a fresh proof is to be taken; also whether 
 in that case the dedication should not be printed there- 
 with; Bulk Delights Publishers (original aphorism; to 
 be said sixteen times in succession as a test of sobriety). 
 
 Your wild and ravening commands were received; 
 but cannot be obeyed. And anyway, I do assure you I 
 am getting better every day; and if the weather would 
 but turn, I should soon be observed to walk in horn- 
 pipes. Truly I am on the mend. I am still very careful. 
 I have the new dictionary; a joy, a thing of beauty, and 
 — bulk. I shall be raked i' the mools' before it 's fin- 
 ished; that is the only pity; but meanwhile I sing. 
 
 I beg to inform you that I, Robert Louis Stevenson, 
 
 ' See page viii. 
 
 ' Stevenson's home for nine months during his two years' residence 
 in Southern France after leaving Davos. 
 'Buried under the earth. 
 
LETTERS 11 
 
 author of Brashiana} and other works, am merely be- 
 ginning to commence to prepare to make a first start 
 at trying to understand my profession. O the height 
 and depth of novelty and worth in any art! and O that 
 I am privileged to swim and shoulder through such 
 oceans ! Could one get out of sight of land — all in the 
 blue? Alas not, being anchored here in flesh, and the 
 bonds i>f logic being still about us. C\ 
 
 But what a great space and a great air there is in these 
 small shallows where alone we venture ! and how new 
 each sight, squall, calm, or simrise! An art is a fine 
 fortune, a palace in a park, a band of music, health, 
 and physical beauty; all but love — to any worthy prac- 
 tiser. I sleep upon my art for a pillow; I waken in my 
 art; I am unready for death, because- 1 hate to leave 
 it. I love my wife, I do not know how much, nor 
 can, nor shall, unless I lost her; but while I can con- 
 ceive my being widowed, I refuse the offering of life with- 
 out my art. I am not but in my art; it is me; I am 
 the body of it merely. 
 
 And yet I produce nothing, am'the author of Brashi- 
 ana and other works: tiddy-iddity — ^as if the works one 
 wrote were anything but prentice's experiments. Dear 
 reader, I deceive you with husks, the real works and all 
 the pleasure are still mine and incommunicable. After 
 this break in my work, beginning to return to it, as 
 from light sleep, I wax exclamatory, as you see. 
 
 SuTsum Corda:* 
 Heave ahead: 
 Here 's luck. 
 Art and Blue Heaven, 
 April and God's Larks. 
 
 Green reeds and the sky-scattering river. / 
 
 A stately music. ^ 
 
 Enter God I R. L. S. 
 
 ' Writings on Brash. ' Upward with our hearts, i.e., be cheerful. 
 
12 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Ay, but you know, until a man can write that "Enter 
 Sod," he has made no art! None I Come, let us take 
 ix>unsel together and make some I 
 
 To W. H. Low' 
 
 Manhattan, mentioned below, is the name of a short-lived New 
 York magazine, the editor of which had asked through Mr. Low foi 
 a contribution from R. L. S. 
 
 La Solitude,* Hyeees, October [1883]. 
 
 My Deak Low, — . . . Some day or other, in Cassell'a 
 Magazine of Art, you will see a paper which will inter- 
 est you, and where your name appears. It is called 
 "Fontainebleau: Village Communities of Artists," and 
 the signature of R. L. Stevenson will be found annexed.' 
 
 Please tell the editor of Manhattan the following se- 
 crets for me: 1st, That I am a beast; 2nd, that I owe 
 him a letter; 3rd, that I have lost his, and cannot recall 
 either his name or address; 4th, that I am very deep in 
 fingagements, which my absurd health makes it hard for 
 me to overtake; but 5th, that I will bear him in mind; 
 6th and last, that I am a brute. 
 
 My address is still the same, and I live in a most 
 sweet corner of the universe, sea and fine hills before 
 me, and a rich, variegated plain; and at my back a 
 craggy hill, loaded with vast feudal ruins. I am very 
 quiet; a person passing by my door half startles me; 
 but I enjoy the most aromatic airs, and at night the 
 most wonderful view into a moonlit garden. By day 
 this garden fades into nothing, overpowered by its sur- 
 
 ' American painter and illustrator. Stevenson and he had beea 
 good friends smce the days they spent together in Paris and the 
 forest of Fontainebleau, an account of which is given in Low's 
 A Chronicle of Friendships. 
 
 'The name of Stevenson's cottage at Hy^res. 
 
 •'Published May, June, 1884. 
 
LETTERS 13 
 
 roundings and the luminous distance; but at night and 
 when the moon is out, that garden, the arbour, the flight 
 of stairs that mount the artificial hillock, the plumed 
 blue gum-trees that hang trembling, become the very 
 skirts of Paradise. Angels I know frequent it; and it 
 thrills all night with the thrills of silence. Damn that 
 garden; — end by day it is gone. 
 
 Continue to testify boldly against realism. Down with 
 Dagon, the fish god! * All art swings down towards 
 imitation, in these days, fatally. But the man who 
 loves art with wisdom sees the joke; it is the lustful 
 that tremble and respect her ladyship; but the honest 
 and romantic lovers of the Muse can see a joke and sit 
 down to laugh with Apollo. 
 
 The prospect of your return to Europe is very agree- 
 able; and I was pleased by what you said about your 
 parents. One of my oldest friends died recently, and 
 this has given me new thoughts of death.^ Up to now 
 I had rather thought of him as a mere personal enemy 
 of my own; but now that I see him hunting after my 
 friends, he looks altogether darker. My own father is 
 not well; and Henley, of whom you must have heard 
 me speak, is in a questionable state of health. These 
 things are very solemn, and take some of the. colour out 
 of life. It is a great thing, after all, to be a man of rea- 
 sonable honour and kindness. Do you remember once 
 consulting me in Paris whether you had not better sac- 
 rifice honesty to art; and how, after much confabula- 
 tion, we agreed that your art would suffer if you did? 
 We decided better than we knew. In this strange welter 
 where we live, all hangs together by a million filaments; 
 
 ' Used by Stevenson to denote unimaginative art and pedantry. 
 See his letter to Colvin, July 28, 1879. 
 
 ' Walter Ferrier, a comrade of Stevenson's Edinburgli days, and 
 the first of bia close friends to be removed by death. His memory 
 is preserved in the essay, Old Mortality, 1884. 
 
14 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 and to do reasonably well by others, is the first prereq- 
 uisite of art. Art is a virtue; and if I were the man I 
 should be, my art would rise in the proportion of my life. 
 If you were privileged to give some happiness to your 
 parents, I know your art will gain by it. By Gad, it wilW 
 Sic subscribitur,^ -d t c 
 
 To W. H, Low 
 
 The paper referred to at the be^nning of the second paragraph 
 is one on R. L. S. in the Century Magazine, the first seriously 
 critical notice, says Mr. Low, which appeared of him in the States. 
 
 [Chalet La Soutude, Htebes, Oct. 23, 1883.] 
 Mt Deab Low, — C'est d'un bon camarade,^ and I am 
 much obliged to you for your two letters,, and the en- 
 closure. Times are a lityle changed with all of us since 
 the ever memorable days of Lavenue:^ hallowed be his 
 name! hallowed his old Fleury! — of which you did 
 not see — I think — as I did — the glorious apotheosis: ad- 
 vanced on a Tuesday to three francs, on the Thursday 
 to six, and on Friday swept off, holus bolus, for the 
 proprietor's private consumption. Well, we had the 
 start of that proprietor. Many a good bottle came our 
 way, and was, I think, worthily made welcome. 
 
 I am pleased that Mr. Gilder ^ should like my litera- 
 ture ; and I ask you particularly to thank Mr. Bunner 
 (have I the name right?) for his notice, which was of 
 that friendly, headlong sort that really pleases an author 
 like what the French call a "shake-hands." It pleased 
 
 ' The referenee is to himself. » Thus subscribing. 
 
 ' It is the part of a good friend. 
 
 » A famous restaurant in the Mont Pamasse district of Paris- a 
 gathering place for artiste. ' 
 
 = R. W. Gilder, for many years editor of The Century MagaztTte. 
 
* LETTERS 15 
 
 me the more coming from the States, where I have met 
 not much recognition, save from the buccaneers, and 
 above all from pirates who misspell my name. I saw 
 my book advertised in a number of the Cntvc as the 
 work of one R. L. Stephenson; and, I own, I boiled. 
 It is so easy to know the name of a man whose book 
 you have stolen; for there it is, at full length, on the 
 title-page of your booty. But no, damn him, not he! 
 He calls me Stephenson. These woes I only refer to by 
 the way, as they set a higher value on the Century notice. 
 I am now a person with an established ill-health — a 
 wife — a dog possessed with an evil, a Gadarene spirit--. 
 a chalet on a hill, looking out over the Mediterranean— 
 a certain reputation — and very obscure finances. Oth- 
 erwise, very much the same, I guess; and were a bottle 
 of Fleury a thing to be obtained, capable of developing 
 theories along with a fit spirit even as of yore. Yet I 
 now draw near to the Middle Ages; nearly three years 
 ago, that fatal Thirty struck; and yet the great work 
 is not yet done — not yet even conceived. But so, as 
 one goes on, the wood seems to thicken, the footpath to 
 narrow, and the House Beautiful on the hill's summit 
 to draw further and further away. We learn. Indeed, to 
 use our means; but only to learn, along with it, the 
 paralysing knowledge that these means are only applica- 
 ble to two or three poor commonplace motives. Eight 
 years ago, if I could have slung ink as I can now, I 
 should have thought myself well on the road after 
 Shakespeare; and now — I find I have only got a pair 
 of walking-shoes and not yet begun to travel. And art 
 is still away there on the mountain summit. But I 
 need not continue; for, of course, this is your story just 
 as much as it is mine; and, strange to think, it was 
 Shakespeare's too, and Beethoven's, and Phidias's. It 
 is a blessed thing that, in this forest of art, we can pur- 
 
16 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 sue our wood-lice and sparrows, and not catch them, 
 with almost the same fervour of exhilaration as that 
 with which Sophocles hunted and brought down the 
 Mastodon. 
 
 Tell me something of your work, and your wife. — • 
 My dear fellow, I am yours ever, 
 
 R. L. Stevenson. 
 
 My wife oegs to be remembered to both of you; I 
 cannot say as much for my dog, who has never seen 
 you, but he would like, on general principles, to bite you. 
 
 To Mk. Dick 
 
 This correspondent was for many years head clerk and confidential 
 assistant in the family firm at Edinburgh. 
 
 La Solitude, Hyekes, Vak, 12th March, 1884. 
 Mt Dear Me. Dick, — I have been a great while owing 
 you a letter, but I am not without excuses, as you have 
 heard. I overworked to get a piece of work finished 
 before I had my holiday, thinking to enjoy it more; and 
 instead of that, the machinery near hand came sundry in 
 my hands! like Murdie's uniform. However, I am now, 
 I think, in a fair way of recovery; I think I was made, 
 what there is of me, of whipcord and thom-switches; 
 surely I am tough I But I fancy I shall not overdrive 
 again, or not so long. It is my theory that work is 
 highly beneficial, but that it should, if possible, and cer- 
 tainly for such partially broken-down instruments as the 
 thing I call my body, be taken in batches, with a clear 
 break and breathing space between. I always do vary 
 my work, laying one thing aside to take up another, not 
 merely because I believe it rests the brain, but because I 
 have found it most beneficial to the result. Reading, 
 
LETTERS 17 
 
 Bacon says, makes a full man, but what makes me full 
 on any subject is to banish it for a time from all my 
 thoughts. However, what I now propose is, out of every 
 quarter, to work two months and rest the third. I 
 believe I shall get more done, as I generally manage, 
 on my present scheme, to have four months' impotent 
 illness and two of imperfect health — one before, one 
 after, I break down. This, at least, is not an economical 
 division of the year. 
 
 I re-read the other day that heart-breaking book, the 
 Life of Scott. One should read such works now and 
 then, but O, not often. As I live, I feel more and more 
 that literature should be cheerful and brave-spirited, 
 even if it cannot be made beautiful and pious and he- 
 roic. We wish it to be a green place; the Waverley 
 Novels are better to re-read than the over-true Life, fine 
 as dear Sir Walter was. The Bible, in most parts, is a 
 cheerful book; it is our little piping theologies, tracts, 
 and sermons that are dull and dowie;* and even the 
 Shorter Catechism, which is scarcely a work of conso- 
 lation, opens with the best and shortest and completest 
 sermon ever written — upon Man's chief end. — Believe 
 me, my dear Mr. Dick, very sincerely yours, 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 
 P. S. — ^You see I have changed my hand. I was 
 threatened 'apparendy with scrivener's cramp, and at 
 any rate had got to write so small that the revisal of 
 my MS. tried my eyes, hence my signature alone re- 
 mains upon the old model; for it appears that if I 
 changed that, I should be cut off from my "vivers."* 
 
 XV. L. Oa 
 
 » DolefuL • Means of living. 
 
18 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 BOimNEMOUTH, ENGLAND 
 
 To W. E. Henlet 
 
 There is no certain clue to the date of the foUomng ; neither has it 
 been possible to make sure what was the enclosure mentioned. The 
 special ilhiess referred to seems to be that of the preceding May at 
 Hyferes. 
 
 [Wensletbale, Bouenemouth, October, 1884?] 
 Dear Boy, — I trust this finds you well; it leaves me 
 so-so. The weather is so cold that I must stick to bed, 
 which is rotten and tedious, but can't be helped. 
 
 I find in the blotting-book the enclosed, which I 
 wrote to you the eve of my blood.* Is it not strange? 
 That night, when I naturally thought I was coopered, 
 the thought of it was much in my mind ; I thought it 
 had gone; and I thought what a strange prophecy I had 
 made in jest, and how it was indeed like to be the end 
 of many letters. But I have written a good few since, 
 and the spell is broken. I am just as pleased, for I 
 earnestly desire to live. This pleasant middle age into 
 whose port we are steering is quite to my fancy. I 
 would cast anchor here, and go ashore for twenty years, 
 and see the manners of the place. Youth was a great 
 time, but somewhat fussy. Now in middle age (bar 
 lucre) all seems mighty placid. It likes me; I spy a 
 little bright cafd in one corner of the port, in front of 
 which I now propose we should sit down. There is 
 just enough of the bustle of the harbour and no more; 
 and the ships are close in, regarding us with stern-win- 
 dows — the ships that bring deals from Norway and par- 
 rots from the Indies. Let us sit down here for twenty 
 years, with a packet of tobacco and a drink, and talk of 
 
 'That is, of a recent attack of hemorrhage. 
 
LETTERS 19 
 
 art and women. By and by, the whole city will sink, 
 and the ships too, and the table, and we also; but wo 
 shall have sat for twenty years and had a fine talk; and 
 by that time, who knows? exhausted the subject. 
 
 I send you a book which (or I am mistook) will please 
 you; it pleased me. But I do desire a book of advent- 
 ure — a romance — and no man will get or write me one. 
 Dumas I have read and re-read too often; Scott, too, 
 and I am short. I want to hear swords clash. I want 
 a book to begin in a good way; a book, I guess, Uke 
 Treasure Island, alas! which I have never read, and can- 
 not though I live to ninety. I would God that some 
 one else had written iti By all that I can learn, it is the 
 very book for my complaint. I like the way I hear it 
 opens; and they tell me John Silver is good fun. And 
 to me it is, and must ever be, a dream unrealised, a book 
 unwritten. O my sighings after romance, or even Skel- 
 tery,* and O! the weary age which will produce me 
 neither! 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 The night was damp and cloudy, the ways foul. The 
 single horseman, cloaked and booted, who pursued his 
 way across Willesden Common, had not met a traveller, 
 when the sound of wheels 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 "Yes, sir," said the old pilot, "she must have dropped 
 into the bay a little afore dawn. A queer craft she 
 looks." 
 
 "She shows no colours," returned the young gentle- 
 man, musingly. 
 
 ' Cheap and sensational romance, so-called from SkeU's Juvenile 
 Drama, a series of melodramatic plays for a t^ theatre, which made 
 a great impression on Stevenson as a boy. See his A Penny Plain 
 and Twopence Coloured. 
 
20 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 " They 're a-lowering of a quarter-boat, Mr. Mark," 
 resumed the old salt. "We shall soon know more of 
 her." 
 
 "Ay," replied the young gentleman called Mark, 
 " and here, Mr. Seadrift, comes your sweet daughter 
 Nancy tripping down the cliff." 
 
 "God bless her kind heart, sir," ejaculated old Sea- 
 drift. 
 
 CHAPTEK I 
 
 The notary, Jean Rossignol, had been summoned to 
 the top of a great house in the Isle St. Louis to make a 
 will; and now, his duties finished, wrapped in a warm 
 roquelaure* and with a lantern swinging from one hand, 
 he issued from the mansion on his homeward way. Lit- 
 tle did he think what strange adventures were to befaU 
 himi 
 
 That is how stories should begin. And I am offered 
 HUSKS instead. 
 
 What should be: What is: 
 
 The Filibuster's Cache. Aunt Anne's Tea Cosy. 
 
 Jerry Abershaw. Mrs. Brierly's Niece. 
 
 Blood Money: A Tale. Society: A Novel. 
 
 R. L. S. 
 
 To EDMtFND GOSSE 
 
 Skerbtvobe, Bournemouth, Jan. 2nd, 1886. 
 
 My Dear Gosse,— Thank you for your letter, so in- 
 
 ter€isting to my vanity. There is a review in the St. 
 
 James's, which, as it seems to hold somewhat of your 
 
 opinions, and is besides written with a pen and not a 
 
 * An old -fashioned type of cloak once need in France. 
 
LETTERS 21 
 
 poker, we think may possibly be yours. The Trinc^ 
 has done fairly well in spite of the reviews, which have 
 been bad: he was, as you doubtless saw, well slated in 
 the Saturday; one paper received it as a child's story; an- 
 other (picture my agony) described it as a " Gilbert com- 
 edy." It was amusing to see the race between me and 
 Justin M'Carthy:^ the Milesian' has won by a length. 
 
 That is the hard part of literature. You aim high, and 
 you take longer over your work, and it will not be so 
 successful as if you had aimed low and rushed it. What 
 the public likes is work (of any kind) a little loosely exe- 
 cuted; so long as it is a little wordy, a little slack, a little 
 dim and knotless, the dear public likes it; it should (if 
 possible) be a little dull into the bargain. I know that 
 good work sometimes hits; but, with my hand on my 
 heart, I think it is by an accident. And I know also 
 that good work must succeed at last; but that is not the 
 doing of the public; they are only shamed into silence 
 or affectation. I do not write for the public; I do write! 
 for money, a nobler deity; and most of all for myself, 
 not perhaps any more noble, but both more intelligent 
 and nearer home. 
 
 Let us tell each other sad stories of the bestiality of 
 the beast whom we feed. What he likes is the news- 
 paper; and to me the press is the mouth of a sewer, 
 where lying is professed as from an university chair, and 
 everything prurient, and ignoble, and essentially dull, 
 finds its abode and pulpit. I do not like mankind; but 
 men, and not all of these — and fewer women. As for 
 respecting the race, and, above all, that fatuous rabble 
 of burgesses called "the public," God save me from 
 such in-eligion! — that way lies disgrace and dishonour. 
 
 ■ Prince Otto. 
 
 ' Irish novelist and political leader. 
 
 ' A name sometimes applied to the Irish. 
 
22 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 There must be something wrong in me, or I would HOt 
 be popular. 
 
 This is perhaps a trifle stronger than my sedate and 
 permanent opinion. Not much, I think. As far the 
 art that we practise, I have never been able to see why 
 its professors should be respected. They chose the 
 primrose path; when they found it was not all prim- 
 roses, but some of it brambly, and much of it uphill, 
 they began to think and to speak of themselves as holy 
 martyrs. But a man is never martyred in any honest 
 sense in the pursuit of his pleasure; and delirium tre- 
 mens has more of the honoiu- of the cross. We were 
 full of the pride of life, and chose, like prostitutes, to 
 live by a pleasure. We should be paid if we give the 
 pleasure we pretend to give; but why should we be hon- 
 oured ? 
 
 I hope some day you and Mrs. Gosse will come for a 
 Sunday; but we must wait till I am able to see people. 
 I am very full of JenkinV life; it is painful, yet very 
 pleasant, to dig into the past of a dead friend, and find 
 him, at every spadeful, shine brighter. I own, as I 
 read, I wonder more and more why he should have 
 taken me to be a friend. He had many and obvious 
 faults upon the face of him; the heart was pure gold. I 
 feel it little pain to have lost him, for it is a loss in which 
 I cannot believe; I take it, against reason, for an ab- 
 sence; if not to-day, then to-morrow, I still fancy I shall 
 see him in the door; and then, now when I know him 
 better, how glad a meeting! Yes, if I could believe in 
 the immortality business, the world would indeed be too 
 good to be true; but we were put here to do what ser- 
 vice we can, for honour and not for hire: the sods cover 
 
 ' Meeming JenkiH, Professor of Engineering at Edinburgh, whera 
 he and Stevenson first formed their life-long friendship. He had 
 been dead about six months when this letter was written. Steven- 
 eon has preserved his memory in the Memoir of Fleeming Jefnkin. 
 
LETTERS 23 
 
 us, and the worm that never dies, the conscience, sleeps 
 well at last; these are the wages, besides what we receive 
 so lavishly day by day; and they are enough for a man 
 who knows his own frailty and sees all things in the 
 proportion of reality. The soul of piety was killed long 
 ago by that idea of reward. Nor is happiness, whether 
 eternal or temporal, the reward that mankind seeks. 
 Happinesses are but his wayside campings; his soul is in 
 the journey; he was bom for the struggle, and only tastes 
 his life in effort and on the condition that he is opposed. 
 How, then, is such a creature, so fiery, so pugnacious, 
 so made up of discontent and aspiration, and such noble 
 and uneasy passions— ^how can he be rewarded but by 
 rest? I would not say it aloud; for man's cherished be- 
 lief is that he loves that happiness which he continually 
 spurns and passes by; and this belief in some ulterior 
 happiness exactly fits him. He does not require to stop 
 and taste it; he can be about the rugged and bitter busi- 
 ness where his heart lies; and yet he can tell himself this 
 fairy tale of an eternal tea-party, and enjoy the notion that 
 fie is both himself and something else; and that his friends 
 will yet meet him, all ironed out and emasculate, and 
 still be lovable, — as if love did not live in the faults of 
 the beloved only, and draw its breath in an unbroken 
 round of forgiveness! But the truth is, we must fight 
 until we die; and when we die there can be no quiet for 
 mankind but complete resumption into — what? — God, 
 let us say — when all these desperate tricks will lie spell- 
 bound at last. 
 
 Here came my dinner and cut this sermon short— 
 Mxusez, B» L. S. 
 
24 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 SECOND JOURNEY TO AMERICA 
 
 To William Akchkb 
 
 In early days in Paris, Stevenson's chivabous feelings were once 
 shocked by the scene in the Demi-Monde of Dumas fils where Suzanne 
 d'Auge is trapped by Olivier de Jalin. Hb correspondent had asked 
 to know exactiy what was the sequel. 
 
 [Saeanac Lake, Spring, 1888?] 
 My Dear Arches, — It happened thus. I came forth 
 from that performance in a breathing heat of indigna- 
 tion. (Mind, at this distance of time and with my in- 
 creased knowledge, I admit there is a problem in the 
 piece; but I saw none then, except a problem in brutal- 
 ity; and I still consider the problem in that case not 
 established.) On my way down the Frangais^ stairs, I 
 trod on an old gentleman's toes, whereupon, with that 
 suavity that so well becomes me, I turned about to apol- 
 ogise, and on the instant, repenting me of that intention, 
 stopped the apology midway, and added something in 
 French to this effect: No, you are one of the Idches^ who 
 have been applauding that piece. I retract my apology. 
 Said the old Frenchman, laying his hand on my arm, 
 and with a smile that was truly heavenly in temperance, 
 irony, good nature, and knowledge of the world, "Ah, 
 monsieur, vous Hes bien jeune!" * 
 Yours very tndy, Robert Loms Stevenson. 
 
 " The Th€4tre Franfais, the most noted theatre in Paris. 
 
 ' Cowards. 
 
 ' Ah, sir, you are very young. 
 
LETTERS 25 
 
 PACIFIC VOYAGES 
 To Cha.ble^ Baxter 
 
 Yacht "Casco," at Sea, neae the Patjmotus,* 
 7 A. M., September 6th, 1888, loilh a dreadful pen. 
 My Dear Charles, — ^Last night as I lay under my 
 blanket in the cockpit, courting sleep, I had a comic 
 sdzure. There was nothing visible but the southern 
 stars, and the steersman there out by the binnacle lamp; 
 we were all looking forward to a most deplorable land- 
 fall on the morrow, praying God we should fetch a tuft 
 of palms which are to indicate the Dangerous Archipel- 
 ago; the night was as warm as milk, and all of a sudden 
 I had a vision of — ^Drummond Street^ It came on me 
 like a flash of lightning: I simply returned thither, and 
 into the past. And when I remember all I hoped 
 and feared as I pickled about Rutherford's in the rain 
 and the east wind; how I feared I should make a mere 
 shipwreck, and yet timidly hoped not; how I feared I 
 should never have a friend, far less a wife, and yet pas- 
 sionately hoped I might; how I hoped (if I did not take 
 to drink) I should possibly write one little book, etc, 
 etc. And then now — ^what a change I I feel somehow 
 as if I should like the incident set upon a brass plate at 
 the corner of that dreary thoroughfare for all students to 
 read, poor devils, when their hearts are down. And I 
 felt I must write one word to you. Excuse me if I write 
 little: when I am at sea, it gives me a headache; when I 
 am in port, I have my diary crying "Give, give." I 
 shall have a fine book of travels, I feel sure; and will tell 
 you more of the South Seas after very few months than 
 
 •Island dependencies of France, about longitude 140° W, and lat- 
 itude 20° S. 
 
26 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 any other writer has done — except Herman Melville* 
 perhaps, who is a howling cheese. Good luck to you, 
 God bless you. — ^Your affectionate friend, R L S. 
 
 To R. A. M. Stevenson* 
 
 HoNOLTJLiT, Hawaiian Islands, February, 1889. ^ 
 My Dear Bob, — ^My extremely foolhardy venture is 
 practically over. How foolhardy it was I don't think I 
 realised. We had a very small schooner, and, like most 
 yachts, over-rigged and over-sparred, and like many 
 American yachts on a very dangerous sail plan. The 
 waters we sailed in are, of coiirse, entirely unlighted, 
 and very badly charted; in the Dangerous Archipel- 
 ago, through which we were fools enough to go, we were 
 perfectly in ignorance of where we were for a whole night 
 and half the next day, and this in the midst of invisible 
 islands and rapid and variable currents; and we were 
 lucky when we found our whereabouts at last. We have 
 twice had all we wanted in the way of squalls: once, as 
 I came on deck, I found the green sea over the cockpit 
 coamings and running down the companion like a brook 
 to meet me; at that same moment the foresail sheet 
 jammed and the captain had no knife; this was the only 
 occasion on the cruise that ever I set a hand to a rope, 
 but I worked like a Trojan, judging the possibility of 
 haemorrhage better than the certainty of drowning. An- 
 other time I saw a rather singular thing: our whole ship's 
 
 ' An American novelist (1819-1891) who wrote stories erf life on 
 the Pacific. 
 
 " Cousin and intimate friend of Stevenson. An art critic noted fon 
 Wb conversational powers. See W. H. Low's A Chronicle of Friend- 
 ships for an accomit of the relationship between the cousins. His 
 conversation is described in the latter portion of Stevenson^ TaUct 
 and Telkers (omitted in these selections). 
 
LETTERS 27 
 
 company as pale as paper from the captain to the cook; 
 we had a black squall asten* on the port side and a 
 white squall ahead to starboard; the complication passed 
 off innocuous, the black squall only fetching us with its 
 tail, and the white one slewing off somewhere else. 
 Twice we were a long while (days) in the close vicin- 
 ity of hurricane weather, but again luck prevailed, and 
 we saw none of it. These are dangers incident to these 
 seas and small craft. What was an amazement, and at 
 the same time a powerful stroke of luck, both our masts 
 were rotten, and we fotmd it out — I was going to say in 
 time, but it was stranger and luckier than that. The 
 bead of the mainmast hung over so that hands were 
 afraid to go to the helm; and less than three weeks be- 
 fore — I am not sure it was more than a fortnight — we 
 had been nearly twelve hours beating off the lee shore of 
 Eimeo (or Moorea, next island to Tahiti) in half a gale 
 of wind with a violent head sea: she would neither tack 
 nor wear once, and had to be boxed off with the main- 
 sail — ^you can imagine what an imgodly show of kites we 
 carried — and yet the mast stood. The very day after 
 that, in the southern bight of Tahiti, we had a near 
 squeak, the wind suddenly coming calm; the reefs were 
 close in with, my eye! what a surf I The pilot thought we 
 were gone, and the captain had a boat cleared, when a 
 lucky squall came to our rescue. My wife, hearing the 
 order given about the boats, remarked to my mother, 
 "Isn't that nice? We shall soon be ashore 1" Thus 
 does the female mind unconsciously skirt along the 
 verge of eternity. Our voyage up here was most dis- 
 astrous — calms, squalls, head sea, waterspouts of rain, 
 hurricane weather all about, and we in the midst of the 
 barricane season, when even the hopeful builder and 
 owner of the yacht Tiad pronounced these seas unfit for 
 her. We ran cut of food, and were quite given up for 
 
28 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 lost in Honolulu: people had ceased to speak to Belle* 
 about the Casco, as a deadly subject. 
 
 But the perils of the deep were part of the programme; 
 and though I am very glad to be done with them for a 
 while and comfortably ashore, where a squall does not 
 matter a snuff to any one, I feel pretty sure I shall want 
 to get to sea again ere long. The dreadful risk I took 
 was financial, and double-headed. First, I had to sink 
 a lot of liioney in the cruise, and if I did n't get health, 
 how was I to get it back? I have got health to a won- 
 derful extent; and as I have the most interesting matter 
 for my book, bar accidents, I ought to get all I have laid 
 out and a profit. But, second (what I own I never con- 
 sider till too late), there was the danger of collisions, of 
 damages and heavy repairs, of disablement, towing, and 
 salvage; indeed, the cruise might have turned round and 
 cost me double. Nor will this danger be quite over till 
 I' hear the yacht is in San Francisco; for though I have 
 shaken the dust of her deck from my feet, I fear (as a 
 point of law) she is still mine till she gets there. 
 
 From my point of view, up to now the cruise has been 
 a wonderful success. I never knew the world was so 
 amusing. On the last voyage we had grown so used to 
 sea-life that no one wearied, though it lasted a full 
 month, except Fanny, who is always ill. All the time 
 our visits to the islands have been more like dreams than 
 realities: the people, the life, the beach-combers, the old 
 stories and songs I have picked up, so interesting; the 
 climate, the scenery, and (in some places) the women, 
 so beautiful. The women are handsomest in Tahiti, the 
 men in the Marquesas; both as fine types as can be im- 
 agined. Lloyd reminds me, I have not told you one 
 characteristic incident of the cruise from a semi-naval 
 
 > Stevenson's step-daughter, Mrs. Strong, who was at this time !!▼■ 
 lug at Honolulu. 
 
LETTEES 29 
 
 point of view. One night we were going ashore in An- 
 aho Bay; the most awful noise on deck; the breakers dis- 
 tinctly audible in the cabin; and there I had to sit below, 
 entertaining in my best style a negroid native chieftain, 
 much the worse for rum I You can imagine the even- 
 ing's pleasure. 
 
 This naval report on cruising in the South Seas would 
 be incomplete without one other trait. On our voyage 
 up here I came one day into the dining-room, the hatch 
 in the floor was open, the ship's boy was below with a 
 baler, and two of the hands were carrying buckets as for 
 a fire; this meant that the pumps had ceased working. 
 
 One stirring day was that in which we sighted Ha- 
 waii. It blew fair, but very strong; we carried jib, fore- 
 sail, and mainsail, all single-reefed, and she carried her 
 lee rail under water and flew. The swell, the heaviest I 
 have ever been out in — I tried in vain to estimate the 
 height, at least fifteen feet — came tearing after us about 
 a point and a half off the wind. We had the best hand 
 — old Louis — at the wheel; and, really, he did nobly, 
 and had noble luck, for it never caught us once. At 
 times it seemed we must have it; Louis would look over 
 his shoulder with the queerest look and dive down his 
 neck into his shoulders; and then it missed us somehow, 
 and only sprays came over our quarter, turning the little 
 outside lane of deck into a mill race as deep as to the 
 cockpit coamings. I never remember anything more de- 
 lightful and exciting. Pretty soon after we were lying 
 absolutely becalmed under the lee of Hawaii, of which 
 we had been warned; and the captain never confessed 
 he had done it on purpose, but when accused, he smiled. 
 Really, I suppose he did quite right, for we stood com- 
 mitted to a dangerous race, and to bring her to the wind 
 would have been rather a heart-sickening manoeuvre. 
 
 li. L. S. 
 \ 
 
30 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 To Mks. R. L. Stevensow 
 
 Kalawao, Molokai [May, i889].* 
 Deae Fanny, — I had a lovely sail up. Captain Cam- 
 eron and Mr. Gilfillan, both bom in the States, yet the 
 first still with a strong Highland, and the second still 
 with a strong Lowland accent., were good company; the 
 night was warm, the victuals plain but good. Mr. Gil- 
 fillan gave me his berth, and I slept well, though I heard 
 the sisters sick in the next state-room, poor souls. Heavy 
 rolling woke me in the morning; I turned in all standing, 
 so went right on the upper deck. The day was on the 
 peep out of a low morning bank, and we were wallow- 
 ing along under stupendous cliffs. As the lights bright- 
 ened, we could see certain abutments and buttresses on 
 their front where wood clustered and grass grew brightly. 
 But the whole brow seemed quite impassable, and my 
 heart sank at the sight. Two thousand feet of rock 
 making 19° (the Captain guesses) seemed quite beyond 
 my powers. However, I had come s^ far; and, to tell 
 you the truth, I was so cowed with fear and disgust that 
 I dared not go back on the adventure in the interests of 
 my own self-respect. Presently we came up with the 
 leper promontory: lowland, quite bare and bleak and 
 harsh, a little town of wooden houses, two churches, a 
 landing-stair, all unsightly, sour, northerly, lying athwart 
 the sunrise, with the great wall of the pali * cutting the 
 world out on the south. Our lepers were sent on the 
 first boat, about a dozen, one poor child very horrid, one 
 white man, leaving a large grown family behind him in 
 Honolulu, and then into the second stepped the sisters 
 
 * The two foUowipg letters were written during and immediately 
 after Stevenson's visit to Molokai, the noted leper settlement and 
 scen« of Father Damien's labours. 
 
 * Pfecipice. 
 
LETTERS 31 
 
 and myself, I do not know how it would have been 
 with me had the sisters not been there. My horror of 
 the horrible is about my weakest point; but the moral 
 loveliness at my elbow blotted all else out; and when I 
 found that one of them was crying, poor soul, quietly 
 imder her veil, I cried a little myself; then I felt as right 
 as a trivet, only a little crushed to be there so uselessly. 
 I thought it was a sin and a shame she should feel un- 
 happy; I turned round to her, and said something like 
 this: "Ladies, God Himself is here to give you welcome. 
 I 'm sure it is good for me to be beside you; I hope it 
 will be blessed to me; I thank you for myself and the 
 good you do me." It seemed to cheer her up; but in- 
 deed I had scarce said it when we were at the landing- 
 stairs, and there was a great crowd, hundreds of (God 
 save us!) pantomime masks in poor human flesh, wait- 
 ing to receive the sisters and the new patients. 
 
 Every hand was offered: I had gloves, but I had made 
 up my mind on the boat's voyage not to give my hand, 
 that seemed less offensive than the gloves. So the sisters 
 and I went up among that crew, and presently I got aside 
 j(for I felt I had no business there) and set off on foot 
 across the promontory, carrying my wrap and the camera. 
 All horror was quite gone from me: to see these dread 
 creatures smile and look happy was beautiful. On my 
 way through Kalaupapa I was exchanging cheerful 
 tUohas^ with the patients coming galloping over on their 
 horses; I was stopping to gossip at house-doors; I was 
 happy, only ashamed of myself that I was here for n© 
 good. One woman was pretty, and spoke good Eng- 
 lish, and was infinitely engaging and (in the old phrase) 
 towardly; she thought I was the new white patient; and 
 when she found I was only a visitor, a curious change 
 came in her face and voice — the only sad thing — morally 
 * The customary Hawaiian greeting. 
 
32 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 sad, I mean — that I met that morning. But for all that, 
 they tell me none want to leave. Beyond Kalaupapa the 
 houses became rare; dry stone dykes, grassy, stony land, 
 one sick pandanus;^ a dreary country; from overhead in 
 the little clinging wood shogs of the pali chirruping of 
 birds fell; the low sun was right in my face; the trade 
 blew pure and cool and delicious; I felt as right as nine- 
 pence, and stopped and chatted with the patients whom 
 I still met on their horses, with not the least disgust. 
 About half-way over, I met the superintendent (a leper) 
 with a horse for me, and O, was n't I glad! But the 
 horse was one of those curious, dogged, cranky brutes 
 that always dully want to go somewhere else, and my 
 traflSc with him completed my crushing fatigue. I got 
 to the guest-house, an empty house with several rooms, 
 kitchen, bath, etc. There was no one there, and I let 
 the horse go loose in the garden, lay down on ihe bed, 
 and fell asleep. 
 
 Dr. Swift woke me and gave me breakfast, then I 
 came back and slept again while he was at the dispen- 
 sary, and he woke me for dinner; and I came back and 
 slept again, and he woke me about six for supper; and 
 then in about an hour I felt tired again, and came up to 
 my solitary guest-house, played the flageolet, and am 
 now writing to you. As yet, you see, I have seen noth- 
 ing of the settlement, and my crushing fatigue (though 
 I believe that was moral and a measure of my coward- 
 ice) and the doctor's opinion make me think the pali 
 hopeless. " You don't look a strong man," said the doc- 
 tor; "but are you sound?" I told him the truth; then 
 he said it was out of the question, and if I were to get up 
 at all, I must be carried up. But, as it seems, men as 
 well as horses continually fall on this ascent: the doctor 
 
 • A Malayan plant with palm-like stem and sword-shaped, spiny 
 leaves. 
 
LETTERS 33 
 
 goes up with a change of clothes — it is plain that to be 
 carried would in itself be very fatiguing to both mind 
 and body; and I should then be at the beginning of thir- 
 teen miles of mountain road to be ridden against time. 
 How should I come through ? I hope you will think me 
 right in my decision: I mean to stay, and shall not be 
 back in Honolulu till Saturday, June first. You must 
 all do the best you can to make ready. 
 
 Dr. Swift has a wife and an infant son, beginning to 
 toddle and run, and they live here as composed as brick 
 and mortar — at least the wife does, a Kentucky German, 
 a fine enough creature, I believe, who was quite amazed 
 at the sisters shedding tears! How strange is mankind! 
 Gilfillan too, a good fellow I think, and far from a stupid, 
 kept up his hard Lowland Scottish talk in the boat while 
 the sister was covering her face; but I believe he knew, 
 and did it (partly) in embarrassment, and part perhaps 
 in mistaken kindness. And that was one reason, too, 
 why I made my speech to them. Partly, too, I did it, 
 because I was ashamed to do so, and remembered one of 
 my golden rules, " When you are ashamed to speak, speak 
 up at once." But, mind you, that rule is only golden 
 with strangers; with your own folks, there are other con- 
 siderations. This is a strange place to be in. A bell 
 has been sounded at intervals while I wrote, now all is 
 still but a musical humming of the sea, not unlike the 
 sound of telegraph wires; the night is quite cool and pitch 
 dark, with a small fine rain; one light over in the leper 
 settlement, one cricket whistling in the garden, my lamp 
 here by my bedside, and my pen cheeping between my 
 inky fingers. 
 
 Next day, lovely morning, slept all night, 80° in the 
 shade, strong, sweet Anaho trade-wind. 
 
 Louis. 
 
34 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 To Sidney Colvin.' 
 
 [Honolulu, May or June, 1889.] 
 My Dear Colvin, — I am just home after twelve days 
 journey to Molokai, seven of them at the leper settle- 
 ment, where I can only say that the sight of so much 
 courage, cheerfulness, and devotion strung me too high 
 to mind the infinite pity and horror of the sights. I used 
 to ride over from Kalawao to Kalaupapa (about three 
 miles across the promontory, the cliff-wall, ivied with 
 forest and yet inaccessible from steepness, on my left), 
 go to the Sisters' home, which is a miracle of neatness, 
 play a game of croquet with seven leper girls (90° in the 
 shade), get a little old-maid meal served me by the Sis- 
 ters, and ride home again, tired enough, but not too tired. 
 The girls have all dolls, and love dressing them. You 
 who know so many ladies delicately clad, and they who 
 know so many dressmakers, please make it known it 
 would be an acceptable gift to send scraps for doll dress- 
 making to the Reverend Sister Maryanne, Bishop 
 Home, Kalaupapa, Molokai, Hawaiian Islands, 
 
 I have seen sights that cannot be told, and heard 
 stories that cannot be repeated: yet I never admired my 
 poor race so much, nor (strange as it may seem) loved 
 life more than in the settlement. A horror of moral 
 beauty broods over the place: that 's like bad Victor 
 Hugo, but it is the only way I can express the sense that 
 lived with me all these days. And this even though it 
 was in great part Catholic, and my sympathies flew never 
 with so much difficulty as towards Catholic virtues. 
 The pass-book kept with heaven stirs me to anger and 
 laughter. One of the sisters calls the place " the ticket 
 office to heaven." Well, what is the odds? They do 
 their darg,^ and do it with kindness and efficiency in- 
 ' See page viii. a Day's work. 
 
LETTERS 35 
 
 credible; and we must take folk's virtues as we find them, 
 and love the better part. Of old Damien/ whose weak- 
 nesses and worse perhaps I heard fully, I think only the 
 more. It was a European peasant: dirty, bigotted, im- 
 tnithful, unwise, tricky, but superb with generosity, 
 residual candour and fundamental good-humour: con- 
 vince him he had done wrong (it might take hours of in- 
 sult) and he would undo what he had done and like his 
 corrector better. A man, with all the grime and paltri- 
 ness of mankind, but a saint and hero all the more for 
 that. The place as regards scenery is grand, gloomy, 
 and bleak. Mighty mountain walls descending sheer 
 along the whole face of the island into a sea unusually 
 deep; the front of the mountain ivied and furred with 
 clinging forest, one viridescent cliff: about half-way from 
 east to west, the low, bare, stony promontory edged ia 
 between the cliff and the ocean; the two little towns 
 (Kalawao and Kalaupapa) seated on either side of it, as 
 bare almost as bathing machines upon a beach; and the 
 population — gorgons and chimseras dire. All this tear 
 of the nerves I bore admirably; and the day after I got 
 away, rode twenty miles along the opposite coast and up 
 into the mountains: they call it twenty, I am doubtful of 
 the figures: I should guess it nearer twelve; but let me 
 take credit for what residents allege; and I was riding 
 again the day after, so I need say no more about health. 
 Honolulu does not agree with me at all: I am always out 
 of sorts there, with slight headache, blood to the head, 
 etc. I had a good deal of work to do and did it with 
 miserable diflBculty; and yet all the time I have been 
 gaining strength, as you see, which is highly encourag- 
 ing. By the time I am done with this cruise I shall have 
 the material for a very singular book of travels: names of 
 strange stories and characters, cannibals, pirates, ancient 
 ' See Father Bamien, p. 193. 
 
36 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 legends, old Polynesian poetry, — never was so generous 
 a farrago. I am going down now to get the story of a 
 shipwrecked family, who were fifteen months on an 
 island with a murderer: there is a specimen. The Pa- 
 cific is a strange place; the nineteenth century only ex- 
 ists theie in spots: all round, it is a no man's land of the 
 ages, a stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and 
 civilisations, virtues and crimes. 
 
 It is good of you to let me stay longer, but if I had 
 known how ill you were, I should be now on my way 
 home. I had chartered my schooner and made all ar- 
 rangements before (at last) we got definite news. I feel 
 highly guilty; I should be back to insult and worry you 
 a little. Our address till further notice is to be ^/o R. 
 Towns and Co., Sydney. That is final: I only got the 
 arrangement made yesterday; but you may now publish 
 it abroad. — Yours ever, t> t a 
 
 Xl> XJ. o« 
 
 LIFE IN SAMOA 
 
 In the Mountain, Apia, Samoa, 
 Monday, November 2d, 1890. 
 ^ My Deae Colvin, — ^This is a hard and interesting 
 and beautiful life that we lead now. Our place is in a 
 deep cleft in 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 
 went crazy over out-door work, and had at last to con- 
 fine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by 
 the board. Nothing is so interesting as weeding, clear- 
 ing, and path-making; the oversight of labourers be- 
 comes a disease; it is quite an effort not to drop into the 
 
LETTERS 37 
 
 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 con- 
 science. And the strange thing that I mark is this: if I 
 go out and make sixpence, bossing my labourers and ply- 
 ing the cutlass or the spade, idiot conscience applauds 
 me; if I sit in the house and make twenty pounds, idiot 
 conscience wails over my neglect and the day wasted. 
 . . . Let me sketch my lads. — Henry — Henry has gone 
 down to town or I could not be writing to you — this were 
 the hour of his English lesson else, when he learns what 
 he calls "long explessions" or "your chief's language" 
 for the matter of an hour and a half — Henry is a chiefling 
 from Savaii;' I once loathed, I now like and — pending 
 fresh discoveries — have a kind of respect for Henry. He 
 does good work for us; goes among the labourers, boss- 
 ing and watching; helps Fanny; is civil, kindly, thought- 
 ful; O si sic semper!^ But will he be "his sometime 
 self throughout the year"? Anyway, he has deserved 
 of us, and he must disappoint me sharply ere I give him 
 up. — Bene — or Peni — Ben, in plain English — is sup- 
 posed to be my ganger;' the Lord love himi God made 
 a truckling coward, there is his full history. He cannot 
 tell me what he wants; he dares not tell me what is wrong; 
 he dares not transmit my orders or translate my cen- 
 sures. And with all this, honest, sober, industriousj 
 miserably smiling over the miserable issue of his own 
 unmanliness, — Paul — a German — cook and steward — a 
 glutton of work — a splendid fellow; drawbacks, three: 
 (1) no cook; (2) an inveterate bungler, a man with twenty 
 thumbs, continually falling in the dishes, throwing out 
 the dinner, preserving the garbage; (3) a dr — , well, don't 
 
 • One of the Samoan Islands. 
 
 » If it were always thus I ' Foreman. 
 
38 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 let us say that — but we daren't let him go to town, and 
 he — poor, good soul — is afraid to be let go. — Lafaele 
 (Raphael), a strong, dull, deprecatoiy man; splendid 
 with an axe, if watched; the better for a rowing, when 
 he calls me "Papa" in the most wheedling tones; des- 
 perately afraid of ghosts, so that he dare not walk alone 
 up in the banana patch. . . . The rest are changing 
 labourers; and to-night, owing to the miserable cowar- 
 dice of Peni, who did not venture to tell me what the men 
 wanted — and which was no more than fair — all are gone 
 — and my weeding in the article of being finished! Pity 
 the sorrows of a planter. 
 I am. Sir, yours, and be jowned to you. The Planter, 
 
 R. L. S. 
 
 Tuesday, 3rd [Nov., 1890]. 
 
 I begin to see the whole scheme of letter-writing; you 
 sit down every day and pour out an equable stream of 
 twaddle. 
 
 This morning all my fears were fled, and all the trou- 
 ble had fallen to the lot of Peni himself, who deserved 
 it; my field was full of weeders; and I am again able to 
 justify the ways of God. All morning I worked at the 
 South Seas, and finished the chapter I had stuck upon 
 on Saturday. Fanny, awfully hove-to with rheumatics 
 and injuries received upon the field of sport and glory, 
 diasing pigs, was unable to go up and down stairs, so 
 she sat upon the back verandah, and my work was 
 chequered by her cries. "Paul, you take a spade to do 
 that— dig a hole first. If you do that, you '11 cut your 
 foot oflPI Here, you boy, what you do there? You no 
 get work? You go find Simel^,* he give you work. Peni, 
 you tell this boy he go find Simel^; suppose Simeld no 
 
 •The "Hemy" of the previous letter. 
 
LETTERS 39 
 
 ^ve him work, you tell him go Vay. I no want him 
 here. That boy no good." — Peni (from the distance in 
 reassurmg tones), "All right, sirl" — Fanny (after a long 
 pause), "Peni, you tell that boy go find Simel^! I no 
 want him stand here all day. I no pay that boy. I see 
 him all day. He no do nothing." — Luncheon, beef, 
 soda^scones, fried bananas, pineapple in claret, coffee. 
 Try to Wiite a poem; no go. Play the flageolet. Then 
 sneakingly off to farmering and pioneering. Four gangs 
 at work on our place; a lively scene; axes crashing 
 and smoke blowing; all the knives are out. But I rob 
 the garden party of one without a stock, and you should 
 see my hand — cut to ribbons. Now I want to do my 
 path up the Vaituliga' single-handed, and I want it to 
 burst on the public complete. Hence, with devilish in- 
 genuity, I begin it at different places; so that if you stum- 
 ble on one section, you may not even then suspect the 
 fulness of my labours. Accordingly, I started in a new 
 place, below the wire, and hoping to work up to it. It 
 was perhaps lucky I had so bad a cutlass, and my smart- 
 ing hand bid me stay before I had got up to the wire, but 
 just in season, so that I was only the better of my ac- 
 tivity, not dead beat as yesterday. 
 
 A strange business it was, and infinitely solitary; away 
 above, the sun was in the high tree-tops; the lianas noosed 
 and sought to hang me; the saplings struggled, and came 
 up with that sob of death that one gets to know so well; 
 great, soft, sappy trees fell at a lick of the cutlass, little 
 tough switches laugJied at and dared my best endeavour. 
 Soon, toiling down in that pit of verdure, I heard blows 
 on the far side, and then laughter. I confess a chill set- 
 tled on my heart. Being so dead alone, in a place where 
 by rights none should be beyond me, I was aware, upon 
 interrogation, if those blows had drawn nearer, I should 
 ' One of the five rivers for which Vailima was named. 
 
40 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 (of course quite unaffectedly) have executed a strategic 
 movement to the rear; and only the other day I was la,- 
 men ting my insensibility to superstition! Am I begin- 
 ning to be sucked in? Shall I become a midnight 
 twitterer like my neighbours? At times I thought the 
 blows were echoes; at times I thought the laughter was 
 from birds. For our birds are strangely human in their 
 calls. Vaea mountain about sim-down sometimes rings 
 with shrill cries, like the hails of merry, scattered children. 
 As a matter of fact, I believe stealthy wood-cutters from 
 Tanugamanono were above me in the wood and answer- 
 able for the blows; as for the laughter, a woman and two 
 children had come and asked Fanny's leave to go up 
 shrimp-fishing in the bum; beyond doubt, it was these 
 I heard. Just at the right time I returned; to wash 
 down, change, and begin this snatch of letter before din- 
 ner was ready, and to finish it afterwards, before Henry 
 has yet put in an appearance for his lesson in "long ex- 
 plessions." 
 
 Dinner: stewed beef and potatoes, baked bananas, 
 new loaf-bread hot from the oven, pineapple in claret. 
 These are great days; we have been low in the past; but 
 now are we as belly-gods, enjoying all things. 
 
 n 
 
 Dec. 2nd, afternoon [1891].* 
 I have kept up the idleness; blew on the pipe^ to Belle's 
 piano; then had a ride in the forest all by my nainsel; 
 back and piped again, and now dinner nearing. Take 
 up this sheet with nothing to say. The weird figure of 
 Faauma is in the room washing my windows, in a black 
 ' To Sidney Colvin. » His flageolet. 
 
/ LETTERS 41 
 
 lavalava (kilt) with a red handkerchief hanging from 
 round her neck between her breasts; not another stitch; 
 her hair close cropped and oiled; when she first came 
 here she was an angelic little stripling, but she is now 
 in full flower — or half-flower — and grows buxom. As 
 I write, I hear her wet cloth moving and grunting with 
 some industry; for I had a word this day with her hus- 
 band on the matter of work and meal-time, when she is 
 always late. And she has a vague reverence for Papa, 
 as she and her enormous husband address me when 
 anything is wrong. Her husband is Lafaele, sometimes 
 called the archangel, of whom I have writ you often. 
 Rest of our household, Talolo, cook; Pulu, kitchen boy, 
 good, steady, industrious lads; Heniy, back again from 
 Savaii, where his love affair seems not to have prospered, 
 with what looks like a spear-wound in the back of his 
 head, of which Mr. Reticence says nothing; Simi, Manu- 
 lee, and two other labom-ers out-doors. Lafaele is pro- 
 vost of the live-stock, whereof now, three milk-cows, one 
 bull-calf, one heifer. Jack, Macfarlane, the mare, Harold, 
 Tifaga Jack, Donald and Edinburgh — seven horses — O, 
 and the stallion — eight horses; five cattle; total, if my 
 arithmetic be correct, thirteen head of beasts; I don't 
 know how the pigs stand, or the ducks, or the chickens; 
 but we get a good many eggs, and now and again a duck- 
 ling or a chickling for the table; the pigs are more solenms 
 and appear only on birthdays and sich. 
 
 m 
 
 Jan. 2nd [1892].* 
 I woke this morning to find the blow quite ended. 
 The heaven was all a mottled gray; even the east quite 
 ' To Sidney Colvin. 
 
42 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 colourless; the downward slope of the island veiled in 
 wafts of vapour, blue like smoke; not a leaf stirred on 
 the tallest tree; only, three miles away below me on the 
 barrier reef, I could see the individual breakers curl and 
 fall, and hear their conjunct roaring rise, as it still rises 
 at 1 p. M., like the roar of a thoroughfare close by. I did 
 a good morning's work, correcting and clarifying my 
 draft, and have now finished for press eight chapters, 
 ninety-one pages, of this piece of journalism. Four 
 more chapters, say fifty pages, remain to be done; I 
 should gain my wager and finish this volume in three 
 months, that is to say, the end should leave me per 
 February mail; I cannot receive it back till the mail of 
 April. Yes, it can be out in time; pray God that it be 
 in time to help.* 
 
 How do journalists fetch up their drivel ? I aim only 
 at clearness and the most obvious finish, positively at no 
 higher degree of merit, not even at brevity — I am sure 
 it could have been all done, with double the time, in 
 two-thirds of the space. And yet it has taken me two 
 months to write 45,500 words; and be damned to my 
 wicked prowess, I am proud of the exploit! The real 
 journalist must be a man not ci brass only, but bronze. 
 Chapter IX. gapes for me, but t shrink on the margin, 
 and go on chattering to you. ... I estimate the whole 
 roughly at 70,000 words. Should anybody ever dream 
 of reading it, it would be found amusing. J^ gg^o = 233 
 printed pages; a respectable little five-bob volume, to 
 bloom unread in shop windows. After that, I'll have a 
 spank at fiction. And rest ? I shall rest in the grave, or 
 when I come to Italy. If only the public will continue 
 to support me I I lost my chance not dying; there seems 
 blooming little fear of it now. I worked close on five 
 
 • He was bu^ at the time -with A Foet-Note to History: Eight Yean 
 f/ Trouble in Samoa. 
 
LETTERS 43 
 
 hours this morning; the day before, close on nine; and 
 unless I finish myself off with this letter, I '11 have an- 
 other hour and a half, or aiblins twa^ before dinner. 
 Poor man, how you must envy me, as you hear of these 
 orgies of work, and you scarce able for a letter. But 
 Lord Colvin how lucky the situations are not reversed, 
 for I have no situation, nor am fit for any. Life is a 
 steigh brae.'' Here, have at Knappe,* and no more 
 clavers! * 
 
 IV 
 
 Thursday, April 5th [1893].' 
 Well, there's no disguise possible; Fanny is not well, 
 and we are miserably anxious. . . . 
 
 Friday, 7th [1893]. 
 I am thankful to say the new medicine relieved her at 
 once. A crape has been removed from the day for all 
 of us. To make things better, the morning is ah! such 
 a morning as you have never seen; heaven upon earth 
 for sweetness, freshness, depth upon depth of unimag- 
 inable colour, and a huge silence broken at this moment 
 only by the far-away murmur of the Pacific and the rich 
 piping of a single bird. You can't conceive what a re- 
 lief this is; it seems a new world. She has such extraor- 
 dinary recuperative power that I do hope for the best. 
 I am as tired as man can be. This is a great trial to a 
 family, and I thank God it seems as if ours was going 
 to bear it well. And oh! if it only lets up, it will be 
 but a pleasant memory. We are all seedy, bar Lloyd;* 
 
 ' Perhaps two. ' Steep hill. 
 
 • German consul in Samoa. * Idle tales. 
 
 « To Sidney Colvin. ' Sae p. x. 
 
44 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON^ 
 
 Fanny, as per above; self nearly extinct; Belle, utterly 
 overworked and bad toothache; Cook, down with a bad 
 foot; Butler, prostrate with a bad leg. Eh, what a 
 faim'ly! 
 
 Sunday [April, 1893]. 
 Grey heaven, raining torrents of rain; occasional thun- 
 der and lightning. Everything to dispirit; but my in- 
 valids are really on the mend. The rain roars like the 
 sea; in the sound of it there is a strange and ominous 
 suggestion of an approaching tramp; something name- 
 less and measureless seems to draw near, and strikes 
 me cold, and yet is welcome. I lie quiet in bed to- 
 day, and think of the universe with a good deal of equa- 
 nimity. I have, at this moment, but the one objection to 
 it; the fracas with which it proceeds. I do not love noise; 
 I am like my grandfather in that; and so many years in 
 these still islands has ingrained the sentiment perhaps. 
 Here are no trains, only men pacing barefoot. No carts 
 or carriages; at worst the rattle of a horse's shoes among 
 the rocks. Beautiful silence; and so soon as this robust- 
 ious rain takes off, I am to drink of it again by oceanfuls. 
 
 Apil IQth [1893]. 
 Several pages of this letter destroyed as beneath scorn; 
 the wailings of a crushed worm; matter in which neither 
 you nor I can take stock. Fanny is distinctly better, I 
 believe all right now; I too am mending, though I have 
 suffered from crushed wormery, which is not good for 
 the body, and damnation to the soul. I feel to-night 
 a baseless anxie<y to write a lovely poem d, propos des 
 bottes de ma grandmbre} I see I am idiotic. I'll try the 
 poem. 
 
 • About nothing. 
 
LETTERS 45 
 
 To Alison Cunningham* 
 
 For a fuller account of the road-making affair here mentioned, 
 see Vailima Letters, pp. 344, 360. 
 
 [Vailima], Ocfoftej- 8th, 1894. 
 
 My Dear Cummt, — So I hear you are ailing? Think 
 shame to yoizrselll So you think there is nothing better 
 to be done with time than that? and be sure we can all 
 do much ourselves to decide whether we are to be ill or 
 Weill like a man on the gymnastic bars. We are all 
 pretty well. As for me, there is nothing the matter with 
 me in the world, beyond the disgusting circumstance that 
 I am not so young as once I was. Lloyd has a gymnastic 
 machine, and practises upon it every morning for an 
 hour: he is beginning to be a kind of youn^ Samson. 
 Austin' grows fat and brown, and gets on not so ill with 
 his lessons, and my mother is in great price. We are 
 having knock-me-down weather for heat; I never re- 
 member it so hot before, and I fancy it means we are to 
 have a hurricane again this year, I think; since we came 
 here, we have not had a single gale of wind I The Pa- 
 cific is but a child to the North Sea; but when she does 
 get excited, and gets up and girds herself, she can do 
 something good. We have had a very interesting busi- 
 ness here. I helped the chiefs who were in prison; and 
 when they were set free, what should they do but offer 
 to make a part of my road for me out of gratitude ? Well, 
 I was ashamed to refuse, and the trumps dug my road for 
 me, and put up this inscription on a board: — 
 
 " Considering the great love of His Excellency Tttsitala 
 in his loving care of its in our tribulation in the prison, 
 we have made this great gift; it shall never be mvMy, U 
 
 • The faithful nurse of Stevenson's boyhood. 
 ■ Giandson of Mrs. R. L. Stevenson. 
 
46 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 shall go on for ever, this road that we have diig!" We had 
 a great feast when it was done, and I read them a kind 
 of lecture, which I dare say Auntie will have, and can 
 let you see. Weel, guid-bye to ye, and joy be wi' ye! 
 I hae nae time to say mair. They say I 'm gettin' fat 
 I — a fact! — ^Your laddie, with all love, 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 
THE AMATEUE EMIGRANT 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT* 
 
 THE SECOND CABIN 
 
 I FIRST encountered my fellow-passengers on tke 
 Broomielav? in Glasgow. Thence we descended the 
 Clyde in no familiar spirit, but looking askance on each 
 other as on possible enemies. A few Scandinavians, who 
 had already grown acquainted on the North Sea, were 
 friendly and voluble over their long pipes; but among 
 English speakers distance and suspicion reigned supreme. 
 The sun was soon overclouded, the wind freshened and ' 
 grew sharp as we continued to descend the widening 
 estuary; and with the falling temperature the gloom 
 among the passengers increased. Two of the women 
 wept. Any one who had come aboard might have sup- 
 posed we were all absconding from the law. There 
 was scarce a word interchanged, and no common senti- 
 ment but that of cold united us, until at length, hav- 
 ing touched at Greenock,' a pointing arm and a rush 
 
 • Written during the autumn and winter before Stevenson's mar- 
 riage (1879-1880), while the author was in California. It is drawn 
 direct from life, being based on Stevenson's experiences in crossing 
 the Atlantic the previous summer. Preparations for printing it 
 were made at once; but for various reasons publication was indefi- 
 nitely postponed. The work was abridged and revised in 1894, and 
 
 Eublished in the Edinburgh Edition, January, 1895. Writing to 
 idney Colvin when The Amateur Emigrant was about half done, 
 Stevenson says, " I believe it will be more popular than any of my 
 others; the canvas is so much more popular and larger too." This 
 statement was, perhaps, too sanguine; but the last clause shows 
 where the real strength of the Emigrant lies. 
 
 • A quay just below Glasgow bridge. 
 
 • A seaport on the Clyde nineteen miles northwest of Glasgow. 
 
 49 
 
60 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 to starboard now announced that our ocean steamer was 
 in sight. There she lay in mid-river, at the tail of the 
 Bank, her sea-signal flying: a wall of bulwark, a street 
 of white deck-houses, an aspiring forest of spars, larger 
 than a church, and soon to be as populous as many an in- 
 corporated town in the land to which she was to bear us. 
 
 I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger. Although 
 anxious to see the worst of emigrant life, I had some 
 work to finish on the voyage, and was advised to go by 
 the second cabin, where at least I should have a table at 
 conunand. The advice was excellent; but to imderstand 
 the choice, and what I gained, some outline of the in- 
 ternal disposition of the ship will first be necessary. In 
 her very nose is Steerage No. 1, down two pair of stairs. 
 A little abaft, another companion, labelled Steerage 
 No. 2 and 3, gives admission to three galleries, two nm- 
 ning forward towards Steerage No. 1, and the third aft 
 towards the engines. The starboard forward gallery is 
 the second cabin. Away abaft the engines and below 
 the officers' cabins, to complete our survey of the vessel, 
 there is yet a third nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5. 
 The second cabin, to return, is thus a modified oasis in 
 the very heart of the steerages. Through the thin par- 
 tition you can hear the steerage passengers being sick, 
 the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied 
 accents in which they converse, the crying of their chil- 
 dren terrified by this new experience, or the clean flat 
 smack of the parental hand in chastisement. 
 
 There are, however, many advantages for the inhabi- 
 tant of this strip. He does not require to bring his own 
 bedding or dishes, but finds berths and a table com- 
 pletely if somewhat roughly furnished. He enjoys a 
 distinct superiority in diet; but this, strange to say, dif- 
 fers not only on different ships, but on the same ship 
 according as her head is to the east or west. In my own 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 51 
 
 experience, the principal difference between our table 
 and that of the true steerage passenger was the table 
 itself, and the crockery plates from which we ate. But 
 lest I should show myself ungrateful, let me recapitulate 
 every advantage. At breakfast, we had a choice be- 
 tween tea and coffee for beverage; a choice not easy to 
 make, the two were so surprisingly alike. J found that 
 I could sleep after the coffee and lay awake after the 
 tea, which is proof conclusive of some chemical dis- 
 parity; and even by the palate I could distinguish a 
 smack of snuff in the former from a flavour of boiling 
 and dish-cloths in the second. As a matter of fact, I 
 have seen passengers, after many sips, still doubting 
 which had been supplied them. In the way of eatables 
 at the same meal we were gloriously favoured; for in 
 addition to porridge, which was common to all, we had 
 Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and sometimes ris- 
 soles. The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, boiled salt 
 junk, and potatoes, was, I believe, exactly common to 
 the steerage and the second cabin; only I have heard it 
 rumoured that our potatoes were of a superior brand; 
 and twice a week, on pudding-days, instead of duff, we 
 had a saddle-bag filled with currants imder the name of 
 a plum-pudding. At tea we were served with some 
 broken meat from the saloon; sometimes in the compara- 
 tively elegant form of spare patties or rissoles; but as a 
 general thing, mere chicken-bones and flakes of fish, 
 neither hot nor cold. If these were not the scrapings of 
 plates their looks belied them sorely; yet we were all too 
 hungry to be proud, and fell to these leavings greedily. 
 These, the bread, which was excellent, and the soup and 
 porridge which were both good, formed my whole diet 
 throughout the voyage; so that except for the broken 
 meat and the convenience of a table I might as well have 
 been in the steerage outright. Had they given me por- 
 
52 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 ridge again in the evening, I should have been perfectly 
 contented with the fare. As it was, with a few biscuits 
 and some whislqr and water before turning in, I kept 
 my body going and my spirits up to the mark. 
 
 The last particidar in which the second-cabin passen- 
 ger remarkably stands ahead of his brother of the steer- 
 age is one altogether of sentiment. In the steerage there 
 are males and females; in the second cabin ladies and 
 gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I thought 
 I was only a male; but in the course of a voyage of dis- 
 covery between decks, I came on a brass plate, and 
 learned that I was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it, 
 of course. I was lost in the crowd of males and females, 
 and rigorously confined to the same quarter of the deck. 
 Who could tell whether I housed on the port or star- 
 board side of steerage No. 2 and 3? And it was only 
 there that my superiority became practical; everywhere 
 else I was incognito, moving among my inferiors with 
 simplicity, not so much as a swagger to indicate that I 
 was a gentleman after all, and had broken meat to tea. 
 Still, I was like one with a patent of nobility in a drawer 
 at home; and when I felt out of spirits I could go down 
 and refresh myself with a look of that brass plate. 
 
 For all these advantages I paid but two guineas. Six 
 guineas is the steerage fare; eight that by the second 
 cabin; and when you remember that the steerage pas- 
 senger must supply bedding and dishes, and, in five cases 
 out of ten, either brings some dainties with him, or pri- 
 vately pays the steward for extw, rations, the difference 
 in price becomes almost nominal. Air comparatively 
 fit to breathe, food comparatively varied, and the satis- 
 faction of being still privately a gentleman, may thus 
 be had almost for the asking. Two of my fellow-pas- 
 sengers in the second cabin had already made the pas- 
 sage by the cheaper fare, and declared it was an ex- 
 
THE AJVJATEUR EMIGRANT 53 
 
 periment not to be repeated. As I go on to tell about 
 my steerage friends, tfie reader will perceive that they 
 were not alone in their opinion. Out of ten with whom I 
 was more or less intimate, I am sure not fewer than five 
 vowed, if they returned, to travel second cabin; and all 
 who had left their wives behind them assured me they 
 would go without the comfort of their presence until they 
 could afford to bring them by saloon. 
 
 Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the 
 most interesting on board. Perhaps even in the saloon 
 there was as much good-will and character. Yet it had 
 some elements of curiosity. There was a mixed group 
 of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen, one of whom, gen- 
 erally known by the name of " Johnny," in spite of his 
 own protests, greatly diverted us by his clever, cross- 
 country efforts to speak English, and became on the 
 strength of that an universal favourite — it takes so little 
 in this world of shipboard to create a popularity. There 
 was, besides, a Scots mason, known from his favourite 
 dish as " Irish Stew," three or four nondescript Scots, a 
 fine young Irishman, O'Reilly, and a pair of young men 
 who deserve a special word of condemnation. One of 
 them was Scots; the other claimed to be American; ad- 
 mitted, after some fencing, that he was bom in Eng- 
 land; and ultimately proved to be an Irishman bom and 
 nurtured, but ashamed to own his coimtry. He had a 
 sister on board, whom he faithfully neglected through- 
 out the voyage, though she was not only sick, but much 
 his senior, and had nursed and cared for him in child- 
 hood. In appearance he was like an imbecile Henry 
 the Third of France. The Scotsman, though perhaps as 
 big an ass, was not so dead of heart; and I have only 
 bracketed them together because they were fast friends, 
 and disgraced themselves equally by their conduct at the 
 table. 
 
54 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had a newly 
 iiarried couple, devoted to each other, with a jJeasant 
 story of how they had first seen each other years ago at 
 a preparatory school, and that very afternoon he had car- 
 ried her books home for her. I do not know if this story 
 will be plain to Southern readers; but to me it recalls 
 many a school idyll, with wrathful swains of eight and 
 nine confronting each other stride-legs, flushed with jeal- 
 ousy; for to carry home a young lady's books was both 
 a delicate attention and a privilege. 
 
 Then there was an old lady, or indeed I am not sure 
 that she was as much old as antiquated and strangely 
 out of place, who had left her husband, and was travel- 
 ling all the way to Kansas by herself. We had to take 
 her own word that she was married; for it was sorely con- 
 tradicted by the testimony of her appearance. Nature 
 seemed to have sanctified her for the single state; even 
 the colour of her hair was incompatible with matrimony, 
 and her husband, I thought, should be a man of saintly 
 spirit and phantasmal bodily presence. She was ill, 
 poor thing; her soul turned from the viands; the dirty 
 tablecloth shocked her like an impropriety; and the 
 whole strength of her endeavour was bent upon keeping 
 her watch true to Glasgow time till she should reach New 
 York. They had heard reports, her husband and she, 
 of some unwarrantable disparity of hours between these 
 two cities; and with a spirit commendably scientific, had 
 seized on this occasion to put them to the proof. It was 
 a good thing for the old lady; for she passed much leisure 
 time in studying the watch. Once, when prostrated by 
 sickness, she let it nm down. It was inscribed on her 
 harmless mind in letters of adamant that the hands of 
 a watch must never be turned backwards; and so it be- 
 hoved her to lie in wait for the exact moment ere she 
 started it again. When she imagined this was about 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 55 
 
 due, she sought out one of the young second-cabin Scots- 
 men, who was embarked on the same experiment as her- 
 self and had hitherto been less neglectful. She was in 
 quest of two o'clock; and when she learned it was al- 
 ready seven on the shores of Clyde, she lifted up her 
 voice and cried "Gravy!" I had not heard this inno- 
 cent expletive since I was a young child; and I suppose 
 it must have been the same with the other Scotsmen 
 present, for we all laughed our fill. 
 
 Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr. 
 Jones. It would be diflBcult to say whether I was his 
 right-hand man, or he mine, during the voyage. Thus 
 at table I carved, while he only scooped gravy; but at 
 our concerts, of which more anon, he was the president 
 who called up performers to sing, and I but his mes- 
 senger who ran his errands and pleaded privately with 
 the over-modest. I knew I liked Mr. Jones from the 
 moment I saw him. I thought him by his face to be 
 Scottish; nor could his accent undeceive me. For as 
 there is a lingua franca^ of many tongues on the moles 
 and in the feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a 
 free or common accent among English-speaking men 
 who follow the sea. They catch a twang in a New Eng- 
 land port; from a cockney skipper, even a Scotsman 
 sometimes learns to drop an h; a word of a dialect is 
 picked up from another hand in the forecastle; until often 
 the result is undecipherable, and you have to ask for the 
 man's place of birth. So it was with Mr. Jones. I 
 thought him a Scotsman who had been long to sea; and 
 yet he was from Wales, and had been most of his life 
 a blacksmith at an inland forge; a few years in Amer- 
 ica and half a score of ocean voyages having sufficed 
 to modify bis speech into the common pattern. By his 
 
 • A phrase applied to any mixed jargon formed from worda of 
 several languages and used as an international dialect. 
 
66 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 own account he was both strong and skilful in his trade. 
 A few years back, he had been married and after a 
 fashion a rich man; now the wife was dead and the money 
 gone. But his was the nature that looks forward, and 
 goes on from one year to another and through all the 
 extremities of fortune xmdismayed; and if the sky were 
 to fall to-morrow, I should look to see Jones, the day 
 following, perched on a step-ladder and getting things 
 to rights. He was always hovering roimd inventions like 
 a bee over a flower, and lived in a dream of patents. He 
 had with him a patent medicine, for instance, the com- 
 position of which he had bought years ago for five dol- 
 lars from an American peddler, and sold the other day 
 for a hundred poimds (I think it was) to an English 
 apothecary. It was called Golden Oil, cured ail mal- 
 adies without exception; and I am bound to say that I 
 partook of it myself with good results. It is a character 
 of the man that he was not only perpetually dosing him- 
 self with Golden Gil, but wherever there was a head 
 aching or a finger cut, there would be Jones with his 
 bottle. 
 
 If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was 
 to study character. Many an hour have we two walked 
 upon the deck dissecting our neighbours in a spirit that 
 was too purely scientific to be called imkind; whenever 
 a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation, you 
 might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and 
 we could hardly go to bed in comfort till we had ex- 
 changed notes and discussed the day's experience. We 
 were then like a couple of anglers comparing a day's 
 kill. But the fish we angled for were of a metaphysical 
 species, and we angled as often as not in one another's 
 baskets. Once, in the midst of a serious talk, each 
 found there was a scrutinising eye upon himself; I own 
 I paused in embarrassment at this double detection; but 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 57 
 
 Jones, with a better civility, broke into a peal of unaf- 
 fected laughter, and declared, what was the truth, that 
 there was a pair of us indeed. 
 
 EARLY IMPRESSIONS 
 
 We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and 
 early on the Friday forenoon we took in our last batch 
 of emigrants at Lough Foyle, in Ireland, and said fare- 
 well to Europe. The company was now complete, and 
 began to draw together, by inscrutable magnetisms, 
 upon the decks. There were Scots and Irish in plenty, 
 a few English, a few Americans, a good handful of Scan- 
 dinavians, a German or two, and one Russian; all now 
 belonging for ten days to one small iron country on the 
 deep. 
 
 As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fel- 
 low-passengers, thus curiously assorted from all north- 
 ern Europe, I began for the first time to understand the 
 nature of emigration. Day by day throughout the pas- 
 sage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on to 
 the shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear 
 and melancholy. Emigration, from a word of the most 
 cheerful import, came to soimd most dismally in my ear. 
 There is nothing more agreeable to picture and noth- 
 ing more pathetic to behold. The abstract idea, as con- 
 ceived at home, is hopeful and adventurous. A young 
 man, you fancy, scorning restraints and helpers, issues 
 forth into life, that great battle, to fight for his own hand. 
 The most pleasant stories of ambition, of difficulties over- 
 come, and of ultimate success, are but as episodes to 
 this great epic of self-help. The epic is composed of 
 individual heroisms; it stands to them as the victorious 
 war which subdued S|| CSfro^"© stands to the personal 
 
58 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and was 
 adequately rewarded with a medal. For in emigration 
 the young men enter direct and by the shipload on their 
 heritage of work; empty continents swarm, as at the 
 bo'sun's whistle, with industrious hands, and whole new 
 empires are domesticated to the service of man. 
 
 This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to 
 consist mostly of embellishments. The more I saw of 
 my fellow-passengers, the less I was tempted to the lyric 
 note. Comparatively few of the men were below thirty; 
 many were married, and encumbered with families; not 
 a few were already up in years; and this itself was out 
 of tune with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant 
 should certainly be young. Again, I thought he should 
 offer to the eye some bold type of humanity, with bluff 
 or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager and 
 pushing disposition. Now those around me were for 
 the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family 
 men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed 
 to place themselves in life, and people who had seen bet- 
 ter days. Mildness was the prevailing character; mild 
 mirth and mild endurance. In a word, I was not tak- 
 ing part in an impetuous and conquering sally, such as 
 swept over Mexico or Siberia, but found myself, like 
 Marmion, " in the lost battle, borne down by the flying." 
 
 Labouring mankind had in the last years, and through- 
 out Great Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing 
 series of defeats. I had heard vaguely of these reverses; 
 of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the Tyne,* 
 the cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of 
 homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow 
 with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless 
 strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them 
 home to me or represented these distresses livingly to my 
 ■ A river in northern England. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 59 
 
 Imagination. A turn of the market may be a calamity 
 as disastrous as the French retreat from Moscow; but it 
 hardly lends itself to lively treatment, and makes a tri- 
 fling figure in the morning papers. We may struggle as 
 we please, we are not born economists. The individual 
 is more affecting than the mass. It is by the scenic ac- 
 cidents, and the appeal to the carnal eye, that for the 
 most part we grasp the significance of tragedies. Thus 
 it was only now, when I found myself involved in the 
 rout, that I began to appreciate how sharp had been the 
 battle. We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, 
 the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had 
 been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one 
 land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though 
 one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. 
 We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of Eng- 
 land. Yet it must not be supposed that these people ex- 
 hibited depression. The scene, on the contrary, was 
 cheerful. Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All 
 were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination 
 to innocent gaiety. Some were heard to sing, and all be- 
 gan to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready 
 laughter. 
 
 The children found each other out like dogs, and ran 
 about the decks scraping acquaintance after their fash- 
 ion also. "What do you call your mither?" I heard 
 one ask. " Mawmaw," was the reply, indicating, I fancy, 
 a shade of difference in the social scale. When people 
 pass each other on the high seas of life at so early an age, 
 the contact is but slight, and the relation more like what 
 we may imagine to be the friendship of flies than that of 
 men; it is so quickly joined, so easily dissolved, so open 
 in its communications and so devoid of deeper human 
 qualities. The children, I observed, were all in a band, 
 and as thick as thieves at a fair, while their elders were 
 
60 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 still ceremoniously manceuvring on the outskirts of ac- 
 quaintance. The sea, the ship, and the seamen were 
 soon as familiar as home to these half-conscious little 
 ones. It was odd to hear them, throughout the voyage, 
 employ shore words to designate portions of the vessel. 
 " Go 'way doon to yon dyke," I heard one say, probably 
 ,' meaning the bulwark. I often had my heart in my 
 mouth, watching them climb into the shrouds or on the 
 rails, while the ship went swinging through the waves; 
 and I admired and envied the courage of their mothers, 
 who sat by in the sun and looked on with composure at 
 these perilous feats. " He '11 maybe be a sailor," I heard 
 one remark; "now 's the time to learn." I had been on 
 the point of running forward to interfere, but stood back 
 at that, reproved. Very few in the more delicate classes 
 have the nerve to look upon the peril of one dear to them; 
 but the life of poorer folk, where necessity is so much 
 more immediate and imperious, braces even a mother to 
 this extreme of endurance. And perhaps, after all, it is 
 better that the lad should break his neck than that you 
 should break his spirit. 
 
 And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I 
 must mention one little fellow, whose family belonged 
 to Steerage No. 4 and 5, and who, wherever he went, 
 was like a strain of music round the ship. He was an 
 ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint white 
 hair in a tangle, his face smeared with suet and treacle; 
 but he ran to and fro with so natural a step, and fell and 
 picked himself up again with such grace and good- 
 humour, that he might fairly be called beautiful when he 
 was in motion. To meet him, crowing with laughter 
 and beating an accompaniment to his own mirth with 
 a tin spoon upon a tin cup, was to meet a little triumph 
 of the human species. Even when his mother and the 
 rest of his family lay sick and prostrate around him, he 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 61 
 
 sat upright in their midst and sang aloud in the pleasant 
 heartlessness of infancy. 
 
 Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made 
 but a few advances. We discussed the probable dura- 
 tion of the voyage, we exchanged pieces of information, 
 naming otir trades, what we hoped to find in the new 
 world, or what we were fleeing from in the old;^ and, 
 above all, we condoled together over the food and the 
 vileness of the steerage. One or two had been so near 
 famine that you may say they had run into the ship with 
 the devil at their heels; and to these all seemed for the 
 best in the best of possible steamers. But the majority 
 were hugely discontented. Coming as they did from a 
 country in so low a state as Great Britain, many of them 
 from Glasgow, which commercially speaking was as good 
 as dead, and many having long been out of woric, I 
 was surprised to find them so dainty m their notions. 
 I myself lived almost exclusively on bread, porridge, and 
 soup, precisely as it was supplied to them, and found it, 
 jf not luxurious, at least sufficient. But these working 
 men were loud in their outcries. It was not "food for 
 human beings," it was "only fit for pigs," it was "a dis- 
 grace." Many of them lived almost entirely upon bis- 
 cuit, others on their own private supplies, and some paid 
 extra for better rations from the ship. This marvellously 
 changed my notion of the degree of luxury habitual to 
 the artisan. I was prepared to hear him grumble, for 
 grumbling is the traveller's pastime; but I was not pre- 
 pared to find him turn away from a diet which was pal- 
 atable to myself. Words I should have disregarded, or 
 taken with a liberal allowance; but when a man prefers 
 dry biscuit there can be no question of the sincerity of 
 his disgust. 
 
 With one of their complaints I could most heartily 
 sympathise. A single night of the steerage had filled 
 
62 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 them with horror. I had myself suffered, even in my 
 decent second-cabin berth, from the lack of air; and as 
 the night promised to be fine and quiet, I determined to 
 sleep on deck, and advised all who complained of their 
 quarters to follow my example. I daresay a dozen of 
 others agreed to do so, and I thought we should have 
 been quite a party. Yet, when I brought up my rug 
 about seven bells, there was no one to be seen but the 
 watch. That chimerical terror of good night-air, which 
 makes men close their windows, list their doors, and 
 seal themselves up with their own poisonous exhala- 
 tions, had sent all these healthy workmen down below. 
 One would think we had been brought up in a fever 
 country; yet in England the most malarious districts are 
 in the bedchambers. 
 
 I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half pleased 
 to have the night so quietly to myself. The wind had 
 hauled a little ahead on the starboard bow, and was dry 
 but chilly. I found a shelter near the fire-hole, and made 
 myself snug for the night. The ship moved over the 
 imeven sea with a gentle and cradling movement. The 
 ponderous, organic labours of the engine in her bowels 
 occupied the mind, and prepared it for slumber. From 
 time to time a heavier lurch would disturb me as I lay, 
 and recall me to the obscure borders of consciousness; 
 or I heard, as it were through a veil, the clear note of the 
 clapper on the brass and the beautiful sea-pry, "All's 
 well!" I know nothing, whether for poetry or music, 
 that can surpass the effect of these two syllables in the 
 darkness of a night at sea. 
 
 The day dawned fairly enough, and during the early 
 part we had some pleasant hours to improve acquaint- 
 ance in the open air; but towards nightfall the wind 
 freshened, the rain began to fall, and the sea rose so high 
 that it was diflBcult to keep one's footing on the deck. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 83 
 
 f have spoken of our concerts. We were indeed a musi- 
 cal ship's company, and cheered our way into exile with 
 the fiddle, the accordion, and the songs of all nations. 
 Good, bad, or indifferent — Scottish, English, Irish, Rus- 
 sian, German or Norse, — the songs were received with 
 generous applause. Once or twice, a recitation, very 
 spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scottish 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 all 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 many mutes at a funeral. I have never 
 seen decorum pushed so far; and as this was not expected, 
 the quadrilte was soon whistled down, and the dancers 
 departed under a cloud. Eight Frenchmen, even eight 
 Englishmen from another rank of society, would have 
 dared to make some fun for themselves and the specta- 
 tors; but the working man, when sober, takes an extreme 
 and even melancholy view of personal deportment. A 
 fifth-form school-boy is not more careful of dignity. He 
 dares not be comical; his fun must escape from him 
 unprepared, and> above ail, it must be unaccompanied 
 by any physical demonstration. I like his society under 
 most circumstances, but let me never again join with 
 him in public gambols. 
 
 But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed 
 over modesty and even the inclemencies of sea and sky. 
 On this rough Saturday night, we got together by the 
 main deck-house, in a place sheltered from the wind 
 and rain. Some clinging to a 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 vio- 
 lent lurching of the ship; and when we were thus dis- 
 posed, sang to our heart's content. Some of the songs 
 
64 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 were appropriate to the scene; others strikingly the re^ 
 verse. B^tard doggrel of the music-hall, such as, 
 "Around her Splendid form, I weaved the magic circle," 
 sounded bald, bleak, and pitifully silly. "We don't 
 want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do," was in some 
 measure saved by the vigour and unanimity with which 
 the chorus was thrown forth into the night. I observed 
 a Platt-Deutsch mason, entirely innocent of English, 
 adding heartily to the general effect. And perhaps the 
 German mason is but a fair example of the sincerity 
 with which the song was rendered; for nearly all with 
 whom I conversed upon the subject were bitterly op- 
 posed to war, and attributed their own misfortimes, and 
 frequently their own taste for whisky, to the campaigns 
 in Zululand and Afghanistan. 
 
 Every now and again, however, some song that 
 touched the pathos of our situation was given forth; 
 and you could hear by the voices that took up the bur- 
 den how the sentiment came home to each. "The 
 Anchor's Weighed" was true for us. We were indeed 
 "Rocked on the bosom of the stormy deep." How 
 many of us could say with the singer, " I 'm lonely to- 
 night, love, without you," or " Go, some one, and tell 
 them from me, to write me a letter from homel" And 
 when was there a more appropriate moment for "Auld 
 Lang Syne" than now, when the land, the friends, and 
 the affections of that mingled but beloved time were 
 fading and fleeing behmd us in the vessel's wake? It 
 pointed forward to the hour when these labours should 
 be overpast, to the return voyage, and to many a meet- 
 ing in the sanded inn, when those who had parted in 
 the spring of youth should again drink a cup of kindness 
 in their age. Had not Burns contemplated emigration, 
 I scarce believe he would have found that note. 
 
 All Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy; 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 65 
 
 many were prostrated by sickness; only five sat down to 
 tea in the second cabin, and two of these departed 
 abruptly ere the meal was at an end. The Sabbath was 
 observed strictly by the majority of the emigrants. I 
 heard an old woman express her surprise that " the ship 
 didna gae doon," as she saw some one pass her with 
 a chess-board on the holy day. Some sang Scottish 
 psalms. Many went to service, and in true Scottish 
 fashion came back ill pleased with their divine. "I 
 didna think he was an experienced preacher," said one 
 girl to me. 
 
 It was a bleak, uncomfortable day; but at night, by 
 six bells, although the wind had not yet moderated, the 
 clouds were all wrecked and blown away behind the 
 rim of the horizon, and the stars came out thickly over- 
 head. I saw Venus burning as steadily and sweetly 
 across this hurly-burly of the winds and waters as ever 
 at home upon the summer woods. The engine pounded, 
 the screw tossed but of the water with a roar, and shook 
 the ship from end to end; the bows battled with loud re- 
 ports against the billows: and as I stood in the lee-scup- 
 pers and looked up to where the funnel leaned out, over 
 my head, vomiting smoke, and the black and monstrous 
 topsails blotted, at each lurch, a different crop of stars, 
 it seemed as if all this trouble were a thing of small ac- 
 count, and that just above the mast reigned peace un- 
 broken and eternal. 
 
 STEERAGE SCENES 
 
 Our companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3) was a favour- 
 ite resort. Down one flight of stairs there was a com- 
 paratively large open space, the center occupied by a 
 hatchway, which made a convenient seat for about 
 
66 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 twenty persons, while barrels, coils of rope, and the car* 
 penter's bench afforded perches for perhaps as many 
 more. The canteen, or steerage bar, was on one side 
 of the stair; on the other, a no less attractive spot, the 
 cabin of the indefatigable interpreter. I have seen peo- 
 ple packed into this space like herrings in a barrel, and 
 many merry evenings prolonged there Tmtil five bells, 
 when the lights were ruthlessly extinguished and all must 
 go to roost. 
 
 It had been rumoured since Friday that there was a 
 fiddler aboard, who lay sick and unmelodious in Steer- 
 age No. 1; and on the Monday forenoon, as I came down 
 the companion, I was saluted by something in Straths- 
 pey* time. A white-faced Orpheus was cheerily play- 
 ing to an audience of white-faced women. It was as 
 much as he could do to play, and some of his hearers 
 were scarce able to sit; yet they had crawled from their 
 bunks at the first experimental flourish, and foxmd bet- 
 ter than medicine in the music. Some of the heaviest 
 heads began to nod in time, and a degree of animation 
 looked from some of the palest eyes. Humanly speaking, 
 it is a more important matter to play the fiddle, even 
 badly, than to write huge works upon recondite sub- 
 jects. What could Mr. Darwin have done for these sick 
 women? But this fellow scraped away; and the world 
 was positively a better place for all who heard him. We 
 have yet to understand the economical value of these 
 mere accomplishments. I told the fiddler he was a 
 happy man, carrying happiness about with him in his 
 fiddle-case, and he seemed alive to the fact. 
 
 " It is a privilege," I said. He thought a while upon 
 the word, turning it over m his Scots head, and then an- 
 swered with conviction, "Yes, a privilege." 
 
 That night I was summoned by "Merrily elanced the 
 
 ' A dance for two people, or a lively tune adapted to such a dance. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 67» 
 
 Quaker's wife" inco the companion of Steerage No. 4 
 and 5. This was, properly speaking, but a strip across 
 a deck-house, lit by a sickly lantern which swung to 
 and fro with the motion of the ship. Through the open 
 slide-door we had a glimpse of a grey night sea, with 
 patches of phosphorescent foam flying, swift as birds, 
 into the wake, and the horizon rising and falling as the 
 vessel rolled to the wind. In the center the companion 
 ladder plunged down sheerly like an open pit. Below, 
 on the first landing, and lighted by another lamp, lads 
 and lasses danced, not more than three at a time for lack 
 of space, in jigs and reels and hornpipes. Above, on 
 either side, there was a recess railed with iron, perhaps 
 two feet wide and four long, which stood for orchestra 
 and seats of honour. In the one balcony, five slatternly 
 Irish lasses sat woven in a comely group. In the other 
 was posted Orpheus, his body, which was convulsively 
 in motion, forming an odd contrast to his sonmolent, 
 imperturbable Scots face. His brother, a dark man with 
 a vehement, interested countenance, who made a god 
 of the fiddler, sat by with open mouth, drinking in the 
 general admiration and throwing out remarks to kin- 
 dle it. 
 
 "That 's a bonny hornpipe now," he would say, "it 's 
 a great favourite with performers; they dance the sand 
 dance to it." And he expounded the sand dance. Then 
 suddenly, it would be a long "Hush!" with uplifted 
 finger and glowing, supplicating eyes; "he's going to 
 play 'Auld Robin Gray' on one string!" And through- 
 out this excruciating movement, — " On one string, that's 
 on one strmg!" he kept crying. I would have given 
 something myself that it had been on none; but the hear- 
 ers were much awed. I called for a tune or two, and 
 thus introduced myself to the notice of the brother, who 
 directed his talk to me for some little while, keeping, I 
 
68 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 need hardly mention, true to his topic, like the seamen 
 to the star. " He 's grand of it," he said confidentially. 
 " His master was a music-hall man." Indeed the music- 
 hall man had left his mark, for our fiddler was ignorant 
 of many of our best old airs; "Logic o* Buchan," for in- 
 stance, he only knew as a quick, jigging figure in a set 
 of quadrilles, and had never heard it called by name. 
 Perhaps, after all, the brother was the more interesting 
 performer of the two. I have spoken with him after- 
 wards repeatedly, and found him always the same quick, 
 fiery bit of a man, not without brains; but he never 
 showed to such advantage as when he was thus squir- 
 ing the fiddler into public note. There is nothing more 
 becoming than a genuine admiration; and it shares this 
 with love, that it does not become contemptible althoiigh 
 misplaced. 
 
 The dancing was but feebly carried on. The space 
 was almost impracticably small; and the Irish wenches 
 combined the extreme of bashfulness about this inno- 
 cent display with a surprising impudence and roughness 
 of address. Most often, either the fiddle lifted up its 
 voice unheeded, or only a couple of lads would be foot- 
 ing it and snapping fingers on the landing. And such 
 was the eagerness of the brother to display all the ac- 
 quirements of his idol, and such the sleepy indifference 
 of the performer, that the tune would as often as not be 
 changed, and the hornpipe expire into a ballad before 
 the dancers had cut half a dozen shuffles. 
 
 In the meantime, however, the audience had been 
 growing more and more numerous every moment; there 
 was hardly standing-room round the top of the com- 
 panion; and the strange instinct of the race moved some 
 of the new-comers to close both the doors, so that the 
 atmosphere grew insupportable. It was a good place, 
 as the saying is, to leave. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 69 
 
 The wind hauled ahead with a head sea. By ten at 
 night heavy sprays were flying and drumming over the 
 forecastle; the companion of Steerage No. 1 had to be 
 closed, and the door of communication through the sec- 
 ond cabin thrown open. Either from the convenience 
 of the opportunity, or because we had already a num- 
 ber of acquaintances in that part of the ship, Mr. Jones 
 and I paid it a late visit. Steerage No. 1 is shaped like 
 an isosceles triangle, the sides opposite the equal angles 
 bulging outward with the contour of the ship. It is 
 lined with eight pens of sixteen bunks apiece, four bunks 
 below and four above on either side. At night the place 
 is lit with two lanterns, one to each table. As the 
 steamer beat on her way among the rough billows, the 
 light passed through violent phases of change, and was 
 thrown to and fro and up and down with startling swift- 
 ness. You were tempted to wonder, as you looked, how 
 so thin a glimmer could control and disperse such solid 
 blackness. When Jones and I entered we found a little 
 company of our acquaintances seated together at the tri- 
 angular foremost table. A more forlorn party, in more 
 dismal circumstances, it would be hard to imagine. The 
 motion here in the ship's nose was very violent; the up- 
 roar of the sea often overpoweringly loud. The yellow 
 flicker of the lantern spun roimd and round and tossed 
 the shadows in masses. The air was hot, but it struck 
 ' a chill from its foetor. From all round in the dark bunks, 
 the scarcely human noises of the sick joined into a kind 
 of farmyard chorus. In the midst, these five friends of 
 mine were keeping up what heart they could in company. 
 Singing was their refuge from discomfortable thoughts 
 and sensations. One piped, in feeble tones, "Oh why 
 left I my hame?" which seemed a pertinent question in 
 the circumstances. Another, from the invisible horrors 
 of a pen where he lay dog-sick upon the upper shelf. 
 
70 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 found courage, in a blink of his sufferings, to give u? 
 several verses of the "Death of Nelson"; and it was odd 
 and eerie to hear the chorus breathe feebly from all sorts 
 of dark comers, and "this day has done his dooty" rise 
 and fall and be taken up again in this dim inferno, to an 
 accompaniment of plunging, hollow-sounding bows and 
 the rattling spray-showers overhead. 
 
 All seemed unfit for conversation; a certain dizziness 
 had interrupted the activity of their minds; and except to 
 sing they were tongue-tied. There was present, how- 
 ever, one tall, powerful fellow of doubtful nationality, 
 being neither quite Scotsman nor altogether Irish, but 
 of surprising clearness of conviction on the highest prob- 
 lems. He had gone nearly beside himself on the Sun- 
 day, because of a general backwardness to indorse his 
 definition of mind as " a living, thinking substance which 
 cannot be felt, heard, or seen" — nor, I presume, although 
 he failed to mention it, smelt. Now he came forward in 
 a pause with another contribution to our culture. 
 
 " Just by way of change," said he, " I'll ask you a 
 Scripture riddle. There's profit in them too," he added 
 ungrammatically. 
 
 This was the riddle — 
 
 CandP 
 
 Did agree 
 
 To cut down C; 
 
 But C and P 
 
 Could not agree 
 
 Without the leave of G. 
 
 All the people cried to see 
 
 The crueltie 
 
 Of C and P. 
 
 Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of 
 Apollo! We were a long while over the problem, shak- 
 ing our heads and gloomily wonderirig how a man could 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 71 
 
 be sudi a fool; but at length he put us out of suspense 
 and divulged the fact that C and P stood for Cakphas 
 and Pontius Pilate. 
 
 I think it must have been the riddle that settled us, 
 but the motion and the close air likewise hurried our 
 departure. We had not been gone long, we heard next 
 morning, ere two or even three out of the five fell sick. 
 We thought it little wonder on the whole, for the sea 
 kept contrary all night. I now made my bed upon the 
 second cabin floor, where, although I ran the risk of be- 
 ing stepped upon, I had a free current of air, more or 
 less vitiated indeed, and nmning only from steerage to 
 steerage, but at least not stagnant; and from this couch, 
 as well as the usual sounds of a rough night at sea, the 
 hateful coughing and retching of the sick and the sobs 
 of children, I heard a man run wild with terror beseech- 
 ing his friend for encouragement. "The ship's going 
 down!" he cried with a thrill of agony. "The ship's 
 going down!" he repeated, now in a blank whisper, now 
 with his voice rising towards a sob; and his friend might 
 reassure him, reason with him, joke at him — all was in 
 vain, and the old cry came back, "The ship's going 
 down!" There was something panicky and catching in 
 the emotion of his tones; and I saw in a clear flash what 
 an involved and hideous tragedy was a disaster to an emi- 
 grant ship. If this whole parishful of people came no 
 more to land, into how many houses would the news- 
 paper carry woe, and what a great part of the web of our 
 corporate human life would be rent across for ever! 
 
 The next morning when I came on deck I found a new 
 world indeed. The wind was fair; the sun mounted 
 into a cloudless heaven; through great dark blue seas 
 the ship cut a swath of curded foam. The horizon was 
 dotted all day with companionable sails, and the sun 
 shone pleasantly on the long, heaving deck. ' 
 
72 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the 
 time. 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. Feats of dexterity, puzzles 
 for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of the same 
 order as the old problem of the fox and goose and cab- 
 bage, were always welcome; and the latter, I observed, 
 more popular as well as more conspicuously well done 
 than tibe former. We had a regular daily competition 
 to guess the vessel's progress; and twelve o'clock, when 
 the result was published in the wheel-house, came to be 
 a moment of considerable interest. But the interest was 
 unmixed. Not a bet was laid upon our guesses. From 
 the Clyde to Sandy Hook I never heard a wager offered 
 oi- taken. We had, besides, romps in plenty. Puss in 
 the Comer, which we had rebaptized, in more manly 
 style. Devil and four Comers, was my own favourite 
 game; but there were many who preferred another, the 
 humour of which was to box a person's ears until he 
 found out who had cuffed him. 
 
 This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the 
 change of weather, and in the highest possible spirits. 
 We got in a cluster like bees, sitting between each other's 
 feet under lee of the deck-houses. Stories and laughter 
 went aroimd. The children climbed about the shrouds. 
 White faces appeared for the first time, and began to 
 take on colour from the wind. I was kept hard at work 
 making cigarettes for one amateur after another, and my 
 less than moderate skill was heartily admired. Lastly, 
 down sat the fiddler in our midst and began to discourse 
 his reels, and jigs, and ballads, with now and then a voice 
 or two to take up the air and throw in the interest of 
 human speech. 
 
 Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came 
 three cabin passengers, a gentleman and two young la- 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 7a 
 
 dies, picking their way with little gracious titters of in- 
 dulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air about nothing, which 
 galled me to the quick. I have little of the radical in 
 social questions, and have always nourished an idea 
 that one person was as good as another. But I began 
 to be troubled by this episode. It was astonishmg what 
 insults these people managed to convey by their presence. 
 They seemed to throw their clothes in our faces. Their 
 eyes searched us all over for tatters and incongruities. 
 A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were too well- 
 mannered to indulge it in our hearing. Wait a bit, till 
 they were all back in the saloon, and then hear how wit- 
 tily they woTild depict the manners of the steerage. We 
 were in truth very innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly en- 
 gaged, and there was no shadow of excuse for the sway- 
 ing elegant superiority with which these damsels passed 
 among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances of their 
 squire. Not a word was said; only when they were 
 gone Mackay sullenly damned their impudence under 
 his breath; but we were all conscious of an icy influence 
 and a dead break in the course of our enjoyment. 
 
 STEERAGE TYPES 
 
 We had a fellow on board, an Irish-American, for all 
 the world like a beggar in a print by Callot;^ one-eyed, 
 with great, splay crow's-feet round the sockets; a knotty 
 squab nose coming down over his mustache; a miracu- 
 lous hat; a shirt that had been white, ay, ages long ago; 
 an alpaca coat in its last sleeves; and, without hyperbole, 
 no buttons to his trousers. Even in these rags and tat- 
 ters, the man twinkled all over with impudence like a. 
 piece of sham jewellery; and Thave heard him offer a situ- 
 ' 4 French engraver (1593-1635). 
 
74 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 ation to one of his fellow-passengers with the air of a 
 lord. Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind of 
 base success was written on his brow. He was then in 
 his ill days; but I can imagine him in Congress with his 
 mouth full of bombast and sawder.* As we moved in 
 the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his so- 
 ciety. I do not think I ever heard him say anything 
 that was true, kind, or interesting; but there was enter- 
 tainment in the man's demeanour. You might call him 
 a half-educated Irish Tigg.^ 
 
 Our Russian made a remarkable contrast to this im- 
 possible fellow. Rumours and legends were current in 
 the steerages about his antecedents. Some said he was 
 a Nihilist escaping; others set him down for a harmless 
 spendthrift, who had squandered fifty thousand roubles, 
 and whose father had now despatched him to America 
 by way of penance. Either tale might flourish in se- 
 curity; there was no contradiction to be feared, for the 
 hero spoke not one word of English. I got on with him 
 lumberingly enough in broken German, and learnt from 
 his own lips that he had been an apothecary. He car- 
 ried the photograph of his betrothed in a pocket-book, 
 and remarked that it did not do her justice. The cut 
 of his head stood out from among the passengers with 
 an air of startling strangeness. The first natural in- 
 stinct was to take him for a desperado; but although the 
 featiu-es, to our Western eyes, had a barbaric and un- 
 homely cast, the eye both reassured and touched. It 
 was large and very dark and soft, with an expression of 
 dumb endurance, as if it had often looked on desperate 
 circumstances and never looked on them without reso- 
 lution. 
 
 • A slang expression, meaning .flattery. 
 
 ' Montague Tigg is a self-reliant but impecunious rascal in Dick> 
 ens's Martin Chvzzlewit. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 75 
 
 He cried out when I used the word. "No, no," he 
 said, "not resolution." 
 
 "The resolution to endure," I explained. 
 
 And then he shrugged Ms shoulders, and said, "Ach, 
 ja" with gusto, like a man who had been flattered in 
 his favourite pretensions. Indeed, he was always hinting 
 at some secret sorrow; and his life, he said, had been 
 one of unusual trouble and anxiety; so the legends of 
 the steerage may have represented at least some shadow 
 of the truth. Once, and once only, he sang a song at 
 our concerts; standing forth without embarrassment, 
 his great stature somewhat humped, his long arms fre- 
 quently extended, his Kalmuck* head thrown backward. 
 It was a suitable piece of music, as deep as a cow's bel- 
 low and wild like the White Sea. He was struck and 
 charmed by the freedom and sociality of our manners. 
 At home, he said, no one on a journey would speak to 
 him, but those with whom he wotJd not care to speak; 
 thus unconsciously involving himself in the condemna- 
 tion of his countrymen. But Russia was soon to be 
 changed; the ice of the Neva was softening under the 
 sua of civilization; the new ideas, "wie eine feine 
 Violine," ^ were audible among the big empty drum 
 notes of Imperial diplomacy; and he looked to see a great 
 revival, though with a somewhat indistinct and child- 
 ish hope. 
 
 We had a father and son who made a pair of Jacks-of- 
 all-trades. It was the son who sang the "Death of Nel- 
 son" under such contrarious circumstances. He was by 
 trade a shearer of ship plates; but he could touch the 
 organ, had led two choirs, and played the flute and pic«' 
 coIo in a professional string band. His repertory of songs 
 was, besides. Inexhaustible, and ranged impartially from 
 
 ' A broad, round head like those of the Kalmuck Tartars. 
 ' LiKe the music of a fine violin. 
 
76 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 the very best to the very worst within his reach. Nor 
 did he seem to make the least distinction between these 
 extremes, but would cheerfully follow up "Tom Bowling" 
 with "Aroimd her splendid form." 
 
 The father, 'an old, cheery, small piece of manhood, 
 could do everything connected with tinwork from one 
 end of the process to the other, use almost every car- 
 penter's tool, and make picture frames to boot. "I sat 
 down with silver plate every Sunday," said he, "and 
 pictures on the wall. I have made enough money to be 
 rolling in my carriage. But, sir," looking at me un- 
 steadily with his bright rheumy eyes, "I was troubled 
 with a drunken wife." He took a hostile view of matri- 
 mony in consequence. "It's an old saying," he re- 
 marked: "God made 'em, and the devil he mixed 'em." 
 
 I think he was justified by his experience. It was a 
 dreary story. He would bring home three pounds on 
 Saturday, and on Monday all the clothes would be in 
 pawn. Sick of the useless struggle, he gave up a pay- 
 ing contract, and contented himself with small and ill- 
 paid jobs, "A bad job was as good as a good job for 
 me," he said; "it all went the same way." Once the 
 wife showed signs of amendment; she kept steady for 
 weeks on end; it was again worth while to labour and 
 to do one's best. The husband found a good situation 
 some distance from home, and, to make a little upon 
 every hand, started the wife in a cook-shop; the chil- 
 dren were here and there, busy as mice; savings began 
 to grow together in the bank, and the golden age of hope 
 had returned again to that imhappy family. But one 
 week my old acquaintance, getting earlier tibirough with 
 his work, came home on the Friday instead of the Satur- 
 day, and there was his wife to receive him reeling drunk. 
 He "took and gave her a pair o' black eyes," for which 
 I pardon him, nailed up the cook-shop door, gave up 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 77 
 
 his situation, and resigned himself to a life of poverty, 
 with the workhouse at the end. As the children came 
 to their full age they fled the house, and established them- 
 selves in other countries; some did well, some not so well; 
 but the father remained at home alone with his drunken 
 wife, all his soimd-hearted pluck and varied accomplish- 
 ments depressed and negatived. 
 
 Was she dead now? or, after all these years, had he 
 broken the chain, and run from home like a school-boy ? 
 I could not discover which; but here at least he was out 
 on the adventure, and still one of the bravest and most 
 youthfxd men on board. 
 
 "Now, I suppose, I must put my old bones to work 
 again," said he; " but I can do a turn yet." 
 
 And the son to whom he was going, I asked, was he 
 not able to support him? 
 
 " Oh yes," he replied. " But I 'm never happy with- 
 out a job on hand. And I 'm stout; I can eat a'most 
 anything. You see no craze about me." 
 
 This tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on board 
 by another of a drunken father. He was a capable man, 
 with a good chance in life; but he had drunk up two 
 thriving businesses like a bottle of sherry, and involved 
 his sons along with him in ruin. Now they were on 
 board with us, fleeing his disastrous neighbourhood. 
 
 Total abstinence, like all ascetical conclusions, is tm- 
 friendly to the most generous, cheerful, and human parts 
 of man; but it could have adduced many instances and 
 arguments from among our ship's company. I was 
 one day conversing with a kind and happy Scotsman, 
 running to fat and perspiration in the physical, but with 
 a taste for poetry and a genial sense of fun. I had asked 
 him his hopes in emigrating. They were like those of 
 so many others, vague and unfounded; times were bad 
 at home; they were said to have a turn for the better in 
 
78' SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 the States; and a man could get on anywhere, he thought. 
 That was precisely the weak point of his position; for if 
 he could get on in America, why could he not do the same 
 in Scotland? But I never had the courage to use that 
 argument, though it was often on the tip of my tongue, 
 and instead I agreed with him heartily, adding, with 
 reckless originality, "If the man stuck to his work, and 
 kept away from drink." 
 
 "Ahl" said he slowly, "the drmk! You see, that's 
 just my trouble." 
 
 He spoke with a simplicity that was touching, look- 
 ing at me at the same time with something strange and 
 timid in his eye, half-ashamed, half-sorry, like a good 
 child who knows he should be beaten. You would have 
 said he recognised a destiny to which he was bom» and 
 accepted the consequences mildly. Like the merchant 
 Abudah,* he was at the same time fleeing from his 
 destiny and carrying it along with him, the whole at an 
 expense of six guineas. 
 
 As far as I saw, drink, idleness, and incompetency 
 were the three great causes of emigration, and for all of 
 them, and drink first and foremost, this trick of getting 
 transported overseas appears to me the silliest means of 
 cure. You cannot run away from a weakness; you must 
 some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why 
 not now, and where you stand? Coelum non animam? 
 Change Glenlivet for Bourbon, and it is still whisky, 
 only not so good. A sea-voyage will not give a man the 
 nerve to put aside cheap pleasure; emigration has to 
 be done before we climb the vessel; an aim in life is the 
 
 ' A ricli merchant in the Rev. James Ridley's Tales of the Genii, 
 who, seeking a talisman for perfect happiness, finds it in love of 
 God and submission to His will. 
 
 ' Ccdum non animum mutant qui trans mare currant, "Those who 
 cross the sea change only the climate, not their character," a quo- 
 tation from Horace. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 79 
 
 only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found 
 in foreign lands, but in the heart itself. 
 
 Speaking generally, there is no vice of this kind more 
 contemptible than another; for each is but a result and 
 outward sign of a soul tragically shipwrecked. In the 
 majority of cases, cheap pleasure is resorted to by way 
 of anodyne. The pleasure-seeker sets forth upon life 
 with high and difficult ambitions; he meant to be nobly 
 good and nobly happy, though at as little pains as pos- 
 sible to himself; and it is because all has failed m his 
 celestial enterprise that you now behold him rolling in 
 the garbage. Hence the comparative success of the tee- 
 total pledge; because to a man who had nothing it sets 
 at least a negative aim in life. Somewhat as prisoners 
 beguile their days by taming a spider, the reformed 
 drunkard makes an interest out of abstaining from in- 
 toxicating drinks, and may live for that negation. There 
 is something, at least, not to be done each day; and a cold 
 triumph awaits him every evening. 
 
 We had one on board with us, whom I have already 
 referred to imder the name of Mackay, who seemed to 
 me not only a good instance of this failure in life of 
 which we have been speaking, but a good type of the 
 intelligence which here surrounded me. Physically he 
 was a small Scotsman, standing a little back as though 
 he were already carrying the elements of a corporation, 
 and his looks somewhat marred by the smallness of 
 his eyes. Mentally, he was endowed above the average. 
 There were but few subjects on which he could not con- 
 verse with understanding and a dash of wit; delivering 
 himself slowly and with gusto, like a man who enjoyed 
 his own sententiousness. He was a dry, quick, pertinent 
 debater, speaking with a small voice, and swinging on 
 his heels to launch and emphasise an argimient. When 
 he began a discussion, he could not bear to leave it off. 
 
80 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 I 
 but would pick the subject to the bone, without once 
 relinquishing a point. An engineer by trade, Mackay 
 believed in the unlimited perfectibility of all machines 
 except the human machine. The latter he gave up with 
 ridicule for a compound of carrion and perverse gases. 
 He had an appetite for disconnected facts which I can 
 only compare to the savage taste for beads. What is 
 called information was indeed a passion with the man, 
 and he not only delighted to receive it, but could pay 
 you back in kind. 
 
 With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already 
 no longer young, on his way to a new country, with no 
 prospects, no money, and but little hope. He was al- 
 most tedious in the cynical disclosures of his despair. 
 "The ship may go down for me," he would say, "now 
 or to-morrow. I have nothing to lose and nothing to 
 hope." And again: "I am sick of the whole damned 
 performance." He was, like the kind little man already 
 quoted, another so-called victim of the bottle. But 
 Mackay was miles from publishing his weakness to the 
 world; laid the blame of his failure on corrupt masters 
 and a corrupt State policy; and after he had been one 
 night overtaken and had played the buffoon in his cups, 
 sternly, though not without tact, suppressed all refer- 
 ence to his escapade. It was a treat to see him manage 
 this; the various jesters withered under his gaze, and you 
 were forced to recognise in him a certain steely force, and 
 a gift of command which might have ruled a senate. 
 
 In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he 
 was ruined long before for all good human purposes but 
 conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap, school- 
 book materialism. He could see nothing in the world 
 but money and steam-engines. He did not know what 
 you meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten 
 ihe simple emotions of childhood, and perhaps never" 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 81 
 
 encoimtered the delights of youth. He believed in pro. 
 duction, that useful figment of economy, as if it had 
 been real like laughter; and production, without preju- 
 dice to liquor, was his god and guide. One day he took 
 me to task — a novel cry to me — upon the overpayment 
 of literature. Literary men, he said, were more highly 
 paid than artisans; yet the artisan made threishing-ma- 
 chines and butter-churns, and the man of letters, except 
 in the way of a few useful hand-books, made nothing 
 worth the while. He produced a mere fancy article. 
 Mackay's notion of a book was Hoppiis's Measurer. 
 Now in my time I have possessed and even studied that 
 work; but if I were to be left to-morrow on Juan Fer- 
 nandez,* Hoppus's is not the book that I should choose 
 for my companion volume. 
 
 I tried to fight the point with Mackay. I made him 
 own that he had taken pleasure in reading books other- 
 wise, to his view, insignificant; but he was too wary to 
 advance a step beyond the admission. It was in vain 
 for me to argue that here was pleasure ready-made and 
 running from the spring, whereas his ploughs and but- 
 ter-churns were but means and mechanisms to give men 
 the necessary food and leisure before they start upon the 
 search for pleasure; he jibbed and ran away from such 
 conclusions. The thing was different, he declared, and 
 nothing was serviceable but what had to do with food. 
 " Eat, eat, eat!" he cried; " that's the bottom and the top." 
 By an odd irony of circumstance, he grew so much inter- 
 ested in this discussion that he let the hour slip by un- 
 noticed and had to go without his tea. He had enough 
 sense and humour, indeed he had no lack of either, to 
 have chuckled over this himself in private; and even to 
 me he referred to it with the shadow of a smile. 
 
 > A lonely island in the South Pacific, where Alexander Selkirk, the 
 supposed original of Bobinson Crusoe, remained alone for four years. 
 
82 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear of re- 
 ligion. I have seen him waste hours of time in argu- 
 ment with all sort of poor human creatures who under- 
 stood neither him nor themselves, and he had had the 
 boyishness to dissect and criticise even so small a mat- 
 ter as the riddler's definition of mind. He snorted aloud 
 with zealotry and the lust for intellectual battle. Any- 
 thing, whatever it was, that seemed to him likely to dis- 
 courage the continued passionate production of com and 
 steam-engines he resented like a conspiracy against the 
 people. Thus, when I put in the plea for literature, that 
 it was only in good books, or in the society of the good, 
 that a man could get help in his conduct, he declared I 
 was in a different world from him. "Damn my con- 
 duct!" said he. " I have given it up for a bad job. My 
 question is, 'Can I drive a nail?'" And he plainly 
 looked upon me as one who was insidiously seeking to 
 reduce the people's annual bellyful of corn and steam- 
 engines. 
 
 It may be argued that these opinions spring from the 
 defect of culture; that a narrow and pinching way of life 
 not only exaggerates to a man the importance of mate- 
 rial conditions, but indirectly, by denying him the neces- 
 sary books and leisure, keeps his mind ignorant of larger 
 thoughts; and that hence springs this overwhelming con- 
 cern about diet, and hence the bald view of existence pro- 
 fessed by Mackay. Had this been an English peasant 
 the conclusion would be tenable. But Mackay had 
 most of the elements of a liberal education. He had 
 skirted metaphysical and mathematical studies. He had 
 a thoughtful hold of what he knew, which would be ex- 
 ceptional among bankers. He had been brought up in 
 the midst of hot-house piety, and told, with incongru- 
 ous pride, the story of bis own brother's death-bed ec- 
 stasies. Yet he had somehow failed to fulfil himself. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 83 
 
 and was adrift like a dead thing among external circum- 
 stances, without hope or lively preference or shaping aim. 
 And further, there seemed a tendency among many of 
 his fellows to fall into the same blank and unlovely opin- 
 ions. One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scot- 
 land, and that is the way to be happy. Yet that is the 
 whole of culture, and perhaps two-thirds of morality. 
 Can it be that the Puritan school, by divorcing a man 
 from nature, by thinning out his instincts, and setting a 
 stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human activity 
 and interest, leads at last directly to material greed ? 
 
 Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of 
 simple pleasures next, if not superior, to virtue; and we 
 had on board an Irishman who based his claim to the 
 widest and most affectionate popularity precisely upon 
 these two qualities, that he was natural and happy. He 
 boasted a fresh colour, a tight little figure, unquenchable 
 gaiety, and indefatigable good-will. His clothes puzzled 
 the diagnostic mind, until you heard he had been once 
 a private coachman, when they became eloquent and 
 seemed a part of his biography. His face contained the 
 rest, and, I fear, a prophecy of the future; the hawk's 
 nose above accorded so ill with the pink baby's mouth 
 below. His spirit and his pride belonged, you might 
 say, to the nose; while it was the general shiftlessness 
 expressed by the other that had thrown him from situa- 
 tion to situation, and at length on board the emigrant 
 ship. Barney ate, so to speak, nothing from the galley; 
 his own tea, butter and eggs supported him throughout 
 the voyage; and about mealtime you might often find 
 him up to the elbows in amateur cookery. His was the 
 first voice heard singing among all the passengers; he was 
 the first who fell to dancing. From Loch Foyle to Sandy 
 Hook, there was not a piece of fun undertaken but there 
 was Barney in the midst. 
 
84 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 You ought to have seen him when he stood up to sing 
 at our concerts — his tight little figure stepping to and fro, 
 and his feet shuffling to the air, his eyes seeking and be- 
 stowing encouragement — and to have enjoyed the bow, 
 so nicely calculated between jest and earnest, between 
 grace and clumsiness, with which he brought each song 
 to a conclusion. He was not only a great favourite 
 among ourselves, but his songs attracted the lords of the 
 saloon, who often leaned to hear him over the rails of the 
 hurricane-deck. He was somewhat pleased, but not at 
 all abashed by this attention; and one night, in the midst 
 of his famous performance of " Billy Keogh," I saw him 
 spin half round in a pirouette and throw an audacious 
 wink to an old gentleman above. 
 
 This was the more characteristic, as, for all his daffing*, 
 he was a modest and very polite little fellow among our- 
 selves. 
 
 He would not have hurt the feelings of a fly, nor 
 throughout the passage did he give a shadow of offence; 
 yet he was always, by his innocent freedoms and love of 
 fun, brought upon that narrow margin where politeness 
 must be natural to walk without a fall. He was once 
 seriously angry, and that in a grave, quiet manner, be- 
 cause they supplied no fish on Friday; for Barney was a 
 conscientious Catholic. He had likewise strict notions 
 of refinement; and when, late one evening, after the 
 women had retired, a young Scotsman struck up an in- 
 decent song, Barney's drab clothes were immediately 
 missing from the group. His taste was for the society 
 of gentlemen, of whom, with the reader's permission, 
 there was no lack in our five steerages and second cabin; 
 and he avoided the rough and positive with a girlish 
 shrinking. Mackay, partly fronx his superior powers of 
 mind, which rendered him incomprehensible, partly 
 ' Foolish gaiety. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 85 
 
 from his extreme opinions, was especially distasteful to 
 the Irishman. I have seen him slink off with backward 
 looks of terror and offended delicacy, while the other, 
 in his witty, ugly way, had been professing hostility to 
 God, and an extreme theatrical readiness to be ship- 
 wrecked on the spot. These utterances hurt the little 
 coachman's modesty like a bad word. 
 
 THE SICK MAN 
 
 One night Jones, the young O'Reilly, and myself were 
 walking arm-in-arm and briskly up and down the deck. 
 Six bells had rung; a head-wind blew chill and fitful, the 
 fog was closing in with a sprinkle of rain, and the fog- 
 whistle had been turned on, and now divided time with 
 its unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull, thrilling and in- 
 tense like a mosquito. Even the watch lay somewhere 
 snugly out of sight. 
 
 For some time we observed something lying black 
 and huddled in the scuppers, which at last heaved a lit- 
 tle and moaned aloud. We ran to the rails. An elderly 
 man, but whether passenger or seaman it was impossible 
 in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling on his belly 
 in the wet scuppers, and kicking feebly with his out- 
 spread toes. We asked him what was amiss, and he 
 replied incoherently, with a strange accent and in a voice 
 unmanned by terror, that he had cramp in the stomach, 
 that he had been ailing all day, had seen the doctor twice, 
 and had walked the deck against fatigue till he was over- 
 mastered and had fallen where we found him. 
 
 Jones remained by his side, while O'Reilly and I hur- 
 ried off to seek the doctor. We knocked in vain at the 
 doctor's cabin; there came no reply; nor could we find 
 any one to guide us. It was no time for delicacy; so we 
 
86 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 ran once more forward; and I, whippmg up a ladder and 
 touching my hat to the oflScer of tiie watch, addressed 
 him as politely as I could: 
 
 "I beg your pardon, sir; but there is a man lying bad 
 with cramp in the lee scuppers; and I can't find the 
 doctor," 
 
 He looked at me peeringly in the darkness; and then, 
 somewhat harshly, " Well, I can't leave the bridge, my 
 man," said he. 
 
 "No, sir; but you can tell me what to do," I returned. 
 
 "Is it one of the crew?" he asked. 
 
 " I believe him to be a fireman," I replied. 
 
 I daresay officers are much aimoyed by complaints 
 and alarmist information from their freight of human 
 creatures; but certainly, whether it was the idea that the 
 sick man was one of the crew, or from something con- 
 ciliatory in my address, the officer in question was imme- 
 diately relieved and mollified; and speaking in a voice 
 much freer from constraint, advised me to find a steward 
 and despatch him in quest of the doctor, who would now 
 be in the smoking-room over his pipe. 
 
 One of the stewards was often enough to be foimd 
 about this hour down our companion. Steerage No. 2 
 and 3; that was his smoking-room of a night. Let me 
 call him Blackwood. O'Reilly and I rattled down the 
 companion, breathing hurry; and in his shirt-sleeves and 
 perched across the carpenter's bench upon one thigh, 
 found Blackwood; a neat, bright, dapper, Glasgow- 
 looking man, with a bead of an eye and a rank twang 
 in his speech. I forget who was with him, but the pair 
 were enjoying a deliberate talk over their pipes. I dare 
 say he was tired with his day's work, and eminently 
 comfortable at that moment; and the truth is, I did not 
 stop to consider his feelings, but told my story in a 
 breath. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 87 
 
 "Steward," said I, "there's a man lying bad with 
 cramp, and I can't find the doctor." 
 
 He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with a 
 black look that is the prerogative of man; and taking his 
 pipe out of his mouth 
 
 ""niat 's none of my business," said he. "I don't 
 care." 
 
 I coidd have strangled the little ruflSan where he sat. 
 The thought of his cabin civility and cabin tips filled me 
 ^th indignation. I glanced at O'/Reilly; he was pale 
 And quivering, and looked like assault and battery, every 
 inch of him. But we had a better card than violence. 
 
 "You will have to make it your business," said I, 
 "for I am sent to you by the officer on the bridge." 
 
 Blackwood was fairly tripped. He made no answer, 
 but put out his pipe, gave me one murderous look, and 
 set off upon his errand strolling. From that day for- 
 ward, I should say, he improved to me in courtesy, as 
 though he had repented his evil speech and were anxious 
 to leave a better impression. 
 
 When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside the 
 sick man; and two or three late stragglers had gathered 
 round and were offering suggestions. One proposed to 
 give the patient water, which was promptly negatived. 
 Another bade us hold him up; he himself prayed to be 
 let lie; but as it was at least as well to keep him off the 
 streaming decks, O'Reilly and I supported him between 
 us. It was only by main force that we did so, and neither 
 an easy nor an agreeable duty; for he fought in his par- 
 oxysms like a frightened child, and moaned miserably 
 when he resigned himself to our control. 
 
 " O let me lie ! " he pleaded. *' I '11 no' get better any- 
 way." And then, with a moan that went to my heart, 
 "O why did I come upon this miserable journey?" 
 
 I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little 
 
88 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 while before in the close, tossing steerage: " O why left 
 I my hame?" 
 
 Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, 
 had gone off to the galley, where we could see a light. 
 There he foimd a belated cook scouring pans by the 
 radiance of two lanterns, and one of these he sought to 
 borrow. The scullion was backward. "Was it one of 
 the crew?" he asked. And when Jones, smitten with 
 my theory, had assured that it was a fireman, he reluc- 
 tantly left his scouring and came towards us at an easy 
 pace, with one of the lanterns swinging from his finger. 
 The light, as it reached the spot, showed us an elderly 
 man, thick-set, and grizzled with years; but the shift- 
 ing and coarse shadows concealed from us the expres- 
 sion and even the design of his face. 
 
 So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort of 
 whistle. 
 
 "It 's only a -passenger!" said he; and turning about, 
 made, lantern and all, for the galley. 
 
 "He 's a man anyway," cried Jones in indignation. 
 
 "Nobody said he was a woman," said a gruff voice, 
 which I recognised for that of the bo's'un. 
 
 All this while there was no word of Blackwood or the 
 doctor; and now the officer came to our side of the ship 
 and asked, over the hurricane-deck rails, if the doctor 
 were not yet come. We told him not. 
 
 "No?" he repeated with a breathing of anger; and we 
 saw him hurry aft in person. 
 
 Ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance 
 deliberately enough and examined our patient with the 
 lantern. He made little of the case, had the man brought 
 ait to the dispensary, dosed him, and sent him forward 
 to his bunk. Two of his neighbours in the steerage had 
 now come to our assistance, expressing loud sorrow that 
 such "a fine cheery body" should be sick; and these, 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 89 
 
 claiming a sort of possession, took him entirely under 
 their own care. The drug had probably relieved him, 
 for he struggled no more, and was led along plaintive and 
 patient, but protesting. His heart recoiled at the thought 
 of the steerage. "O let me lie down upon the bieldy* 
 side," he cried; "O dinna take me down!" ;iud again: 
 *'0 why did ever I come upon this miserable voyage?" 
 And ye. once more, with a gasp and a wailint^ prolonga- 
 tion of the fourth word: "I had no call to come." But 
 there he was, and by the doctor's orders and the kind 
 force of his two shipmates disappeared down the com- 
 panion of Steerage No. 1 into the den allotted him. 
 
 At the foot of our own companion, just where I found 
 Blackwood, Jones and the bo's'un were now engaged in 
 talk. This last was a gruff, cruel-looking seaman, who 
 must have passed near half a century upon the seas; 
 square-headed, goat-bearded, with heavy blond eye- 
 brows, and an eye without radiance, but inflexibly steady 
 and hard. I had not forgotten his rough speech; but I 
 remembered also that he had helped us about the lan- 
 tern; and now seeing him in conversation with Jones, 
 and being choked with indignation, I proceeded to blow 
 off my steam. 
 
 "Well," said I, "I make you my compliments upon 
 your steward," and furiously narrated what had happened. 
 
 " I 've nothing to do with him," replied the bo's'un. 
 "They're all alike. They wouldn't mind if they saw 
 you all lying dead one upon the top of another." 
 
 This was enough. A very little humanity went a long 
 way with me after the experience of the evening. A 
 sympathy grew up at once between the bo's'un and my- 
 self; and that night, and during the next few days, I 
 learned to appreciate him better. He was a remark- 
 able iype, and not at all the kind of man you 6nd in 
 » Sheltered. 
 
90 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 books. He had been at Sebastopol* under English 
 colours; and again in a States ship, "after the Alabama,^ 
 and praying God we sliouldn't find her." He was a 
 high Tory and a high Englishman. No manufacturer 
 could have held opinions more hostile to the working- 
 man and his strikes. "The workmen," he said, "think 
 nothing of their country. They think of nothing but 
 themselves. They 're damned greedy, selfish fellows." 
 He would not hear of the decadence of England. " They 
 say they send us beef from America," he argued; "but 
 who pays for it? AH the money in the world 's in Eng- 
 land." The Royal Navy was the best of possible ser- 
 vices, according to him. "Anyway the officers are gende- 
 men," said he; "and you can't get hazed to death by a 
 
 damned non-commissioned as you can in the army." 
 
 Among nations, England was the first; then came France. 
 He respected the French navy and liked the French peo- 
 ple; and if he were forced to make a new choice in life, 
 "by God, he would try Frenchmen!" For all his looks 
 and rough, cold manners, I observed that children were 
 never frightened by him; they divined him at once to be a 
 friend; and one night when he had chalked his hand and 
 went about stealthily setting his mark on people's clothesj 
 it was incongruous to hear this formidable old salt chuck- 
 ling over his boyish monkey trick. 
 
 In the morning, my first thought was of the sick man. 
 I was afraid I should not recognise him, so baffling had 
 been the light of the lantern; and found myself unable to 
 decide if he were Scots, English, or Irish. He had cer- 
 tainly employed north-country words and elisions; but 
 the accent and the pronunciation seemed imfamiliar and 
 incongruous in my ear. 
 
 ' A Russian fortress, chief storm-centre of the Crimean war. 
 ' A famous Confederate privateer which raised havoc with North- 
 em commerce during the Civil War. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 91 
 
 To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 1, 
 was an adventure that required some nerve. The stench 
 was atrocious; each respiration tasted in the throat like 
 some horrible kind of cheese; and the squalid aspect of 
 the place was aggravated by so many people worming 
 themselves into their clothes in the twilight of the bunks. 
 You may guess if I was pleased, not only for him, but for 
 myself also, when I heard that the sick man was better 
 and had gone on deck. 
 
 The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun suf- 
 fused the fog with pink and amber; the fog-horn still blew, 
 stertorous and intermittent; and to add to the discomfort, 
 the seamen were just beginning to wash down the decks. 
 But for a sick man this was heaven compared to the 
 steerage. I found him standing on the hot-water pipe, 
 just forward of the saloon deck-house. He was smaller 
 than I had fancied, and plain-looking; but his face was 
 distinguished by strange and fascinating eyes, limpid 
 grey from a distance, but, when looked into, full of chang- 
 ing colours and grains of gold. His manners were mild 
 and uncompromisingly plain; and I soon saw that, when 
 once started, he delighted to talk. His accent and lan- 
 guage had been formed in the most natural way, since 
 he was bom in Ireland, had lived a quarter of a century 
 on the banks of Tyne, and was married to a Scots wife. 
 A fisherman in the season, he had fished the east coast 
 from Fisherrow to Whitby. When the season was over, 
 and the great boats, which required extra hands, were 
 once drawn up on shore till the next spring, he worked 
 as a labourer about chemical furnaces, or along the 
 wharves imloading vessels. In this comparatively hum- 
 ble way of life he had gathered a competence, and could 
 speak of his comfortable house, his hayfield, and his 
 garden. On this ship, where so many accomplished 
 artisans were fleeing from starvation, he was present on 
 a pleasure trip to visit a brother in New York. 
 
92 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Ere he started, he informed me, he had bben warned 
 against the steerage and the steerage fare, and recom- 
 mended to bring with him a ham and tea and a spice loaf. 
 But he laughed to scorn such counsels. " I 'm not afraid," 
 he had told his adviser; " I 'II get on for ten days. I 've 
 not been a fisherman for nothing." For it is no light 
 matter, as he reminded me, to be in an open boat, per- 
 haps waist-deep with herrings, day breaking with a scowl, 
 and for miles on every hand lee-shores, unbroken, iron- 
 bound, surf-beat, with only here and there an anchorage 
 where you dare not lie, or a harbour impossible to enter 
 with the wind that blows. The life of a North Sea fisher 
 is one long chapter of exposure and hard work and in- 
 suflBcient fare; and even if he makes land at some bleak 
 fisher port, perhaps the season is bad or his boat has been 
 unlucky, and after fifty hours* imsleeping vigilance and 
 toil, not a shop will give him credit for a loaf of bread. 
 Yet the steerage of the emigrant ship had been too vile 
 for the endurance of a man thus rudely trained. He 
 had scarce eaten since he came on board, until the day 
 before, when his appetite was tempted by some excellent 
 pea-soup. We were all much of the same mind on board, 
 and beginning with myself, had dined upon pea-soup not 
 wisely but too well; only with him the excess had been, 
 punished, perhaps because he was weakened /by former 
 abstinence, and his first meal had resulted in a cramp. 
 He had determined to live henceforth on biscuit; and 
 when, two months later, he should return to England, to 
 make the passage by saloon. The second cabin, after 
 due inquiry, he scouted as another edition of the steerage. 
 
 He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill. "Ye 
 see, I had no call to be here," said he; "and I thought 
 it was by with me last night. I 've a good house at home, 
 and plenty to nurse me, and I had no real call to leave 
 them." Speaking of the attentions he had received from 
 his shipmates generally, " they were all so kind," he said. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 93 
 
 *' that there 'a none to mention." And except in so far as 
 I might share in this, he troubled me with no reference 
 to my services. 
 
 But what affected me in the most lively manner was 
 the wealth of this day-labourer, paying a two months' 
 pleasure visit to the States, and preparing to return in 
 the saloon, and the new testimony rendered by his story, 
 not so much to the horrors of the steerage as to the 
 habitual comfort of the working-classes. One foggy, 
 frosty December evening, I encountered on Liberton 
 Hill, near Edinburgh, an Irish labourer trudging home- 
 ward Jrom the fields, dur roads lay together, and it 
 was natural that we should fall into talk. He was cov- 
 ered with mud; an inoffensive, ignorant creature, who 
 thought the Atlantic Cable was a secret contrivance of 
 the masters the better to oppress labouring mankind; 
 and I confess I was astonished to learn that he had nearly 
 three hundred pounds in the bank. But this man had 
 travelled over most of the world, and enjoyed wonderful 
 opportunities on some American railroad, with two dol- 
 lars a shift and double pay on Sunday and at night; 
 whereas my fellow-passenger had never quitted Tyneside, 
 and had made all that he possessed in that same accursed, 
 down-falling England, whence skilled mechanics, engi- 
 neers, millwrights, and carpenters were fleeing as from 
 the native country of starvation. 
 
 Fitly enough, we slid off on the subject of strikes and 
 wages and hard times. Being from the Tyne, and a man 
 who had gained and lost in his own pocket by these 
 fluctuations, he had much to say, and held strong opinions 
 on the subject. He spoke sharply of the masters, and, 
 when I led him on, of the men also. The masters had 
 been selfish and obstructive; the men selfish, silly, and 
 light-headed. He rehearsed to me the course of a meet- 
 ing at which he had been present, and the somewhat 
 
94 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 long discourse which he had there pronounced, calling 
 into question the wisdom and even the good faith of the 
 Union delegates; and although he had escaped himself 
 through flush times and starvation times with a hand- 
 somely provided purse, he had so little faith in either man 
 or master, and so profound a terror for the unerring 
 Nemesis of mercantile affairs, that he could think of no 
 hope for our country outside of a sudden and complete 
 political subversion. Down must go Lords and Church 
 and Army; and capital, by some happy direction, must 
 change hands from worse to better, or England stood 
 condemned. Such principles, he said, were growing 
 "like a seed." 
 
 From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words 
 sounded unusually ominous and grave. I had heard 
 enough revolutionary talk among my workmen fellow- 
 passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid, and fell 
 discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men. This man 
 was calm; he had attained prosperity and ease; he dis- 
 approved the policy which had been pursued by labour 
 in the past; and yet this was his panacea, — to rend the 
 old country from end to end, and from top to bottom, 
 and in clamour and civil discord remodel it with the hand 
 of violence. 
 
 THE STOWAWAYS 
 
 On the Sunday, among a party of men who were talk- 
 ing in our companion. Steerage Nos. 2 and 3, we remarked 
 a new figure. He wore tweed clothes, well enough made 
 if not very fresh, and a plain smoking-cap. His face was 
 pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly enough designed; 
 but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly degen- 
 eration had already overtaken his features. The fine 
 nose had grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 95 
 
 were sunk in fat. His hands were strong and elegant; 
 his experience of life evidently varied; his speech full of 
 pith and verve; his manners forward, but perfectly pre- 
 sentable. The lad who helped in the second cabin told 
 me, in answer to a question, that he did not know who 
 he was, but thought, "by his way of speaking, and be- 
 cause he was so polite, that he was some one from the 
 saloon." 
 
 I was not so sure, for to me there was something 
 equivocal in his air and bearing. He might have been, 
 I thought, the son of some good family who had fallen 
 early into dissipation and run from home. But, making 
 early allowance, how admirable was his talk! I wish 
 you could have heard him tell his own stories. They 
 were so swingingly set forth, in such dramatic language, 
 and illustrated here and there by such luminous bits of 
 a.cting that they could only lose in any reproduction. 
 There were tales of the P. and O. Company,* where he 
 had been an officer; of the East Indies, where in former 
 years he had lived lavishly; of the Royal Engineers, where 
 he had served for a period; and of a dozen other sides of 
 life, each introducing some vigorous thumb-nail portrait. 
 He had the talk to himself that night, we were all so glad 
 to listen. The best talkers usually address themselves 
 to some particular society; there they are kings, else- 
 where camp-followers, as a man may know Russian and 
 yet be ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow had a frank, 
 headlong power of style, and a broad, human choice of 
 subject, that would have turned any circle in the world 
 into a circle of hearers. He was a Homeric talker, plain, 
 strong, and cheerful; and the things and the people of 
 which he spoke became readily and clearly present to the 
 minds of those who heard him. This, with a certain 
 
 > FenJiistilaT and Oriental steamship line running from England to 
 India. 
 
9Q SELECTIONS FKOM STEVENSON 
 
 dddfc*! colouring of rhetoric and rodomontade, must have 
 been the style of Bums, who equally charmed the ears 
 of duchesses and hostlers. 
 
 Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points 
 remained obscure in his narration. The Engineers, for 
 instance, was a service which he praised highly; it is true 
 there would be trouble with the sergeants; but then the 
 oiBcers were gentlemen, and his own, in particular, one 
 among ten thousand. It sounded so far exactly like an 
 episode in the rakish, topsy-turvy life of such an one as 
 I had imagined. But then there came incidents more 
 doubtful, which showed an almost impudent greed after 
 gratuities, and a truly impudent disregard for truth. 
 And then there was the tale of his departure. He had 
 wearied, it seems, of Woolwich, and one fine day, with 
 a companion, slipped up to London for a spree. I have 
 a suspicion that spree was meant to be a long one; but 
 God disposes all things; and one morning, near West- 
 minster Bridge, whom should he come across but the 
 very sergeant who had recruited him at first! What 
 followed? He himself indicated cavalierly that he had 
 then resigned. Let us put it so. But these resignations 
 are sometimes very trying. 
 
 At length, after having delighted us for hours, he took 
 himself away from the companion; and I could ask 
 Mackay who and what he was. "That?" said Mac- 
 kay. " Why, that 's one of the stowaways." 
 
 "No man," said the same authority, "who has had 
 anything to do with the sea, would ever think of paying 
 for a passage." I give the statement as Mackay's, with- 
 out endorsement; yet I am tempted to believe that it 
 contains a grain of truth; and if you add that the man 
 shall be impudent and thievish, or else dead-broke, it 
 may even pass for a fair representation of the facts. We 
 gentlemen of England who live at home at ease have, I 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 97 
 
 I suspect, very insufficient ideas on the subject. All the 
 world over, people are stowing away in coal-holes and 
 dark comers, and when ships are once out to sea, ap- 
 pearing again, begrimed and bashful, upon deck. The 
 career of these sea-tramps partakes largely of the adven- 
 turous. They may be poisoned by coal-gas, or die by 
 starvation in their place of concealment; or when found 
 they may be clapped at once and ignominiously into 
 irons, thus to be carried to their promised land, the port 
 of destination, and alas! brought back in the same way 
 to that from which they started, and there delivered over 
 to the magistrates and the seclusion of a coimty jail. 
 Since I crossed the Atlantic, one miserable stowaway was 
 found in a dying state among the fuel, uttered but a word 
 or two, and departed for a farther country than America. 
 When the stowaway appears on deck, he has but one 
 thing to pray for: that he be set to work, which is the 
 price and sign of his forgiveness. After half an hour with 
 a swab or a bucket, he feels himself as secure as if he had 
 paid for his passage. It is not altogether a bad thing for 
 the company, who get more or less efficient hands for 
 nothing but a few plates of junk and duff; and every now 
 and again find themselves better paid than by a whole 
 family of cabin passengers. Not long ago, for instance, 
 a packet was saved from nearly certain loss by the skill 
 and courage of a stowaway engineer. As was no more 
 than just, a handsome subscription rewarded him for 
 his success; but even without such exceptional good for- 
 tune, as things stand in England and America, the stow- 
 away will often make a good profit out of his adventure. 
 Four engineers stowed away last summer on the same 
 ship, the Circassia; and before two days after their arrival 
 each of the four had found a comfortable berth. This was 
 the most hopeful tale of emigration that I heard from 
 first to last; and as you see, the luck was for stowaways. 
 
98 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 My curiosity was much inflamed by what I heard; and 
 the next morning, as I was making the round of the ship, 
 I was delighted to find the ex-Royal Engineer engaged 
 in washing down the white paint of a deck house. There 
 was another fellow at work beside him, a lad not more 
 than twenty, in the most miraculous tatters, his hand- 
 some face sown with grains of beauty and lighted up 
 by expressive eyes. Four stowaways had been found 
 aboard our ship before she left the Clyde, but these two 
 had alone escaped the ignominy of being put ashore. 
 Alick, my acquaintance of last night, was Scots by birth, 
 and by trade a practical engineer; the other was from 
 Devonshire, and had been to sea before the mast. Two 
 people more unlike by training, character, and habits, it 
 would be hard to imagine; yet here they were together, 
 scrubbing paint. 
 
 Alick had held all sorts of good situations, and wasted 
 many opportunities in life. I have heard him end a 
 story with these words: "That was in my golden days, 
 when I used finger-glasses." Situation after situation 
 failed him; then followed the depression of trade, and 
 for months he had hung round with other idlers, playing 
 marbles all day in the West Park, and going home at night 
 to tell his landlady how he had been seeking for a job. 
 I believe this kind of existence was not unpleasant to 
 Alick himself, and he might have long continued to en- 
 joy idleness and a life on tick; but he had a comrade, let 
 us call him Brown, who grew restive. This fellow was 
 continually threatening to slip his cable for the States, 
 and at last, one Wednesday, Glasgow was left widowed 
 of her Brown. Some months afterwards, Alick met an- 
 other old chum in Sauchiehall Street. 
 
 "By the by, Alick," said he, "I met a gentleman in 
 New York who was asking for you." 
 
 "Who was that?" asked Alick. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 99 
 
 "The new second engineer on board the So-and-so," 
 was the reply. 
 
 "Well, and who is he?" 
 
 "Brown, to be sure." 
 
 For Brown had been one of the fortunate quartette 
 aboard the Circassia. If that was the way of it in the 
 States, Alick thought it was high time to follow Brown's 
 example. He spent his last day, as he put it, "review- 
 ing the yeomanry," and the npxt morning says he to his 
 landlady, "Mrs. X., I '11 not take porridge to-day, please; 
 I '11 take eome eggs." 
 
 "Why, have you found a job?" she asked, delighted. 
 
 "Well, yes," returned the perfidious Alick; "I think 
 I '11 start to-day." 
 
 And so, well lined with eggs, start he did, but for 
 America. I am afraid that landlady has seen the last 
 of him. 
 
 It was easy enough to get on board in the confusion 
 that attends a vessel's departure; and in one of the dark 
 corners of Steerage No. 1, flat in a bunk and with an 
 empty stomach, Alick made the voyage from the Broo- 
 mielaw to Greenock. That night the ship's yeoman 
 pulled him out by the heels and had him before the mate. 
 Two other stowaways had already been found and sent 
 ashore; but by this^time darkness had fallen, they were 
 out in the middle of the estuary, and the last steamer had 
 left them till the morning. 
 
 "Take him to the forecastle and give him a meal," 
 said the mate, "and see and pack him off the first thing 
 to-morrow." 
 
 In the forecastle he had supper, a good night's rest, 
 and breakfast; and was sitting placidly with a pipe, fan- 
 cying all was over and the game up for good with that 
 ship, when one of the sailors grumbled out an oath at him, 
 with a "What are you doing there?" and "Do you call 
 
100 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 that hiding, anyway?" There was need of no morei 
 Alick was in another bunk before the day was older. 
 Shortly before the passengers arrived, the ship was cur- 
 sorily inspected. He heard the round come down the 
 companion and look into one pen after another, until 
 they came within two of the one in which he lay con- 
 cealed. Into these last two they did not enter, but merely 
 glanced from without; and Alick had no doubt that he 
 was personally favoured in this escape. It was the char-i 
 acter of the man to attribute nothing to luck and but 
 little to kindness; whatever happened to him he had 
 earned in his own right amply; favours came to him from 
 his singular attraction and adroitness, and misfortunes 
 y.he had always accepted with his eyes open. Half aq 
 hour after the searchers had departed, the steerage begaij 
 to fill with legitimate passengers, and the worst of Alick's 
 troubles was at an end. He was soon making himseU 
 popular, smoking other people's tobacco, and politelj 
 sharing their private stock of delicacies, and when nighl 
 came he retired to his bunk beside the others with com- 
 posure. 
 
 Next day by afternoon. Lough Foyle being already 
 far behind, and only the rough northwestern hills of 
 Ireland within view, Alick appeared on deck to court 
 inquiry and decide his fate. As a matter of fact, he waa 
 known to several on board, and even intimate with one 
 of the engineers; but it was plainly not the etiquette of 
 .such occasions for the authorities to avow their infor* 
 mation. Every one professed surprise and anger on his 
 appearance, and he was led prisoner before the captain. 
 
 " What have you got to say for yourself?" inquired the 
 captain. 
 
 "Not much," said Alick, "but when a man has been 
 a long time out of a job, he will do things he would not 
 under other circumstances." 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 101 
 
 "Are you willing to work?"- 
 
 Alick swore he was burning to be useful. 
 
 "And what can you do?" asked the captain. 
 
 He replied composedly that he was a brass-fitter by 
 trade. 
 
 "I think you will be better at engineering?" sug- 
 gested the officer, with a shrewd look. 
 
 "No, sir," says Alick simply. — "There's few can beat 
 me at a lie," was his engaging commentary to me as he 
 recounted the affair. 
 
 "Have you been to sea?" again asked the captain. 
 
 " I 've had a trip on a Clyde steamboat, sir, but no 
 more," replied the unabashed Alick. 
 
 "Well, we must try and find some work for you," 
 concluded the officer. 
 
 And hence we behold Alick, clear of the hot engine- 
 room, lazily scraping paint and now and then taking a 
 pull upon a sheet. "You leave me alone," was his de- 
 duction. " When I get talking to a man, I can get round 
 him." 
 
 The other stowaway, whom I will call the Devonian 
 • — it was noticeable that neither of them told his name — 
 had both been brought up and seen the world in a much 
 smaller way. His father, a confectioner, died and was 
 closely followed by his mother. His sisters had taken, 
 I think, to dress-making. He himself had returned' from 
 sea about a year ago and gone to live with his brother, 
 who kept the "George Hotel" — "it was not quite a real 
 hotel," added the candid fellow — "and had a hired man 
 to mind the horses." At first the Devonian was very 
 welcome; but as time went on his brother not unnatu- 
 rally grew cool towards him, and he began to find himself 
 one too many at the " George Hotel." " I don't think 
 brothers care much for you," he said, as a general reflec- 
 tion upon life. Hurt at this change, nearly penniless. 
 
102 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 and too proud to ask for more, he set off on foot and 
 walked eighty miles to Weymouth, living on the journey 
 as he could. He would have enlisted, but he was too 
 small for the army and too old for the navy; and thought 
 himself fortunate at last to find a berth on board a trad-- 
 ing dandy/ Somewhere iu the Bristol Channel, the 
 dandy sprung a leak and went down; and though the 
 crew were picked up and brought ashore by fishermen, 
 they foimd themselves with nothing but the clothes upon 
 their back. His next engagement was scarcely better 
 starred; for the ship proved so leaky, and frightened them 
 all so heartily during a short passage through the Irish 
 Sea, that the entire crew deserted and remained behind 
 upon the quays of Belfast. 
 
 Evil days were now coming thick on the Devonian. 
 He could find no berth in Belfast, and had to work a pas- 
 sage to Glasgow on a steamer. She reached the Broo- 
 mielaw on a Wednesday: the Devonian had a bellyful 
 that morning, laying in breakfast manfully to provide 
 against the future, and set off along the quays to seek 
 employment. But he was now not only penniless, his 
 clothes had begun to fall in tatters; he had begun to have 
 the look of a street Arab; and captains will have nothing 
 to say to a ragamuflBn; for in that trade, as in all others, 
 it is the coat that depicts the man. You may hand, 
 reef, and steer like an angel, but if you have a hole in 
 your trousers, it is like a millstone round your neck. 
 The Devonian lost heart at so many refusals. He had 
 not the impudence to beg; although, as he said, "when I 
 had money of my own, I always gave it." It was only 
 on Saturday morning, after three whole days of starvation, 
 that he asked a scone' from a milk-woman, who added 
 of her own accord a glass of milk. He had now made 
 
 ' A vessel rigged as a sloop. 
 
 ' A thin cake of wheat or barley-meal. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 103 
 
 up his mind to stow away, not from any desire to see 
 America, but merely to obtain the comfort of a place in 
 the forecastle and a supply of familiar sea-fare. He 
 lived by begging, always from milk-women, and always 
 scones and milk, and was not once refused. It was vile 
 wet weather, and he could never have been dry. By 
 night he walked the streets, and by day slept upon Glas- 
 gow Green, and heard, in the intervals of his dozing, the 
 famous theologians of the spot clear up intricate points 
 of doctrine and appraise the merits of the clergy. He 
 had not much instruction; he could "read bills on the 
 street," but was "main bad at writing"; yet these theolo- 
 gians seem to have impressed him with a genvine sense 
 of amusement. Why he did not go to the Sailor's Home 
 I know not; I presume there is in Glasgow one of these 
 institutions, which are by far the happiest and the wisest 
 effort of contemporaneous charity; but I must stand to 
 my author, as they say in old books, and relate the story 
 as I heard it. In the meantime, he had tried four times 
 to stow away in different vessels, and four times had been 
 discovered and handed back to starvation. The fifth 
 time was lucky; and you may judge if he were pleased 
 to be aboard ship again, at his old work, and with duff 
 twice a week. He was, said Alick, " a devil for flie duff." 
 Or if devil was not the word, it was one if anything 
 stronger. 
 
 The difference in the conduct of the two was remark- 
 able. The Devonian was as willing as any paid hand, 
 swarmed aloft among the first, pulled his natural weight 
 and firmly upon a rope, and foimd work fw himself 
 when there was none to show him. Alick, on the other 
 hand, was not only a skulker in the grain, but took a 
 humourous and fine gentlemanly view of the transaction. 
 He would speak to me by the hour in ostentatious idle- 
 ness; and only if the bo's'un or a mate came by. fell-to 
 
104 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 languidly for just the necessary time till they were out 
 of sight. " I 'm not breaking my heart with ft," he re- 
 marked. 
 
 Once there was a hatch to be opened near where he 
 was stationed; he watched the preparations for a second 
 or so suspiciously, and then, "Hullo," said he, "here's 
 some real work coming — I 'm off," and he was gone that 
 moment. Again, calculating the six guinea passage- 
 money, and the probable duration of the passage, he re- 
 marked pleasantly that he was getting six shillings a day 
 for this job, " and it 's pretty dear to the company at 
 that." "They are making nothing by me," was another 
 of his observations; "they 're making something by that 
 fellow." And he pointed to the Devonian, who was just 
 then busy to the eyes. 
 
 The more you saw of Alick, the more, it must be 
 owned, you learned to despise him. His natural talents 
 were of no use either to himself or others; for his char- 
 acter had degenerated like his face, and become pulpy 
 and pretentious. Even his power of persuasion, which 
 was certainly very surprising, stood in some danger of 
 being lost or neutralised by over-confidence. He lied in 
 an aggressive, brazen manner, like a pert criminal in the 
 dock; and he was so vain of his ovra cleverness that he 
 could not refrain from boasting, ten minutes after, of the 
 very trick by which he had deceived you. "Why, now 
 I have more money than when I came on board," he said 
 one night, exhibiting a sixpence, "and yet I stood my- 
 self a bottle of beer before I went to bed yesterday. And 
 as for tobacco, I have fifteen sticks of it." That was 
 fairly successful indeed; yet a man of his superiority, and 
 with a less obtrusive policy, might, who knows ? have got 
 the length of half a crown. A man who prides himself 
 upon persuasion should learn the persuasive faculty of 
 silence, above all as to his own misdeeds. It is only in 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 105 
 
 the faree and for dramatic purposes that Scapin* en- 
 larges on his peculiar talents to the world at large. 
 
 Scapin is perhaps a good name for this clever, unfor- 
 tunate Alick; for at the bottom of all his misconduct there 
 was a guiding sense of humour that moved you to forgive 
 him. It was more than half a jest that he conducted his 
 existence. " Oh, man," he said to me once with unusual 
 emotion, like a man thinking of his mistress, "I would 
 give up anything for a lark." ♦ 
 
 It was in relation to his fellow-stowaway that Alick 
 showed the best, or perhaps I should say the only good, 
 points of his nature. "Mind you," he said suddenly, 
 changing his tone, "mind you that 's a good boy. He 
 wouldn't tell you a lie. A lot of them think he is a 
 scamp because his clothes are ragged, but he isn't; he 's 
 as good as gold." To hear him, you become aware that 
 Alick himself had a taste for virtue. He thought his own 
 idleness and the other's industry equally becoming. He 
 was no more anxious to insure his own reputation as a 
 liar than to uphold the truthfulness of his companion; 
 and he seemed unaware of what was incongruous in his 
 attitude, and was plainly sincere in both characters. 
 
 It was not surprising that he should take an interest in 
 the Devonian, for the lad worshipped and served him in 
 love and wonder. Busy as he was, he would find time 
 to warn Alick of an approaching oflScer, or even to tell 
 him that the coast was clear, and he might slip off and 
 smoke a pipe in safety. "Tom," he once said to him, 
 for that was the name which Alick ordered him to use, 
 "if you don't like going to the galley, I '11 go for you. 
 You ain't used to this kind of thing, you ain't. But I 'm 
 a sailor; and I can understand the feelings of any fellow, 
 I can." Again, he was hard up, and casting about for 
 
 • A shrewd, unprincipled servant in Molilre'a comedy, Les Four- 
 beries de Scapin. 
 
106 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 some tobacco, for he was not so liberally used in this 
 respect as others perhaps less worthy, when Alick offered 
 him the half of one of his fifteen sticks. I think, for my 
 part, he might have increased the offer to a whole one, 
 or perhaps a pair of them, and not lived to regret his 
 liberality. But the Devonian refused. "No," he said, 
 "you 're a stowaway like me; I won't take it from you, 
 I '11 take it from some one who 's not down on his luck." 
 
 It was notable in this generous lad that he was strongly 
 under the influence of sex. If a woman passed near 
 where he was working, his eyes lit up, his hand paused, . 
 and his mind wandered instantly to other thoughts. It 
 was natural that he should exercise a fascination pro- 
 portionally strong upon women. He begged, you will 
 remember, from women only, and was never refused. 
 Without wishing to explain away the charity of those 
 who helped him, I cannot but fancy he may have owed a 
 little to his handsome face, and to that quick, responsive 
 nature, formed for love, which speaks eloquenfly through 
 all disguises, and can stamp an impression in ten min- 
 utes' talk or an exchange of glances. He was the more 
 dangerous in that he was far from bold, but seemed to 
 woo in spite of himself, and with a soft and pleading eye. 
 Ragged as he was, and many a scarecrow is in that respect 
 more comfortably furnished, even on board he was not 
 without some curious admirers. 
 
 There was a girl among the passengers, a tall, blonde, 
 handsome, strapping Irishwoman, with a wild, accom- 
 modating eye, whom Alick had dubbed Tommy, with 
 that transcendental appropriateness that defies analysis. 
 One day the Devonian was lying for warmth in the upper 
 stoke-hole, which stands open on the deck, when Irish 
 Tommy came past, very neatly attired, as was her custom. 
 
 "Poor fellow," she said, stopping,' "you haven't a 
 vest." 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 107 
 
 "No," he said; "I wish I 'ad." 
 
 Then she stood and gazed on him in silence, until, in 
 his embarrassment, for he knew not how to look under 
 this scrutiny, he pulled out his pipe and began to fill it 
 M^ith tobacco. 
 
 "Do you want a match?" she asked. And before he 
 had time to reply, she ran off and presently returaed with 
 more than one. 
 
 That was the beginning and the end, as far as our pas- 
 Sage is concerned, of what I will make bold to call this 
 love-affair. There are many relations which go on to 
 marriage and last during a lifetime, in which less human 
 feeling is engaged than in this scene of five minutes at the 
 stoke-hole. 
 
 Rigidly speaking, this would end the chapter of the 
 stowaways; but in a larger sense of the word I have yet 
 more to add. Jones had discovered and pointed out to 
 me a young woman who was remarkable among her fel- 
 lows for a pleasing and interesting air. She was poorly 
 clad, to the verge, if not over the line, of disrespectabiHty, 
 with a ragged old jacket and a bit of a sealskin cap no 
 bigger than your fist; but her eyes, her whole expression, 
 and her manner, even in ordinary moments, told of a true 
 Womanly nature, capable of love, anger, and devotion. 
 She had a look, too, of refinement, like one who might 
 have been a better lady than most, had she been allowed 
 the opportunity. When alone she seemed preoccupied 
 and sad; but she was not often alone; there was usually 
 by her side a heavy, dull, gross man in rough clothes, 
 chary of speech and gesture — not from caution, but pov- 
 erty of disposition; a man like a ditcher, imlovely and 
 uninteresting; whom she petted and tended and waited 
 on with her eyes as if he had been Amadis of Gaul.* It 
 was strange to see this hulking fellow dog-sick, and this 
 
 > A legendaiy hero, appearing in numerous mediaeval romances. 
 
108 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 delicate, sad woman caring for him. He seemed, from 
 first to last, insensible of her caresses and attentions, and 
 she seemed unconscious of his insensibility. The Irish 
 husband, who sang his wife to sleep, and this Scottish girl 
 serving her Orson,* were the two bits of human nature 
 I that most appealed to me throughout the voyage. 
 
 On the Thursday before we arrived, the tickets were 
 collected; and soon a rumour began to go roimd the ves- 
 sel; and this girl, with her bit of sealskin cap, became the 
 centre of whispering and pointed fingers. She also, it 
 was said, was a stowaway of a sort; for she was on board 
 with neither ticket nor money; and the man with whom 
 she travelled was the father of a family, who had left wife 
 and children to be hers. The ship's ofiBcers discouraged 
 the story, which may therefore have been a story and no 
 more; but it was believed in the steerage, and the poor 
 girl had to encounter many curious eyes from that day 
 forth. 
 
 PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW 
 
 Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across 
 the ocean combined both. " Out of my country and my- 
 self I go," sings the old poet: and I was not only travelling 
 out of my country in latitude and longitude, but out of 
 myself in diet, associates, and consideration. Part of 
 the interest and a great deal of the amusement flowed, at 
 least to me, from this novel situation in the world. 
 
 I found that I had what they call fallen in life with 
 absolute success and verisimihtude. I was taken for 
 a steerage passenger; no one seemed surprised that I 
 should be so; and there was nothing but the brass plate 
 
 ' Another hero of mediseval romance. According to the story, he 
 (fas carried off by a bear, and grew up rough and uncouth; hence 
 Stevenson's point. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 109 
 
 between decks to remind me that I had once been a 
 gentleman. In a former book, describing a former jour- 
 ney, I expressed some wonder that I could be readily 
 and naturally taken for a pedlar, and explained the acci- 
 dent by the difference of language and manners between 
 England and France. I must now take a humbler view; 
 for here I was among my own countrymen, somewhat 
 roughly dad, to be sure, but with every advantage of 
 speech and manner; and I am boimd to confess (bat I 
 passed for nearly anything you please except an educated 
 gentleman. The sailors called me "mate," the oflScers 
 addressed me as "my man," my comrades accepted me 
 without hesitation for a person of their own character 
 and experience, but with some curious information. 
 One, a mason himself, believed I was a mason; several, 
 and 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. From all these guesses I drew 
 one conclusion, which told against the insight of my com- 
 panions. 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. 
 
 To the saloon passengers also I sustained my part with- 
 out a hitch. It is true I came little in their way; but when 
 we did encoimter, there was no recognition in their eye, 
 although I confess I sometimes courted it in silence. All 
 these, my inferiors and equals, took me, like the trans- 
 formed monarch in the story, for a mere common, human 
 man. They gave me a hard, dead look, with the flesh 
 about the eye kept unrelaxed. 
 
 With the women this surprised me less, as I had al- 
 ready experimented on the sex by going abroad through 
 a suburban part of London simply attired in a sleeve- 
 waistcoat The result was curious. I then learned for 
 
110 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 the first time, and by the exhaustive process, how much 
 attention ladies are accustomed to bestow on all male 
 creatures of their own station; for, in my humble ng, 
 each one who went by me caused me a certain shock of 
 surprise and a sense of something wanting. In my nor- 
 mal circumstances, it appeared every young lady must 
 have paid me some tribute of a glance; and though I had 
 often not detected it when it was given, I was well aware 
 of its absence when it was withheld. My height seemed 
 to decrease with every woman who passed me, for she 
 passed me like a dog. This is one of my grounds for 
 supposing that what are called the upper classes may 
 sometimes produce a disagreeable impression in what 
 are called the lower; and I wish some one would continue 
 my experiment, and find out exactly at what stage of 
 toilette a man becomes invisible to the well-regulated 
 female eye. 
 
 Here on shipboard the matter was put to a more com- 
 plete test; for, even with the addition of speech and man- 
 ner, I passed among the ladies for precisely the average 
 man of the steerage. It was one afternoon that I saw 
 this demonstrated. A very plainly dressed woman was 
 taken ill on deck. I think I had the luck to be present 
 at every sudden seizure during all the passage; and on 
 this occasion found myself in the place of importance, 
 supporting the sufferer. There was not only a large 
 crowd immediately around us, but a considerable knot 
 of saloon passengers leaning over our heads from the 
 hurricane-deck. One of these, an elderly managing 
 woman, hailed me with counsels. Of course I had to 
 reply; and as the talk went on, I began to discover that 
 the whole group took me for the husband. I looked 
 upon my new wife, poor creature, with mingled feelings; 
 and I must own she had not even the appearance of the 
 poorest class of city servant-maids, but looked more like 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT IH 
 
 a country wench who should have been employed at a 
 roadside inn. Now was the time for me to go and study 
 the brass plate. 
 
 To such of the officers as knew about me — the doctor, 
 the purser, and the stewards — I appeared in the light of 
 a broad joke. The fact that I spent the better part of 
 my day in writing had gone abroad over the ship and 
 tickled them all prodigiously. Whenever they met me 
 they referred to my absurd occupation with familiarity 
 and breadth of hiunorous intention. Their manner was 
 well calculated to remind me of my fallen fortunes. You 
 may be sincerely amused by the amateur literary efforts 
 of a gentleman, but you scarce publish the feeling to his 
 face. "Well!" they would say: "still writing?" And 
 the smile would widen into a laugh. The purser came 
 one day into the cabin, and, touched to the heart by my 
 misguided industry, offered me some other kind of writ- 
 ing, " for which," he added pointedly, "you will be paid." 
 This was nothing else than to copy out the list of pas- 
 sengers. 
 
 Another trick of mine which told against my reputa- 
 tion was my choice of roosting-place in an active draught 
 upon the cabin floor. I was openly jeered and flouted 
 for this eccentricity; and a considerable knot would some- 
 times gather at the door to see my last dispositions for 
 the night. This was embarrassmg, but I learned to sup 
 port the trial with equanimity. 
 
 Indeed I may say that, upon the whole, my new posi- 
 tion sat lightly and naturally upon my spirits. I ac- 
 cepted the consequences with readiness, and found them 
 far from difficult to bear. The steerage conquered me; 
 I conformed more and more to the type of the place, not 
 only in manner but at heart, growing hostile to the officers 
 and cabin passengers who looked down upon me, and 
 day by day greedier for small delicacies. Such was the 
 
112 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 result, as I fancy, of a diet of bread and butter, soup and 
 porridge. We think we have no sweet tooth as long as 
 we are full to the brim of molasses; but a man must have 
 jwjoumed in the workhouse before he boasts himself m- 
 ^jfiFerent to dainties. Every evening, for instance, I was 
 more and more preoccupied about our doubtful fare at 
 tea. If it was delicate my heart was much lightened; if 
 it was but broken fish I was proportionally downcast. 
 The ofifer of a little jelly from a fellow-passenger more 
 provident than myself caused a marked elevation in my 
 spirits. And I would have gone to the ship's end and 
 back again for an oyster or a chipped fruit. 
 
 In other ways I was content with my position. It 
 seemed no disgrace to be confoimded with my company; 
 for I may as well declare at once I found their manners 
 as gentle and becoming as those of any other class. I 
 do not mean that my friends could have sat down with- 
 out embarrassment and laughable disaster at the table 
 of a duke. That does not imply an inferiority of breed- 
 ing, but a difference of usage. Thus I flatter myself 
 that I conducted myself well among my fellow-passengers; 
 yet my most ambitious hope is not to have avoided faults, 
 but to have committed as few as possible. I know too 
 well that my tact is not the same as their tact, and that 
 my habit of a different society constituted, not only no 
 qualification, but a positive disability to move easily and 
 becomingly in this. When Jones complimented me — 
 because I "managed to behave very pleasantly" to my 
 fellow-passengers, was how he put it — I could follow the 
 thought in his mind, and knew his compliment to be such 
 as we pay foreigners on their proficiency in English. I 
 dare say this praise was given me immediately on the 
 back of some unpardonable solecism, which had led him 
 io review my conduct as a whole. We are all ready to 
 laugh at the ploughman among lords; we should con- 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 113 
 
 sider also the case of a lord among the ploughmen. J 
 have seen a lawyer in the house of a Hebridean fisherman-, 
 and I know, but nothing will induce me to disclose, which 
 of these two was the better gentleman. Some of our 
 finest behaviour, though it looks well enough from the 
 boxes, may seem even brutal to the gallery. We boast 
 too often manners that are parochial rather than univer- 
 sal; that, like a country wine, will not bear transportation 
 for a hundred miles, nor from the parlour to the kitchen. 
 To be a gentleman is to be one all the world over, and 
 in every relation and grade of society. It is a high call- 
 ing, to which a man must first be bom, and then devote 
 himself for life. And, unhappily, the manners of a cer- 
 tain so-called upper grade have a kind of currency, and 
 meet with a certain external acceptation throughout all 
 the others, and this tends to keep us well satisfied with 
 slight acquirements and the amateurish accomplishments 
 of a clique. But manners, like art, should be human and 
 central. 
 
 Some of my fellow-passengers, as I now moved among 
 them in a relation of equality, seemed to me excellent 
 gentlemen. They were not rough, nor hasty, nor dis- 
 putatious; debated pleasantly, differed kindly; were 
 helpful, gentle, patient, and placid. The type of man- 
 ners was plain, and even heavy; there was little to please 
 the eye, but nothing to shock; and I thought gentleness 
 lay more nearly at the spring of behaviour than in many 
 more ornate and delicate societies. I say delicate, where 
 I cannot say refined; a thing may be fine, like ironwork, 
 without being delicate, like lace. There was here less del- 
 icacy; the skin supported more callously the natural sur- 
 face of events, the mind received more bravely the crude 
 facts of human existence; but I do not think that there 
 was less effective refinement, less consideration for others, 
 less polite suppression of self. I speak of the best among 
 
114 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 my fellow-passengers; for in the steerage, as well as in the 
 sialoon, there is a mixture. Those, then, with whom I 
 found myself in sympathy, and of whom I may therefore 
 hope to write with a greater measure of truth, were not 
 only as good in their manners, but endowed with very 
 much the same natural capacities, and about as wise in 
 deduction, as the bankers and barristers of what is called 
 society. One and all were too much interested in dis- 
 connected facts, and loved information for its own sake 
 with too rash a devotion; but people in all classes display 
 the same appetite as they gorge themselves daily with 
 the miscellaneous gossip of the newspaper. Newspaper 
 reading, as far as I can make out, is often rather a sort 
 of brown study than an act of culture. I have myself 
 palmed off yesterday's issue on a friend, and seen him re- 
 peruse it for a continuance of minutes with an air at once 
 refreshed and solemn. Workmen, perhaps, pay more 
 attention; but though they may be eager listeners, they 
 have rarely seemed to me either willing or careful think- 
 ers. Culture is not measured by the greatness of the field 
 which is covered by our knowledge, but by the nicety with 
 which we can perceive relations in that field, whether 
 great or small. Workmen, certainly those who were 
 on board with me, I found wanting in this quality or 
 habit of the mind. They did not perceive relations, but 
 leaped to a so-called cause, and thought the problem 
 settled. Thus the cause of everything in England was 
 the form of government, and the cure for all evils was, 
 by consequence, a revolution. It is surprising how many 
 of them said this, and that none should have had a defi- 
 nite thought in his head as he said it. Some hated the 
 Church because they disagreed with it; some hated Lord 
 Beaconsfield because of war and taxes; all hated the mas- 
 ters, possibly with reason. But these feelings were not 
 at the root of the matter; the true reasoning of their souls 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 115 
 
 ran thus — I have not got on; I ought to have got en; if 
 there was a revolution I should get on. How? They 
 had no idea. "Why? Because — because— well, look at 
 America! 
 
 To be politically blind is no distinction; we are all so, 
 if you come to that. At bottom, as it seems to me, there 
 is but one question in modem home politics, though it 
 appears in many shapes, and that is the question of 
 money; and but one political remedy, that the people 
 should grow wiser and better. My workmen fellow- 
 passengers were as impatient and dull of hearing on the 
 second of these points as any member of Parliament; but 
 they had some glimmerings of the first. They would not 
 hear of improvement on their part, but wished the world 
 made over again in a crack, so that they might remain 
 improvident and idle and debauched, and yet enjoy the 
 comfort and respect that should accompany- the opposite 
 virtues; and it was in this expectation, as far as I could see, 
 that many of them were now on their way to America. 
 But on the point of money they saw clearly enough that 
 inland politics, so far as they were concerned, were re- 
 ducible to the question of annual income; a question 
 which should long ago have been settled by a revolution, 
 they did not know how, and which they were now about 
 to settle for themselves, once more they knew not how, 
 by crossing the Atlantic in a steamship of considerable 
 tonnage. 
 
 And yet it has been amply shown them that the sec- 
 ond or income question is in itself nothing, and may as 
 well be left undecided, if there be no wisdom and virtue 
 to profit by the change. It is not by a man's purse, but 
 by his character, that he is rich or poor. Barney will be 
 poor, Alick will be poor, Mackay will be poor; let them 
 go where they will, and wreck all the governments under 
 heaven, they will be poor until they die. 
 
116 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average woik' 
 man than his surprising idleness, and the candour with 
 which he confesses to the failing. It has to me been al- 
 ways something of a relief to find the poor, as a general 
 rule, so little oppressed with work. I can in consequence 
 enjoy my own more fortunate beginning with a better 
 grace. The other day I was living with a farmer in 
 America, an old frontiersman, who had worked and 
 fought, himted and farmed, from his childhood up. He 
 excused himself for his defective education on the ground 
 that he had been overworked from first to last. Even 
 now, he said, anxious as he was, he had never the time 
 to take up a book. In consequence of this, I observed 
 him closely; he was occupied for four or, at the extreme 
 outside, for five hours out of the twenty-four, and then 
 principally in walking; and the remainder of the day he 
 passed in born idleness, either eating fruit or standing 
 with his back against a door. I have known men do hard 
 literary work all morning, and then undergo quite as 
 much physical fatigue by way of relief as satisfied this 
 powerful frontiersman for the day. He, at least, like all 
 the educated class, did so much homage to industry as to 
 persuade himself he was industrious. But the average 
 mechanic recognises his idleness with effrontery; he has 
 even, as I am told, organized it. 
 
 I give the story as it was told me, and it was told me 
 for a fact. A man fell from a housetop in the city of 
 Aberdeen, and was brought into hospital with broken 
 bones. He was asked what was his trade, and replied 
 that he was a tapper. No one had ever heard of such a 
 thing before; the officials were filled with curiosity; they 
 besought an explanation. It appeared that when a 
 party of slaters were engaged upon a roof, they would 
 aow and then be taken with a fancy for the public-house. 
 Now a seamstress, for example, might slip away from 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 117 
 
 her work and no one be the wiser; but if these fellows 
 adjourned, the tapping of the mallets would cease, and 
 thus the neighbourhood be advertised of their defection. 
 Hence the career of the tapper. He has to do the tapping 
 and keep up an industrious bustle on the housetop dur- 
 ing the absence of the slaters. When he taps for only 
 one or two the thing is child's-play, but when he has to 
 represent a whole troop, it is then that he earns his money 
 in the sweat of his brow. Then must he bound from 
 spot to spot, reduplicate, triplicate, sexduplicate his sin- 
 gle personality, and swell and hasten his blows, until he 
 produce a perfect illusion for the ear, and you would 
 swear that a crowd of emulous masons were continuing 
 merrily to roof the house. It must be a strange sight 
 from an upper window. 
 
 I heard nothing on board of the tapper; but I was as- 
 tonished at the sto.ries told by my companions. Skulking, 
 shirking, malingering, were all established tactics, it 
 appeared. They could see no dishonesty where a man 
 who is paid for an hour's work gives half an hour's con- 
 sistent idling in its place. Thus the tapper would refuse 
 to watch for the police during a burglary, and call himself 
 an honest man. It is not sufficiently recognised that our 
 race detests to work. If I thought that I should have to 
 work every day of my life as hard as I am working now, I 
 should be tempted to give up the struggle. And the 
 workman early begins on^is career of toil. He has never 
 had his fill of holidays in the past, and his prospect of 
 holidays in the future is both distant and uncertain. In 
 the circumstances, it would require a high degree of virtue 
 not to snatch alleviations for the moment. 
 
 There were many good talkers on the ship; and I be- 
 lieve good talking of a certain sort is a common ac- 
 complishment among working-men. Where books are 
 comparatively scarce, a greater amount of information 
 
118 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 will be given and received by word of mouth; and this 
 tends to produce good talkers, and, what is no less need- 
 ful for conversation, good listeners. They could all tell 
 a story with effect. I am sometimes tempted to think 
 that the less literary class show always better in narra- 
 tion; they have so much more patience with detail, are 
 so much less hurried to reach the points, and preserve 
 so much juster a proportion among the facts. At the 
 same time their talk is dry; they pursue a topic plod- 
 dingly, have not an agile fancy, do not throw sudden 
 lights from unexpected quarters, and when the talk is 
 over they often leave the matter where it was. They 
 mark time instead of marching. They think only to 
 argue, not to reach new conclusions, and use their rea- 
 son rather as a weapon of offence than as a tool for self- 
 improvement. Hence the talk of some of the cleverest 
 was unprofitable in result, because there was no give and 
 take; they would grant you as little as possible for premise, 
 and begin to dispute under an oath to conquer or to die. 
 
 But the talk of a workman is apt to be more interest- 
 ing than that of a wealthy merchant, because the thoughts, 
 hopes, and fears of which the workman's life is built lie 
 nearer to necessity and nature. They are more immedi- 
 ate to human life. An income calculated by the week 
 is a far more human thing than one calculated by the 
 year, and a small income, simply from its smallness, than 
 a large one. I never wearied listening to the details of a 
 workman's economy, because every item stood for some 
 real pleasure. If he could afford pudding twice a week, 
 you know that twice a week the man ate with genuine 
 gusto and was physically happy; while if you learn that 
 a rich man has seven courses a day, ten to one the half 
 of them remain untasted, and the whole is but misspent 
 money and a weariness to the flesh. 
 
 The difference between England and America to a 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 119 
 
 working-man was thus most humanly put to me by a fel- 
 low-passenger: "In America," said he, "you get pies and 
 puddings." I do not hear pnough, in economy books, 
 of pies and pudding. A man lives in and for the deli- 
 cacies, adornments, and accidental attributes of life, such 
 as pudding to eat and pleasant books and theatres to 
 occupy his leisure. The bare terms of existence would 
 be rejected with contempt by all. If a man feeds on 
 bread and butter, soup and porridge, his appetite grows 
 wolfish after dainties. And the workman dwells in a 
 borderland, and is always within sight of those cheerless 
 regions where life is more difficult to sustain than worth 
 sustaining. Every detail of our existence, where it is 
 worth while to cross the ocean after pie and pudding, is 
 made alive and enthralling by the presence of genuine 
 desire; but it is all one to me whether Croesus has a hun- 
 dred or a thousand thousands in the bank. There is 
 more adventure in the life of the working-man who de- 
 scends as a common soldier into the battle of life, than 
 in that of the millionaire who sits apart in an office, like 
 Von Moltke,' and only directs the manoeuvres by tele- 
 graph. Give me to hear about the career of him who is 
 in the thick of the business; to whom one change of mar- 
 ket means an empty belly, and another a copious and 
 savoury meal. This is not the philosophical, but the 
 human side of economics; it interests like a story; and the 
 life of all who are thus situated partakes in a small way 
 of the charm of Robinson Crusoe; for every step is critical, 
 and human life is presented to you naked and verging 
 to its lowest terms. 
 
 ' Germany's foremost strategist in the Franco-Prussian war 
 (1870-1871). 
 
120 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 As we drew near to New York I was at first amused, 
 and then somewhat staggered, by the cautious and the 
 grisly tales that went the round. You would have 
 thought we were to land upon a cannibal island. You 
 must speak to no one in the streets, as they would not 
 leave you till you were rooked and beaten. You must 
 enter a hotel with military precautions; for the least you 
 had to apprehend was to awake next morning without 
 money or baggage, or necessary raiment, a lone forked 
 radish in a bed; and if the worst befell, you would in- 
 stantly and mysteriously disappear from the ranks of 
 mankind. 
 
 I have usually found such stories correspond to the 
 least modicum of fact. Thus I was warned, I remem- 
 ber, against the roadside inns of the Cdvennes,* and that 
 by a learned professor; and when I reached Pradelles 
 the warning was explained — it was but the faraway 
 rumour and reduplication of a single terrifying story 
 already half a century old, and half forgotten in the the- 
 atre of the events. So I was tempted to make light of 
 these reports against America. But we had on board 
 with us a man whose evidence it would not do to put 
 aside. He had come near these perils in the body; he 
 had visited a robber inn. The public has an old and 
 well-grounded favour for this class of incident, and shall 
 be gratified to the best of my power. 
 
 My fellow-passenger, whom we shall call M'Naughten, 
 had come from New York to Boston with a comrade, 
 seeking work. They were a pair of rattling blades; and, 
 leaving their baggage at the station, passed the day in 
 
 ' A mountain range in Southern France through which Stevenson 
 had already taken the trip described in Travels with a Donkey. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 121 
 
 beer-saloons, and with congenial spirits, until midnight 
 struck. Then they applied themselves to find a lodg- 
 ing, and walked the streets till two, knockiog at houses of 
 entertainment and being refused admittance, or them- 
 selves declining the terms. By two the inspiration of 
 their liquor had begun to wear off; they were weary and 
 humble, and after a great circuit found themselves in the 
 same street where they had begun their search, and in 
 front of a French hotel where they had already sought 
 accommodation. Seeing the house still open, they re- 
 turned to the charge. A man in a white cap sat in an 
 office by the door. He seemed to welcome them more 
 warmly than when they had first presented themselves, 
 and the charge for the night had somewhat unaccount- 
 ably fallen from a dollar to a quarter. They thought him 
 ill-looking, but paid their quarter apiece, and were shown 
 upstairs to the top of the house. There, in a small room, 
 the man in the white cap wished them pleasant slum- 
 bers. 
 
 It was furnished with a bed, a chair, and some con- 
 veniences. The door did not lock on the inside; and the 
 only sign of adornment was a couple of framed pictures, 
 one close above the head of the bed, and the other op- 
 posite the foot, and both curtained, as we may sometimes 
 see valuable water-colours, or the portraits of the dead, or 
 works of art more than usually skittish in the subject. 
 It was perhaps in the hope of finding something of this 
 last description that M'Naughten's comrade pulled aside 
 the curtain of the first. He was startlingly disappointed. 
 There was no picture. The frame surrounded, and the 
 curtain was designed to hide, an oblong aperture in the 
 partition, through which they looked forth into the dark 
 corridor. A person standing without could easily take 
 a purse from under the pillow, or even strangle a sleeper 
 as he lay abed. M'Naughten and his comrade stared 
 
122 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 at each other likeVasco's seamen, "with a wild sumuse;"* 
 and then the latter, catching up the lamp, ran to the other 
 frame and roughly raised the curtain. There he stood, 
 petrified; and M'Naughten, who had followed, graced 
 him by the wrist in terror. They could see into another 
 room, larger in size than that which they occupied, where 
 three men sat crouching and silent in the dark. For a 
 second or so these five persons looked each other in the 
 eyes, then the curtain was dropped, and M'Naughten 
 and his friend made but one bolt of it out of the room 
 and downstairs. The man in the white cap said nothing 
 as they passed him; and they were so pleased to be once 
 more in the open night that they gave up all notion of a 
 bed, and walked the streets of Boston till the mormng. 
 
 No one seemed much cast down by these stories, but 
 all inquired after the address of a respectable hotel; and 
 I, for my part, put myself tmder the conduct of Mr. 
 Jones. Before noon of the second Sunday we sighted 
 the low shores outside of New York harbour; the steer- 
 age passengers must remain on board to pass through 
 Castle Garden^ on the following morning; but we of the 
 second cabin made our escape along with the lords of 
 the saloon; and by six o'clock Jones and I issued into 
 West Street, sitting on some straw in the 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 down- 
 pour. The roadways were flooded; a loud strident noise 
 of falling water filled the air; the restaurants smelt heavily 
 of wet people and wet clothing. 
 
 It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us a good 
 deal of money, to be rattled along West Street to our 
 
 ' An erroneous reference to Keats' Sonnet on First Looking into 
 Chapman's Homer, which describes Cortes' (not Vasco's) first view 
 of the Pacific. 
 
 ' Formerly the regular landing place for immigiauts. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 123 
 
 destination: "Reunion House, No 10 West Street, one 
 minute's walk from Castle Garden; convenient to Castle 
 Garden, the Steamboat Landings, California Steamers 
 and Liverpool Ships; Board and Lodging per day 1 
 dollar, single meals 25 cents, lodging per night 25 cents; 
 private rooms for families; no charge for storage or bag- 
 gage; satisfaction guaranteed to all persons; Michael 
 Mitchell, Proprietor." Reunion House was, I may go 
 the length of saying, a humble hostelry. You entered 
 through a long bar-room, thence passed into a little 
 dining-room, and thence into a still smaller kitchen. The 
 furniture was of the plainest; but the bar was htmg in 
 the American taste, with encouraging and hospitable 
 mottoes. 
 
 Jones was well known; we were received warmly; and 
 two minutes afterwards I had refused a drink from 
 the proprietor, and was going on, in my plain European 
 fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr. Mitchell sternly 
 interposed, and explained the situation. He was offer- 
 ing to treat me, it appeared; whenever an American bar- 
 keeper proposes anything, it must be borne in mind 
 that he is offering to treat; and if I did not want a drink, 
 I must at least take the cigar. I took it bashfully, feel- 
 ing I had begun my American career on the wrong foot, 
 I did not enjoy that cigar; but this may have been from 
 a variety of reasons, even the best cigar often failing to 
 please if you smoke three^juarters of it in a drenching 
 rain. 
 
 For many years America was to me a sort of promised 
 land; "westward the march of empire holds its way"; 
 the race is for the moment to the young; what has been 
 and what is we imperfectly and obscurely know; what is 
 to be yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations. 
 Greece, Rome and Judaea are gone by forever, leaving to 
 generations the legacy of their accomplished work; China 
 
124 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 still endures, an old-inhabited house in the braad-new 
 city of nations; England has already declined, since she 
 has lost the States; and to these States, therefore, yet im- 
 developed, full of dark possibilities, and grown, like an- 
 other Eve, from one rib out of the side of their own old 
 land, the minds of young men in England turn naturally 
 i at a certain hopeful period of their age. It will be hard 
 for an American to understand the spirit. But let him 
 imagine a young man, who shall have grown up in an old 
 and rigid circle, following bygone fashions and taught 
 to distrust his own fresh instincts, and who now suddenly 
 hears of a family of cousins, all about his own age, who 
 keep house together by themselves and live far from 
 restraint and tradition; let him imagine this, and he will 
 have some imperfect notion of the sentiment with which 
 spirited English youths turn to the thought of the Amer- 
 ican Republic. It seems to them as if, out west, the war 
 of life was still conducted in the open air, and on free 
 barbaric terms; as if it had not yet been narrowed into 
 parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like some unjust 
 and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume, forms 
 of procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial. Which of 
 these two he prefers, a man with any youth still left in 
 him will decide rightly for himself. He would rather 
 be houseless than denied a pass-key; rather go without 
 food than partake of a stalled ox in stiff, respectable 
 society; rather be shot out of hand than direct his life 
 according to the dictates of the world. 
 
 He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the 
 Puritan sourness, the fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, 
 or the dreary existence of country towns. A few wild 
 story-books which delighted his childhood form the im- 
 aginative basis of his picture of America. In course of 
 time, there is added to this a great crowd of stimulating 
 details — ^vast cities that grow up as by enchantment; 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT l2a 
 
 tte birds, that have gone south in autumn, returning 
 with the spring to find thousands camped upon their 
 marshes, and the lamps burning far and near along pop* 
 ulous streets; forests that disappear like snow; countries 
 larger than Britain that are cleared and settled, one man 
 running forth with his household gods before another, 
 while the bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware of 
 their approach; oil that gushes from the earth; gold that 
 is washed or quarried in the brooks or glens of the Sierras; 
 and all that bustle, courage, action, and constant kalei- 
 doscopic change that Walt Whitman has seized and set 
 forth in his vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious verses. 
 
 Here I was at last Ln America, and was soon out upon 
 New York streets, spying for things foreign. The place 
 had to me an air of Liverpool; but such was the rain that 
 not Paradise itself would have looked inviting. We were 
 a party of four, under two umbrellas; Jones and I and two 
 Scots lads, recent immigrants, and not indisposed to wel- 
 come a compatriot. They had been six weeks in New 
 York, and neither of Item had yet found a single job or 
 earned a single halfpeimy. Up to the present they were 
 exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare. 
 
 The lads soon left us. Now I had sworn by all my 
 gods to have such a dinner as would rouse the dead; 
 there was scarce any expense at which I should have 
 hesitated; the devil was in it but Jones and I should 
 dine like heathen emperors. I set to work, asking after 
 a restaurant; and I chose the wealthiest and most gas- 
 tronomical-looking passers-by to ask from. Yet, al- 
 though I had told them I was willing to pay anything 
 in reason, one and all sent me off to cheap, fixed-price 
 houses, where I would not have eaten that night for the 
 cost of twenty dinners. I do not know if this were 
 characteristic of New York, or whether it was only Jones 
 and I who looked un-dinerly and discouraged enterprise 
 
126 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 ing suggestions. But at length, by our owij sagacity, we 
 found a French restaurant, where there was a French 
 waiter, some fair French cooking, some so-called French 
 wine, and French coffee to conclude the whole. I never 
 entered into the feelings of Jack on land so completely as 
 when I tasted that coffee. 
 
 I suppose we had one of the "private rooms for fam- 
 ilies" at Reunion House. It was very small, furnished 
 with a bed, a chair, and some clothes-pegs; and it derived 
 all that was necessary for the life of the human animal 
 through two borrowed lights; one looking into the pas- 
 sage, and the second opening, without sash, into another 
 apartment, where three men fitfully snored, or in intervals 
 of wakefulness, drearily mumbled to each other all night 
 long. It will be observed that this was almost exactly 
 the disposition of the room in M'Naughten's story. Jones 
 had the bed; I pitched my camp upon the floor; he did 
 not sleep until near morning, and I, for my part, never 
 closed an eye. 
 
 At sunrise I heard a cannon fired; and shortly after- 
 wards the men in the next room gave over snoring for 
 good, and began to rustle over their toilettes. The sound 
 of their voices as they talked was low and moaning, like 
 that of people watching by the sick. Jones, who had 
 at last begun to doze, tumbled and murmured, and every 
 now and then opened unconscious eyes upon me where 
 I lay. I found myself growing eerier and eerier, for I 
 daresay I was a little fevered by my restless night, and 
 hurried to dress and get downstairs. 
 
 You had to pass through the rain, which stiU fell thick 
 and resonant, to reach a lavatory on the other side of 
 the court. There were three basin-stands, and a few 
 crumpled towels and pieces of wet soap, white and slip- 
 pery like fish; nor should I forget a looking-glass and a 
 pair of questionable combs. Another Scots lad was here. 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 127 
 
 scrubbing his face with a good will. He had been three 
 months in New York and had not yet found a single job 
 nor earned a single halfpenny. Up to the present, he 
 also was exactly out of pocket by the amount of the 
 fare. I began to grow sick at heart for my fellow-emi- 
 grants. 
 
 Of my nightmare wanderings in New York I spare to 
 tell. 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 patient 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, restaurants, publishers, book-sellers, money- 
 changers, and wherever I went a pool would gather about 
 my feet, and those who were careful of their floors would 
 look on with an unfriendly eye. Wherever I went, too, 
 the same traits struck me; the people were all surprisingly 
 rude and surprisingly kind. The money-changer cross- 
 questioned me like a French commissary, asking my age, 
 my business, my average income, and my destination, 
 beating down my attempts at evasion, and receiving my 
 answers in silence; and yet when all was over, he shook 
 hands with me up to the elbows, and sent his lad nearly 
 a quarter of a mile in the rain to get me books at a 
 reduction. Again, in a very large publishing and book- 
 selling establishment, a man, who seemed to be the man- 
 ager, received me as I had certainly never before been 
 received in any human shop, indicated squarely that he 
 put no faith in my honesty, and refused to look up the 
 names of books or give me the slightest help or infor- 
 mation, on the ground, like the steward, that it was none 
 of his business. I lost my temper at last, said I was a 
 .stranger in America and not learned in their etiquette; 
 
128 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 but I would assure him, if he went to any bookseller in 
 England, of more handsome usage. The boast was per- 
 haps exaggerated; but like many a long shot, it struck the 
 gold. The manager passed at once from one extreme 
 to the other; I may say that from that moment he loaded 
 me with kindness; he gave me all sorts of good advice, 
 wrote me down addresses, and came bare-headed into 
 the rain to point me out a restaurant, where I might 
 lunch, tior even then did he seem to think that he had 
 done enough. These are (it is as well to be bold in state- 
 ment) the manners of America. It is this same oppo- 
 sition that has most struck me in people of almost all 
 classes and from east to west. By the time a man had 
 about strung me up to be the death of him by his insult- 
 ing behaviour, he himself would be just upon the point of 
 melting into confidence and serviceable attentions. Yet 
 I suspect, although I have met with the like in so many 
 parts, that this must be the character of some particular 
 state or group of states; for in America, and this again in 
 all classes, you will find some of the softest-mannered 
 gentlemen in the world. 
 
 I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell's toward 
 the 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. I wonder if they are dry by now. Mitchell 
 hired a man to carry my baggage to the station, which 
 was hard by, accompanied me thither himself, and rec- 
 ommended me to the particular attention of the oflacials. 
 No one could have been kinder. Those who are out of 
 pocket may go safely to Reunion House, where they will 
 
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 129 
 
 get decent meals and find an honest and obliging land- 
 lord. I owed him this word of thanks, before I enter 
 fairly on the second and far less agreeable chapter of my 
 emigrant experience. 
 
ESSAYS 
 
ESSAYS 
 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS* 
 
 "BoswEu,: We grow weary when idle. 
 
 "Johnson: That is, sir, because others being busy, we want com- 
 pany; but if we were idle, there would be no growing weaiy; we 
 should all entertain one another." 
 
 Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a 
 decree in absence convicting them of Z^5c-respectability,* 
 to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein 
 with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from 
 the opposite party who are content when they have 
 enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, 
 savours a little of bravado and gasconade.' And yet this 
 should not be. Idleness sa called, which does not consist 
 in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized 
 in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as 
 good a right to ^tate its position as industry itself. It is 
 lidmitted that t^e presence of people who refuse to enter 
 in the great hdndicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once 
 an insult and av disenchantment for those who do. A 
 
 'Begun before July, 1,876; rejected by the Macmillan Magazine, 
 afterward accepted for the Comhill by its discriminating editor, 
 Leslie Stephen, and first printed in that magazine July, 1877. It 
 was reprinted in the Virginibus Puerisgue volume, 1881. "A paper 
 -Bailed 'A Defence of Idlers' (which is really a defence of R. L. S.)," 
 Stevenson called it in a letter to Mrs. SitweU. But Stevenson needed 
 no such defence, for although he knew how to be idle wisely when 
 idle at all, he was usually one of the most industrious of men. 
 
 'From the French verb User, "to injure." Stevenson's phrase 
 is a humorous take-off on the common expression Use-majeste, " in- 
 jured majesty," i.e., high treason. 
 
 » Boasting. Literary tradition has always represented the people 
 of Gascony, France, as boasters, hence the term. 
 
 133 
 
134 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination^ 
 votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism, 
 "goes for" them. And while such an one is ploughing 
 distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his 
 resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the mea- 
 dows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over 
 their ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is 
 touched in a very delicate place by the disregard of 
 Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken Rome 
 for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the 
 Senate house, and found the Fathers sitting silent and 
 unmoved by their success? It is a sore thing to have 
 laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when 
 all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. 
 Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers 
 have only a superficial toleration for those who know lit- 
 tle of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and 
 people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who 
 have none. 
 
 But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not 
 the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speak- 
 ing against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry* for 
 speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most 
 subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remem- 
 ber this is an apology. It is certain that much may be 
 judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is 
 something to be said against it, and that is what, on the 
 present occasion, I have to say. To state one argument 
 is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that a man 
 has written a book of travels in Montenegro, is no reason 
 why he should never have been to Richmond. 
 
 It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a 
 good deal idle in youth. For though here and there a 
 Lord Macaulay may escape from school honours with all 
 ' A proverbial expression, meaning to ostracise. 
 
AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 135 
 
 his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their medals 
 that they never afterwards have a shot in their lockfer, 
 and begin the world bankrupt. And the same holds true 
 during all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffer- 
 ing others to educate him. It must have been a very 
 foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford 
 in these words: "Young man, ply your book diligently 
 now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years 
 come upon you, you will find that poring upon books 
 will be but an irksome task." The old gentleman 
 seems to have been unaware that many other things 
 besides reading grow irksome, and not a few become 
 impossible, by the time a man has to use spectacles and 
 cannot walk without a stick. Books are good enough 
 in their own way, but they are^ a mifrTitv hlnfiHless suK- 
 §titute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of 
 Shalott> peering into a mirror, with your back turned on 
 all the bustle and glamour «f reality. And if a man reads 
 very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have 
 little time for thoughts. 
 
 If you look back on your own education, I am sure it 
 will not be the full> vivid, instructive hours of truantry 
 that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack- 
 lustre periods between sleep and waking m the class. 
 For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures 
 in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a top 
 is a case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Em- 
 phyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But 
 though I would not willingly part with such scraps of 
 science, I do not set the same store by them, as by cer- 
 tain other odds and ends that I came by in the open 
 street while I was playing truant. This is not the mo- 
 ment to dilate on that mighty place of education, which 
 was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and 
 turns out yearly many inglorious masters is tfce Science 
 
136 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad 
 does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no fac- 
 ulty of learning. Nor is the truant always in the streets, 
 for if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs 
 into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs 
 over a bum, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune 
 of the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the 
 thicket. And there he may fall into a vein of kindly 
 thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if 
 this be not education, what is? We may conceive Mr. 
 Worldly Wiseman' accosting such an one, and the con- 
 versation that should thereupon ensue: — 
 
 "How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?" 
 
 "Truly, sir, I take mine ease." 
 
 "Is not this the hour of the class? and should'st thou 
 not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou 
 mayest obtain knowledge?" 
 
 "Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your 
 leave." 
 
 " Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray thee ? 
 Is it mathematics?" 
 
 "No, to be sure." 
 
 "Is it metaphysics?" 
 
 "Nor that." 
 
 "Is it some language?" 
 
 "Nay, it is no language." 
 
 "Is it a trade?" 
 
 "Nor a trade neither." 
 
 "Why, then, what is 't?" 
 
 "Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go 
 upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is com- 
 monly done by persons in my case, and where are the 
 ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what 
 manner of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie 
 ' A character in Bvmyan's Pilgrim's Progress, 
 
AN APOLOGY FOR IDLEES 137 
 
 here, by this water, to leam by root-of-heart a lesson 
 which my master teaches me to call Peacc> or Content- 
 ment." 
 
 Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commored 
 with passion, and shaking his cane with a very threatful 
 coimtenance, broke forth npon this wise: "Learning, 
 quotha ! " said he; " I would have all such rogues scourged 
 by the Hangman!" 
 
 And so he would go his way, ruflBing out his cravat 
 with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spread its 
 feathers. 
 
 Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common opinion. 
 A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does 
 not fall into one of your scholastic categories. An in- 
 quiry must be in some acknowledged direction, wifli a 
 name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all, only 
 lounging; and the work-house is too good for you. It 
 is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, 
 or the far end of a telejpope. Sainte-Beuve,* as he grew 
 older, came to regard all experience as a single grea t 
 book, i n which to study for a few years ere we go hence; 
 and It seemed all one to him whether you should read 
 in Chapter xx., which is the differential calculus, or in 
 Chapter xxxix., which is hearing the band play in the 
 gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, look- 
 ing out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a 
 smile on his face all the time, will get more true educa- 
 tion than many another in a life of heroic vigjk. There 
 is certainly some chiU and arid knowledge to be found 
 upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but 
 it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking 
 that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts 
 of life. While others are filling their memory with a 
 lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget be- 
 * A great French writer and critic (1804-1869X 
 
138 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 fore the week be out, your truant may learn some really 
 useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or 
 to speak with ease and opportimity to all varieties of 
 men. Many who have "plied their book diligently," 
 and know all about some one branch or another of ac- 
 cepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and 
 owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dys- 
 peptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many 
 make a large fortune, who remain underbred and pa- 
 thetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes 
 the idler, who began life along with them — ^by your 
 leave, a different picture. He has had time to take care 
 of his health and his spirits; he has been a great deal in 
 the open air, which is the most salutary of all thiogs for 
 both body and mind; and if he has never read the great 
 Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and 
 skimmed it over to excellent purpose. Might not the 
 student afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man 
 some of his half-crowns, for a shgre of the idler's knowl- 
 edge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and the 
 idler has another and more important quality than these. 
 I mean his wisdom. He who has much looked on at 
 the childish satisfaction of other people in their hobbies, 
 will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. 
 He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will 
 have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people 
 and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way tniflis, he 
 will identify himself with no very burning falsehood. 
 His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, 
 but very even and pleasant, which is called Common- 
 place Lane, and leads to the Belvedere' of Common- 
 sense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if no 
 very noble prospect; and while others behold the East 
 
 ' An Italian word, tised here in its original meaning, which was. 
 a place of observation on top of a houae. 
 
AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 13S 
 
 and West, the DevH and the Sunrise, he will be content^ 
 edly aware of a sort of morning hour upon all sublunary 
 things, with an army of shadows running speedily and 
 in many different directions into the great daylight of 
 Eternity. The shadows and the generations, the shrill 
 doctors and the plangent wars, go by into ultimate 
 silence and emptiness; but underneath all this, a man 
 may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and 
 peaceful landscape; many firelit parlours; good people 
 laughing, drinking, and making love as they did before 
 the Flood or the French Revolution; and the old shep- 
 herd telling his tale under the hawthorn. 
 
 Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, ki rk 
 or marke t, is a symptom of deficient vitality ; and a_ 
 faculty for idlen ess implies a catholic appetite and a 
 strong sense of per sonal identity . There is a sort of 
 dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely 
 conscious of living except in the exercise of some con- 
 ventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the coun- 
 try, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they 
 pine for their desk or their study. They have no curi- 
 osity; they cannot give themselves over to random 
 provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise 
 of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity 
 lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. 
 It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, 
 their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those 
 hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furi- 
 ous moiling in the gold-mill. When they do not require 
 to go to the office, when they are not hungry and have 
 no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank 
 to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, 
 they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To 
 see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look 
 at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they 
 
140 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 were paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they 
 are hard workers in their own way, and have good eye- 
 sight for a flaw iii a deed or a turn of the market. They 
 have been to school and college, but all the time they had 
 their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world 
 and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were 
 thioking of their own affairs. As if a man's soul were not 
 too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed 
 theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they 
 are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of 
 all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub 
 against another, while they wait for the train. Before 
 he was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; 
 when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; 
 but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, 
 and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with 
 lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to me as being 
 Success in Life. 
 
 But it is not only the person himself who suffers from 
 his busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends 
 and relations, and down to the very people he sits with 
 in a railway carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devo- 
 tion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sus- 
 tained by perpetual neglect of many other things. And 
 it is not by any means certain that a man's business is 
 the most important thing he has to do. To an impar- 
 tial estimate it will seem clear that many of the wisest, 
 most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be 
 played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous 
 performers, and pass, among the world at large, as 
 phases of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only the 
 walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent 
 fiddlers in the orchestra, but those who look on and 
 clap their hands from the benches, do really play a part 
 and fulfil important offices towards the general result. 
 
AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS )41 
 
 You are no doubt very dependent on the care of your 
 lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and signalmen 
 who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the 
 policemen who walk the streets for your protection; but 
 is there not a thought of gratitude in your heart for cer- 
 tain other benefactors who set you smiling when they 
 fall in your way, or season your dinner with good com- 
 pany? Colonel Newcome* helped to lose his friend's 
 money; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing 
 shirts; and yet they were better people to fall among 
 than Mr. Barnes. And though Falstaff was neither 
 sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two 
 long-faced Barabbases whom the world could better have 
 done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more sen- 
 sible of obligation to Northcote, who had never done 
 him anything he could call a service, than to his whole 
 circle of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good 
 companion emphatically the greatest benefactor. I 
 know there are people in the world who cannot feel grate- 
 ful unless the favour has been done them at the cost of 
 pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish disposition. 
 A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper covered 
 with the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass half 
 an hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article of 
 his; do you think the service would be greater, if he had 
 made the manuscript in his heart's blood, like a compact 
 with the devil ? Do you really fancy you should betoore 
 beholden to your correspondent, if he had been damning 
 you all the while for your importunity? Pleasures are 
 more beneficial than duties because, like the quality of 
 
 • Colonel Newcome, Fred Bayham, and Mr. Barnes are characters 
 in Thackeray's novel, The Newcomes, the two former impractical 
 but lovable, the third hard-headed and heartless. Falstaff is a most 
 delightful reprobate in Shakespeare's Henry IV; Barabbas the Jew- 
 ish thief who was released instead of Christ. Hazlitt (1778-1830) 
 was a famous English essayist, Northcote (1746-1831) a less well- 
 known artist and writer. 
 
142 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 mercy, they are not strained, and they are twice blest. 
 There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a 
 score in a jest; but wherever there is an element of sac- 
 rifice, the favour is conferred with pain, and, among 
 generous people, received with confusion. There is no 
 duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. 
 By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the 
 world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or 
 when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the 
 benefactor. The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran 
 down the street after a marble, with so jolly an air that 
 he set every one he passed into a good humour; one of 
 these persons, who had been delivered from more than 
 usually black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave 
 him some money with this remark: "You see what 
 sometimes comes of looking pleased." If he had looked 
 pleased before, he had now to look both pleased and 
 mystified. For my part, I justify this encouragement of 
 smiling rather than tearful children; I do not wish to pay 
 for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am pre- 
 pared to deal largely in the opposite commodity. A 
 happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a 
 five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good- 
 will; and their entrance into a room is as though another 
 candle had been lighted. We need not care whether 
 they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do 
 a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate 
 the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life. Conse- 
 quently ,jf_ajpCTSojLjc|moot_beJia££;^j^^ 
 
 idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary pre- 
 
 cept; bui inanks to hunger and the workhouse, one not 
 easily to be abused; and within practical limits, it is one 
 of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of 
 Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for 
 a moment, I beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps 
 
AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 143 
 
 indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to inter- 
 est, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement 
 in return. Either he absents himself entirely from all 
 fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet 
 slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he comes among people 
 swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole ner- 
 vous system, to discharge some temper before he returns 
 to work. I do not care how much or how well he works, 
 this fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives. They 
 would be happier if he were dead. They could easier do 
 without his services in th^ Circumlocution Office, than 
 they can tolerate his fractious spirits. He poisons life at 
 the well-head. It is better to be beggared out of hand 
 by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a 
 peevish uncle. 
 
 And what, in God's name, is all this pother about? 
 For what cause do they embitter their own and other 
 people's lives? That a man should publish three or 
 thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not finish his 
 great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to 
 the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a 
 thousand fall, there are always some to go into the 
 breach. When they told Joan of Arc she should be at 
 home minding women's work, she answered there were 
 plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own 
 rare gifts I When nature is "so careless of the single 
 life," why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy 
 that our own is of exceptional importance? Suppose 
 Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark 
 night in Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would 
 have wagged on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the 
 well, the scythe to the com, and the student to his book; 
 and no one been any the wiser of the loss. There are 
 not many works extant, if you look the alternative all 
 over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to 
 
144 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 a man of limited means. This is a sobermg reflection 
 for the proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a tobac- 
 conist may, upon consideration, find no great cause for 
 personal vainglory in the phrase; for although tobacco 
 is an admbable sedative, the qualities necessary for re- 
 , tailing . it are neither rare nor precious in themselves. 
 Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the 
 services of no single mdividual are indispensable. Atlaa 
 was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And 
 yet you see merchants who go and laboiir themselves 
 into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court; 
 scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until their 
 temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though 
 Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead 
 of a pyramid; and fine young men who work themselves 
 into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse with white 
 plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these persons 
 had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, 
 flie promise of some momentous destiny? and that this 
 lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was the 
 bull's-eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet 
 it is not so. The ends for which they give away their 
 priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or 
 hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never come, 
 or may find them indifferent; and they and the world 
 they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes 
 at the thought. 
 
MS TRIPLEX* 
 
 The changes wrought by death are in themselves so 
 sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their 
 consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's ex- 
 perience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes 
 all other accidents because it is the last of them. Some- 
 times it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; 
 sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their 
 citadel during a score of years. And when the business 
 is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives, 
 and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friend- 
 ships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary 
 walks, and single beds at night. Again, in taking away 
 our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but 
 leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable 
 residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence a 
 whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind, 
 from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule^ trees 
 of mediaeval Europe. The poorest persons have a bit of 
 pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are 
 set up over the least memorable; and, in order to preserve 
 some show of respect for what remains of our old loves 
 and friendships, we must accompany it with much 
 
 ' Krat publiBhed in The ComhiU Magazine for April, 1878. The 
 time when this essay was written was at once a strenuous and hope- 
 ful one for its author, as his first printed book. An Iniand Voyage, was 
 then being prepared for the press. The title is from a phrase used 
 by Horace, ces triplex circa pectus, " breast enclosed by triple brass," 
 efcs being used by Horace as a symbol of indomitable courage. 
 The essay is generally considered Stevenson's masterpiece; and 
 its noble description of a happy, fearless, painless death seems^ al- 
 most a prophecy of his own end. It was included in Virginibus 
 Pnerisw, 1881. 
 
 * A dule or.''dool" was a stake used to mark boundaries 
 
 145 
 
146 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker 
 parades before the door. All this, and much more of the 
 same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has 
 gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in manj 
 philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down 
 with every circumstance of logic; although in real life 
 the bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to 
 think, have not left them time enough to go dangerously 
 wrong in practice. 
 
 As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken 
 of with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of 
 death, few have less influence on conduct under healthy 
 circumstances. We have all heard of cities in South 
 America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, 
 even in this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants 
 are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal 
 conditions than if they were delving gardens in the green- 
 est corner of England. There are serenades and suppers 
 and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and 
 meanwhile die foundation shudders underfoot, the bowels 
 of the mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin 
 may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and tumble man 
 and his merry-making in the dust. In the ejes of very 
 young people, and very dull old ones, there is something 
 indescribably reckless and desperate in such a picture. 
 It seems not credible that respectable married people, 
 with umbrellas, should find appetite for a bit of sup- 
 per within quite a long distance of a fiery mountain; ordi- 
 nary life begins to smell of high-handed debauch when 
 it is carried on so close to a catastrophe; and even cheese 
 and salad, it seems, could hardly be relished in such cir- 
 cumstances without something like a defiance of the Cre- 
 ator. It should be a place for nobody but hermits 
 dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere bom-devils 
 drowning care in a perpetual carouse. 
 
JES TRIPLEX 147 
 
 And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly^ 
 the situation of these South American citizens forms only 
 a very pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind. 
 This world itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in over- 
 crowded space, among a million other worlds travelling 
 blindly and swiftly in contrary directions, may very well 
 come by a knock that would set it into explosion like 
 a penny squib. And what, pathologically looked at, is 
 the human body with all its organs, but a mere bagful of 
 petards ? The least of these is as dangerous to the whole 
 economy as the ship's powder-magazine to the ship; and 
 with every breath we breathe, and every meal we eat, we 
 are putting one or more of them in peril. If we clung as 
 devotedly as some philosophers pretend we do to the 
 abstract idea of life, or were half as frightened as they 
 make out we are, for the subversive accident that ends it 
 all, the trumpets might sound by the hour and no one 
 would follow them into battle — the blue-peter* might fly 
 at the truck, but who would climb into a sea-going ship ? 
 Think (if these philosophers were right) with what a 
 preparation of spirit we should affront the daily peril of 
 the dinner-table: a deadlier spot than any battle-field in 
 history, where the far greater proportion of our ancestors 
 have miserably left their bones! What woman would 
 ever be lured into marriage, so much more dangerous 
 than the wildest sea ? And what would it be to grow old ? 
 For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life 
 we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all 
 aroimd us and behind us we see our contemporaries 
 going through. By the time a man gets well into the 
 seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle; and 
 when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there 
 is an overwhelming probability that he will never see 
 the day. Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fact? 
 ' A flag used as a signal for sailing. 
 
148 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Why, no. They were never merrier; they have their grog 
 at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death 
 of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if 
 it was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleas- 
 ure at having outlived some one else; and when a draught 
 might puff them out like a guttering candle, or a bit of 
 a stumble shatter them like so much glass, their old 
 hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, 
 bubbling with laughter, through years of man's age com- 
 pared to which the valley at Balaclava* was as safe and 
 peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday. It may 
 fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether 
 it was a much more daring feat for Curtius^ to plunge 
 into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff 
 his clothes and clamber into bed. 
 
 Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, 
 with what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on 
 along the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The whole 
 way is one wilderness of snares, and the end of it, for 
 those who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable min. And 
 yet we go spinning throiigh it all, like a party for the 
 Derby.* Perhaps the reader remembers one of the hu- 
 morous devices of the deified Caligula:* how he en- 
 couraged a vast concourse of holiday-makers on to his 
 bridge over Baise bay; and when they were in the height 
 of their enjoyment, turned loose the Praetorian guards 
 among the company, and had them tossed into the sea. 
 This is no bad miniature of the dealings of nature with 
 the transitory race of man. Only, what a chequered 
 picnic we have of it, even while it lasts 1 and into what 
 
 ' Scene of the famous charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean 
 War. 
 
 ' According to tradition, a Roman who sacrificed his life for hia 
 country, leaping into a gulf to fulfil the requirements of an oracle. 
 
 • Derby Day, date of the greatest racing event in England. 
 
 * One of the worst of the Roman tyrants, reigned 37-5n a. d. 
 
MS TRIPLEX 149 
 
 great waters, not to be crossed by 'any swimmer, God's 
 pale Praetorian throws us over in the end! 
 
 We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the 
 cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swal- 
 lows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incon- 
 gruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, 
 incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-* 
 beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake?' 
 The love of Life and the fear of Death are two famous 
 phrases that grow harder to understand the more we 
 think about them. It is a well-known fact that an im- 
 mense proportion of boat accidents would never hap- 
 pen if people held the sheet in their hands instead of 
 makiDg it fast; and yet, unless it be some martinet of a 
 professional mariner or some landsman with shattered 
 nerves, every one of God's creatures makes it fast A 
 strange instance of man's unconcern and brazen bold- 
 ness in the face of death! 
 
 We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, 
 which we import into daily talk with noble inappro- 
 priateness. We have no idea of what death is, apart 
 from its circumstances and some of its consequences to 
 others; and although we have some experience of living, 
 there is not a man on earth who has flown so high into 
 abstraction as to have any practical guess at the mean- 
 ing of the word life. All literature, from Job and Omar 
 Khayyam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an 
 attempt to look upon the human state with such large- 
 ness of view as shall enable us to rise from the consider- 
 ation of living to the Definition of Life. And our sages 
 give us about the best satisfaction in their power when 
 they say that it is a vapour, or a show, or made out of 
 the same stuff wiA dreams. Philosophy, in its more 
 rigid sense, has been at the same work for ages; and after 
 a myriad bald heads have wagged over the problem. 
 
150 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 and piles of words have been heaped one upon another 
 into dry and cloudy volumes without end, philosophy haa 
 the honour of laying before us, with modest pride, her 
 contribution towards the subject: that life is a Permanent 
 Possibility of Sensation. Truly a fine result! A man 
 may very well lov e beef, or hunting, or a woman; bu t 
 Sureiy, su i'fely, not' a i^ermanent Possibility of Sensation ! 
 He may be afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large 
 enemy with a club, or even an undertaker's man; but not 
 certainly of abstract death. We may trick with the word 
 life in its dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; 
 we may argue in terms of all the philosophies on earth, 
 but one fact remains true throughout — that we do not 
 love life, in the sense that we are greatly preoccupied 
 about its conservation; that we do not, properly speaking, 
 love life at all, but living. Into the views of the least 
 careful there will enter some degree of providence; no 
 man's eyes are fixed entirely on the passing hour; but 
 although we have some anticipation of good health, good 
 weather, wine, active employment, love, and self-approval, 
 the sum of these anticipations does not amount to any- 
 thing like a general view of life's possibilities and issues; 
 nor are those^ who cherish them most vividly at all the 
 most scrupulous of their personal safety. To be deeply 
 interested in the accidents of our existence, to enjoy 
 keenly the mixed texture of human experience, rather 
 leads a man to disregard precautions, and risk his neck 
 against a straw. For surely the love of living is stronger 
 in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a hunter rid- 
 ing merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature who lives 
 upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest 
 of his constitution. 
 
 There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked 
 upon both sides of the matter: tearing divines reducing 
 life to the dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so 
 
^S TRIPLEX 151 
 
 short as to be hardly decent; and melancholy unbe- 
 lievers yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far 
 away. Both sides must feel a little ashamed of their 
 performances now and again when they draw in their 
 chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of 
 wine is an answer to most standard works upon the ques- 
 tion. When a man's heart warms to his viands, he for- 
 ^ts a grieat deal of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone 
 of contemplation. Death may be knocking at the door, 
 like the Commander's statue;^ we have something else in 
 hand, thank God, and let him knock. Passing bells are 
 ringing all the world over. All the world over, and every 
 hour, some one is parting company with all his aches and 
 ecstasies. For us also the trap is laid. But we are so 
 fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror 
 of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and 
 none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our 
 whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetites, 
 to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the 
 pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own 
 nimble bodies. 
 
 We all of us appreciate the sensations; but as for car- 
 ing about the Permanence of the Possibilily, a man's 
 head is generally very bald, and his senses very dull, 
 before he comes to that. Whether we regard life as a 
 lane leading to a dead wall — a mere bag's end, as the 
 French say — or whether we think of it as a vestibule or 
 gymnasium, where we wait our turn and prepare our fac- 
 ulties for some more noble destiny; whether we thun- 
 der in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic poetry-books, 
 aboiA its vanity and brevity; whether we look justly for 
 years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into a 
 
 • In the story of Don Juan (see MoHfere's play of that name) the 
 hero has an adventure with a statue temporarily endowed with 
 Ufe. 
 
152 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Bath-chair/ as a step towards the hearse; in each and all 
 of these views and situations there is but one conclusion 
 possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralys- 
 ing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a 
 single mind. No one surely could have recoiled with 
 more heartache and terror from the thought of death 
 than our respected lexicographer;^ and yet we know how 
 little it affected his conduct, how wisely and ^boldly he 
 walked, and in what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of 
 life. Already an old man, he ventured on his Highland 
 tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not 
 recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea. As 
 courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth 
 a good man's cultivation, so it is the first part of intelli- 
 gence to recognise our precarious estate in life, and the 
 first part of courage to be not at all abashed before the 
 fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not 
 looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin re- 
 gret over the past, stamps the man who is well armoured 
 for this world. 
 
 And not only well armoured for himself, but a good 
 friend and a good citizen to boot. We do not go to 
 cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as 
 panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcass, 
 has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist 
 who took his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted 
 wholly upon tepid milk, had all his work cut out for him 
 in considerate dealings with his own digestion. So soon 
 as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a 
 dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis 
 of generous acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually; 
 he develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated tem- 
 
 'An invalid's chair; named from Bath, the well-known health 
 resort. 
 
 * Dr. Samuel Johnson, author of the famous Dictionary. 
 
MS TRIPLEX 153 
 
 perature, and takes his morality on the principle o\ tin 
 ihoes and tepid milk. The care of one important body 
 "T soul becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the 
 outer world begin to come thin and faint into the parlour 
 with the regulated temperature; and the tin shoes go 
 equably forward over blood and rain. To be overwise 
 is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing 
 stockstill. Now the man who has his heart on his 
 sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock of a brain, who 
 reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly used and 
 cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance 
 of the world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and 
 gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he be running tow- 
 ards anything better than wildfire, he may shoot up and 
 become a constellation in the end. Lord look after his 
 health. Lord have a care of his soiil, says he; and he has 
 at the key of the position, and swashes through incon- 
 gruity and peril towards his aim. Death is on all sides 
 of him with pointed batteries, as he is on all sides of 
 all of us; unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim- 
 mouthed friends and relations hold up their hands in 
 quite a little elegiacal synod about his path: and what 
 cares he for all this ? Being a true lover of living, a fel- 
 low with something pushing and spontaneous in his in- 
 side, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, 
 deadly warfare, push on at his best pace imtil he touch 
 the goal. "A peerage or Westminster Abbey!" cried 
 Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner. These are 
 great incentives; not for any of these, but for the plain 
 satisfaction of living, of being about their business in 
 some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of 
 every nation tread down the nettle danger, and pass fly- 
 ingly over all the stumbling-blocks of prudence. Think 
 of the heroism of Johnson, think of that superb indiffer- 
 ence to mortal limitation that set him upon his diction- 
 
154 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 ary, and carried him through triumphantly until the end! 
 Who, if he were wisely considerate of things at large, 
 would ever embark upon any work much more consider- 
 able than a halfpenny poslrcard? Who would project 
 a serial novel, after Thackeray and Dickens' had each 
 ; fallen in mid-course ? Who would find he ar^- ftnoiifyh to 
 beffln tO- IJYf;, 'f ^p iJ^ll'^H with thp, pft ^jderation of 
 death? 
 
 " Sna, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this 
 is I To forego all the issues of living in a parlour with a 
 regulated temperature — as if that were not to die a hun- 
 dred times over, and for ten years at a stretch! As if it 
 were not to die in one's own lifetime, and without even 
 the sad immimities of death! As if it were not to die, 
 and yet be the patient spectators of our own pitiable 
 change! The Permanent Possibility is preserved, but the 
 sensations carefully held at arm's length, as if one kept 
 a photographic plate in a dark chamber. It is better, t o 
 lose health like a spendthrift than , to -wast f^ it. 1'Vp « 
 m i serl.l It is better to live and be done with it, than to die 
 daily in the sick-room. By all means begin your folio; 
 even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he 
 hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see 
 what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in 
 finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful 
 labour. A spirit goes out of the man who means execu- 
 tion, which outlives the most untimely ending. All who 
 have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done 
 good work, although they may die before they have the 
 time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and 
 cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the 
 world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even 
 if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid- 
 career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous 
 ' Thackeray and Dickens each left a novel imfinished at his death. 
 
MS TRIPLEX 155 
 
 foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of 
 boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and 
 silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such 
 a termination? and does not life go down with a better 
 grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miser- 
 ably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? When the 
 Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods 
 love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort 
 of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age 
 it overtake the man, this is to die young. Death has not 
 been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his 
 heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point 
 of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The 
 noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the 
 trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with 
 him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded 
 spirit shoots into the spiritual land. 
 
EL DORADO* 
 
 It seems as if a great deal were attainable in a worid 
 where there are so many marriages and decisive battles, 
 and where we all, at certain hours of the day, and with 
 great gusto and despatch, stow a portion of victuals finally 
 and irretrievably into the bag which contains us. And it 
 would seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of 
 as much as possible was the one goal of mail's conten- 
 tious life. And yet, as regards the spirit, this is but a 
 semblance. We live in an ascending scale when we live 
 happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series. 
 There is always a new horizon for onward-looking men, 
 and although we dwell on a small planet, immersed in 
 petty business and not enduring beyond a brief period of 
 years, we are so constituted that our hopes are inaccessi- 
 ble, like stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged luitil 
 the term of life. To be truly happy is a question of how 
 we begin and not of how we end, of what we want and not 
 of what we have. An aspiration is a joy forever, a pos- 
 session as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we 
 can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a 
 revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these 
 is to be spiritually rich. Life is only a very dull and ill- 
 directed theatre imless we have some interests in the 
 
 • Published May 11, 1878, in London, a newly founded weekly re- 
 view under the editorship at first of Mr. Glasgow Brown and later 
 of Mr. Henley, both friends of Stevenson. In 1881 the essay was 
 reprinted in VirginHms Pueriscpie. El Dorado was the name of a 
 mythical country of fabulous wealth, long supposed to exist in 
 northern South America. The phrase is Spanish and means "The 
 Golden." 
 
 156 
 
EL DORADO 157 
 
 piece; and to those who have neither art nor science, the 
 world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough foot- 
 way where they may very well break their shins. It is 
 in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man 
 continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed 
 by the look of things and people, and that he wakens 
 every morning with a renewed appetite for work and 
 pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through 
 which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours: 
 it is they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting: 
 and the man may squander his estate and come to beg- 
 gary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in 
 the possibilities of pleasure. Suppose he could take one 
 meal so compact and comprehensive that he should never 
 himger any more; suppose him, at a glance, to take in all 
 the features of the world and allay the desire for knowl- 
 edge; suppose him to do the like in any province of ex- 
 perience — would not that man be in a poor way for 
 amusement ever after? 
 
 One who goes touring on foot with a single volume 
 in his knapsack reads with circumspection, pausing often 
 to reflect, and often laying the book down to contem- 
 plate the landscape or the prints in the inn parlour; 
 for he fears to come to an end of his entertainment, and 
 be left eompanionless on the last stages of his journey. 
 A young fellow recently finished the works of Thomas 
 Carlyle, winding up, if we remember aright, with the ten 
 note-books upon Frederick the Great. "What!" cried 
 the young fellow, in consternation, "is there no more 
 Carlyle? Am I left to the daily papers?" A more 
 celebrated instance is that of Alexander, who wept bit- 
 terly because he had no more worlds to subdue. And 
 when Gibbon had finished the Decline and Fall,^ he had 
 
 • The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire occupied the best 
 jrears of Gibbon's life. 
 
158 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 only a few moments of joy; and it was with a "sober 
 melancholy" that he parted from his labours. 
 
 Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual ar- 
 rows; our hopes are set on inaccessible El Dorado; we 
 come to an end of nothing here below. Interests are 
 only plucked up to sow themselves again, like mustard. 
 You would think, when the child was bom, there would 
 be an end to trouble; and yet it is only the beginning 
 of fresh anxieties; and when you have seen it through 
 its teething and its education, and at last its marriage, 
 alas! it is only to have new fears, new quivering sensi- 
 bilities, with every day; and the health of your children's 
 children grows as touching a concern as that of your own. 
 Again, when you have married your wife, you would 
 think you were got upon a hilltop, and might begin to go 
 downward by an easy slope. But you have only ended 
 courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning 
 love are often difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious 
 spirits; but to keep in love is also a business of some im- 
 portance, to which both man and wife must bring kind- 
 ness and goodwill. The true love story commences at 
 the altar, when there lies before the married pair a most 
 beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity, and a life- 
 long struggle towards an unattainable ideal. Unattain- 
 able ? Ay, surely unattainable, from the very fact that 
 they are two instead of one. 
 
 " Of making books there is no end," complained the 
 Preacher;* and did not perceive how highly he was 
 praising letters as an occupation. There is no end, in- 
 deed, to making books or experiments, or to travel, or 
 to gathering wealth. Problem gives rise to problem. 
 We may study forever, and we are never as learned as 
 we would. We have never made a statue worthy of 
 our dreams. And when we have discovered a continent, 
 ' Ecclesiastes XII, 12. 
 
EL DORADO 159 
 
 or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another 
 ocean or another plain upon the further side. In the 
 infinite universe there is room for our swiftest diligence 
 and to spare. It is not like the works of Carlyle, which 
 can be read to an end. Even in a comer of it, in a private 
 park, or in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the 
 weather and the seasons keep so deftly changing that 
 although we walk there for a lifetime there will be always 
 something new to startle and delight us. 
 
 There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only 
 one thing that can be perfectly attained: Death. And 
 from a variety of circumstances we have no one to tell 
 us whether it be worth attaining. 
 
 A strange picture we make on our way to our chimseras, 
 ceaselessly marching, grudging ourselves the time for 
 rest; indefatigable, adventurous pioneers. It is true that 
 we shall never reach the goal; it is even more than prob- 
 able that there is no such place; and if we lived for cen- 
 turies and were endowed with the powers of a god, we 
 should find ourselves not much nearer what we wanted 
 at the end. O toiling hands of mortals! O unwearied 
 feet, travelling ye know not whither I Soon, soon/, it seems 
 to you, you must come forth on some conspicuoui^ hilltop, 
 and but a little way further, agamst the setting sun, descry 
 the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own 
 blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than 
 to arrive, and the true success is to labour. 
 
TRUTH OF INTERCOUESE* 
 
 Among sayings that have a currency in spite of being 
 wholly false upon the face of them for the sake of a half- 
 truth upon another subject which is accidentally com- 
 bined with the error, one of the grossest and broadest 
 conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell 
 the truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily it were. 
 But the truth is one; it has first to be discovered, then 
 justly and exactly uttered. Even with instruments spe- 
 cially contrived for such a purpose — ^with a foot rule, a 
 level, or a theodolite^ — it is not easy to be exact; it is 
 easier, alas! to be inexact. From those who mark the 
 divisions on a scale to those who measure the boundaries 
 of empires or the distance of the heavenly stars, it is by 
 careful method and minute, unwearying attention that 
 men rise even to material exactness or to sure knowledge 
 even of external and constant things. But it is easier to 
 draw the outline of a moimtain than the changing ap- 
 pearance of a face; and truth in human relations is of this 
 more intangible and dubious order: hard to seize, harder 
 to communicate. Veracity to facts in a loose, colloquial 
 sense — ^not to say that I have been in Malabar when as 
 a matter of fact I was never out of England, not to say 
 that I have read Cervantes in the original when as a mat- 
 
 ' Written shortly before Stevenson's first voyage to America, 
 and published in The ComhiU Magazine, May, 1879, just a year be- 
 fore the author's marriage. It was later included in the volume 
 Virgimbus Puerisque (published 1881) as the fourth of his talks 
 "tg^maidens and youths." 
 
 'u. surveying instrument for measuring horizontal angles upoa 
 a ^dmated circle. 
 
 160 
 
TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE 161 
 
 ter of fact I know not one syllable of Spanish — this, in- 
 deed, is easy and to the same degree unimportant in itself. 
 Lies of this sort, according to circumstances, may or may 
 not be important; in a certain sense even they may or may 
 not be false. The habitual liar may be a very honest fel- 
 low, and live truly with his wife and friends; while another 
 man who never told a formal falsehood in his life may 
 yet be "himself one lie — heart and face, from top to bot- 
 tom. This is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. 
 And, vice versa, veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, | 
 truth to your own heart and your friends, never to feign 
 or falsify emotion — that is the truth which makes love ' 
 possible and mankind happy. 
 
 L'art de Men dire ^ is but a drawing-room accomplish- 
 ment unless it be pressed into the service of the truth. 
 The diflBculty of literature is not to write, but to write 
 what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect 
 him precisely as you wish. This is commonly under- 
 stood in the case of books or set orations; even in mak- 
 ing your will, or writing an explicit letter, some difficulty 
 is admitted by the world. But one thing you can never 
 make Philistine^ natures understand; one thing, which 
 yet lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their wits 
 as a high flight of metaphysics — ^namely, that the business 
 of life is' mainly carried on by means of this difficult art 
 of literature, and according to a man's proficiency in that 
 art shall be the freedom and the fulness of his intercourse 
 with other men. Anybody, it is supposed, can say what 
 he means; and, in sipite of their notorious experience to 
 the contrary, people so continue to suppose. Now, I 
 simply open the last book I have been reading — ^Mr. Le- 
 land's captivating English Gipsies. " It is said," I find 
 
 • The art of expressing oneself well. 
 
 * A common term in literature for men who emphasize the sordid 
 and "practical" side of life at the expense of the spiritual and im^ 
 a^native. 
 
162 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 on p. 7, " that those who can converse with Irish peasants 
 in their own native tongue form far higher opinions of 
 their appreciation of the beautiful, and of the elements of 
 humour and pathos in their hearts, than do those who 
 know their thoughts only through the medium of English. 
 I know from my own observations that this is quite the 
 case with the Indians of North America, and it is un- 
 questionably so with the gipsy." In short, where a man 
 has not a full possession of the language, the most import- 
 ant, because tiie most.amiable, qualities of his nature have 
 to lie buried and fallow; for the pleasure of comradeship, 
 and the intellectual part of love, rest upon these very 
 "elements of humour and pathos." Here is a man 
 opulent in both, and for lack of a medium he can put none 
 of it out to interest in the market of affection! But what 
 is thus made plain to our apprehensions in the case of a 
 foreign language is partially true even with the tongue 
 we learned in childhood, tideed, we all speak different 
 dialects; one shall be copious and exact, another loose and 
 meagre; but the speech of the ideal talker shall corre- 
 spond and fit upon the truth of fact — ^not clumsily, obscur- 
 ing lineaments, like a mantle, but cleanly adhering, like 
 an athlete's skin. And what is the result ? That the one 
 can open himself more clearly to his friends, and can en- 
 joy more of what makes life truly valuable — ^intimacy 
 with those he loves. An orator makes a false step; he em- 
 ploys some trivial, some absurd, some AOilgar phrase; 
 in the turn of a sentence he insults, by a side wind, those 
 whom he is labouring to charm; in speaking to one senti- 
 ment he imconsciously ruffles another in parenthesis; and 
 you are not surprised, for you know his task to be delicate 
 and filled with perils. " O frivolous mind of man, light 
 ignorance!" As if yourself, when you seek to explain 
 some misunderstanding or excuse some apparent fault, 
 speaking swiftly and addressing a mind still recently in- 
 
TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE 163 
 
 censed, were not harnessing for a more perilous adven- 
 ture; as if yourself required less tact and eloquence; as 
 if an angry friend or a suspicious lover were not more 
 easy to offend than a meeting of indifferent politicians! 
 Nay, and the orator treads in a beaten round; the matters 
 he discusses have been discussed a thousand times before; 
 language is ready-shaped to his purpose; he speaks out of 
 a cut and dry vocabulary. But you — may it not be that 
 your defence reposes on some subtlety of feeling, not so 
 much as touched upon in Shakespeare, to express which, 
 like a pioneer, you must venture forth into zones of 
 thought still unsurveyed, and become yourself a literary 
 innovator ? For even in love there are unlovely humours ; 
 ambiguous acts, unpardonable words, may yet have 
 sprung from a kind sentiment. If the injured one could 
 read your heart, you may be sure that he would under- 
 stand and pardon; but, alas! the heart cannot be shown 
 — it has to be demonstrated in words. Do you think it 
 is a hard thing to write poetry? Why, that is to write 
 poetry, and of a high, if not the highest, order. 
 
 I should even more admire "the lifelong and Iwroic 
 literary labours" of my fellow-men, patiently clearing 
 up in words their loves and their contentions, and speak- 
 ing their autobiography daily to their wives, were U not 
 for a circumstance which lessens their difficulty and my 
 admiration by equal parts. For life, though largely, is 
 not entirely carried on by literature. We are subject to 
 physical passions and contortions; the voice breaks and 
 changes, and speaks by unconscious and winning inflec- 
 tions; we have legible coimtenances, like an open book; 
 things that cannot be said look eloquently through the 
 eyes; and the soul, not locked into the body as a dungeon, 
 dwells ever on the threshold with appealing signals. 
 Groans and tears, looks and gestures, a flush or a pale- 
 ness, are often the most clear reporters of the heart, and 
 
164 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 speak more directly to the hearts of others. The mesr 
 sage flies by these interpreters in the least space of time, 
 and the misunderstanding is averted in the moment of 
 its birth. To explain in words takes time and a just and 
 patient hearing; and in the critical epochs of a close re- 
 lation, patience and justice are not qualities on which we 
 can rely. But the look or the gesture explains things in 
 a breath; they tell their message without ambiguity; un- 
 like speech, they cannot stumble, by the way, on a re- 
 proach or an allusion that should steel your friend against 
 the truth; and then they have a higher authority, for they 
 are the direct expression of the heart, not yet transmitted 
 through the unfaithful and sophisticating brain. Not 
 long ago I wrote a letter to a friend which came near in- 
 volving us in quarrel; but we met, and in personal talk I 
 repeated the worst of what I had written, and added 
 worse to that; and with the commentary of the body it 
 seemed not unfriendly either to hear or say. Indeed, 
 letters are in vain for the purposes of intimacy; an ab- 
 sence is a dead break in the relation; yet two who know 
 each other fully and are bent on perpetuity i " Inypr-mgy 
 so preserve the attituae of meir tmections tnat they n^ a ,y 
 meet on the same terms a s bxey had parted. 
 "rT^aTjs me case' of i;he""BImcl,"WI10 dSimot read the 
 face; pitiful that of the deaf, who cannot follow the 
 changes of the voice. And there are others also to be 
 pitied; for there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, 
 who have been denied all the symbols of communication, 
 who have neither a lively play of facial expression, nor 
 speaking gestures, nor a responsive voice, nor yet the gift 
 of frank, explanatory speech: people truly made of clay, 
 people tied for life into a bag which no one can undo. 
 They are poorer than the gypsy, for their heart can speak 
 no language under heaven. Such people we must learn 
 slowly by the tenor of their acts, or through yea and nay 
 
TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE 165 
 
 communications; or we take them on trust on the strength 
 of a general air, and now and again, when we see the 
 spirit breaking through in a flash, correct or change our 
 estimate. But these will be uphill, intimacies, without 
 charm or freedom, to the end; and freedom is the chief 
 ingredient in confidence. Some minds, romantically dull, 
 ' despise physical endowments. That is a doctrme foi a 
 misanthrope; to those who like their fellow-creatures it 
 must always be meaningless; and, for my part, I can see 
 few thiDgs more desirable, after the possession of such 
 radical qualities as honour and humour and pathos, 
 than to have a lively and not a stolid countenance; to 
 have looks to correspond with every feeling; to be 
 elegant and delightful in person, so that we shall please 
 even in the intervals of active pleasing, and may never 
 discredit speech with uncouth manners or become uncon- 
 sciously our own burlesques. But of all unfortunates 
 there is one creature (for I will not call him man) con- 
 spicuous in misfortune. This is he who has forfeited 
 his birthright of expression, who has cultivated artful 
 intonations, who has taught his face tricks, like a pet 
 monkey, and on every side perverted or cut off his means 
 of communication with his fellow-men. The body is a 
 house of many windows: there we all sit, showing our- 
 selves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us. 
 But this fellow has filled his windows with opaque glass, 
 elegantly coloured. His house may be admired for its 
 design, the crowd may pause before the stained windows, 
 but meanwhile the poor proprietor must lie languishing 
 within, uncomforted, unchangeably alone. 
 
 Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than 
 to refrain from open lies. It is possible to avoid false- 
 hood and yet not tell the truth. It is not enough to an- 
 swer formal questions. To reach the truth by yea and 
 nay commimications implies a questioner with a share of 
 
166 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 inspiration, such as is often found in mutual love. Yea 
 and nay mean nothing; the meaning must have been re- 
 lated in the question. Many words are often necessaiy 
 to convey a very simple statement; for in this sort of 
 exercise we never hit the gold; the most that we can 
 hope is by many arrows, more or less far off on differ- 
 ent sides, to indicate, in the course of time, for what target 
 we are aiming, and after an hour's talk, back and for- 
 ward, to convey the purport of a single principle or a 
 single thought. And yet while the curt, pithy speaker 
 misses the point entirely, a wordy, prolegomenous* bab- 
 bler will often add three new offences in the process of 
 excusing one. It is really a most delicate affair. The 
 world was made before the English language, and seem- 
 ingly upon a different design. Suppose we held our con- 
 verse not in words, but in music, those who have a bad 
 ear would find themselves cut off from all near commerce, 
 and no better than foreigners in this big world. But we 
 do not consider how many have "a bad ear" for words, 
 nor how often the most eloquent find nothing to reply. I 
 hate questioners and questions; there are so few that 
 can be spoken to without a lie. "Do you forgive mef" 
 Madam and sweetheart, so far as I have gone in life I 
 have never yet been able to discover what forgiveness 
 means. "Is it still the same between usf" Why, how 
 can it be ? It is eternally different; and yet you are still 
 the friend of my heart. "Do you understand mef" 
 God knows; I should think it highly improbable. 
 
 The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A man 
 may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his 
 teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or 
 a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished 
 because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that un- 
 manly shame which withholds a man from daring to be- 
 ' Given to long prefatory remarks. 
 
TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE 167 
 
 tray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, 
 has but hung his head and held his tongue ? And, again, 
 a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed through 
 a lie. Truth to facts is not always truth to sentiment; 
 and part of the truth, as often happens in answer to a 
 question, may be the foulest calumny. A factjmay be 
 an ex ception L but the -feeling , is_ the law. anS Xtjg" taat 
 which you must neithergarble nor belie. The whole 
 tenor or a'conversation is a parTof ffie^meaning of each 
 separate statement; the beginning and the end define 
 and travesty the intermediate conversation. You never 
 speak to God; you address a fellow-man, full of his own 
 tempers; and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to 
 state the true facts, but to convey a true impression; 
 truth in spirit, not truth to letter, is the true veracity. 
 To reconcile averted friends a Jesuitical discretion is 
 often needful, not so much to gain a kind hearing as to 
 communicate sober truth. Women have an ill name in 
 this connection; yet they live in as true relations; the lie of 
 a good woman is the true index of her heart. 
 
 " It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and most use- 
 ful passage I remember to have read in any modern 
 author,* " two to speak truth — one to speak and another 
 to hear." He must be very little experienced, or have 
 no great zeal for truth, who does not recognise the fact. 
 A grain of anger or a grain of suspicion produces strange 
 acoustical effects, and makes the ear greedy to remark 
 offence. Hence we find those who have once quarrelled 
 carry themselves distantly, and are ever ready to break 
 the truce. To speak truth there must be moral equality 
 or else no respect; and hence between parent and child 
 intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal fencing 
 bout, and misapprehensions to become ingrained. And 
 
 > A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Wednesday, p. 
 283. 
 
168 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 there is another side to thisj for the parent begins with an 
 imperfect notion of the child's character, formed in early 
 years or during the equinoctial gales of youth; to this he 
 adheres, noting only the facts which suit with his pre- 
 
 > spei^__ 
 
 "Eancr,"an3 still more between lovers (for mutual under- 
 standing is love's essence), the truth is easily indicated 
 by the one and aptly comprehended by the other. A 
 hint taken, a look imderstood, conveys the gist of long 
 and delicate explanations; and where the life is known 
 even yea and nay become luminous. In the closest of all 
 relations — that of a love well founded and equally shared 
 — speech is half discarded, like a roundabout, infantile 
 process or a ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two 
 commimicate directly by their presences, and with few 
 looks and fewer words contrive to share their good and 
 evil and uphold each other's hearts in joy. For love 
 rests upon a physical basis; it is a familiarity of nature's 
 making and apart from voluntary choice. Understand- 
 ing has in some sort outrun knowledge, for the affection 
 perhaps began with the acquaintance; and as it was not 
 made like other relations, so it is not, like them, to be 
 perturbed or clouded. Each knows more than can be 
 uttered; each lives by faith, and believes by a natural 
 compulsion; and between man and wife the language of 
 the body is largely developed and grown strangely elo- 
 quent. The thought that prompted and was conveyed in 
 a caress would only lose to be set down in iwords — ay, 
 although Shakespeare himself should be the scribe. 
 
 Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond all others, 
 that we must strive and do battle for the truth. Let but 
 a doubt arise, and alas! all the previous intimacy and 
 confidence is but another charge against the person 
 
TRUTH OF INTERCOUESE 169 
 
 doubted. "What a monstrov^ dishonesty is this if I 
 have been deceived so long and so completely!" Let but 
 that thought gain entrance, and you plead before a deaf 
 tribunal. Appeal to the past; why, that is your crime! 
 Make all clear, convince the reason; alas! speciousness is 
 but a proof against you. "If you can abuse me now, the 
 more likely thai you have abused me from the first." 
 
 For a strong affection such moments are worth sup- 
 porting, and they will end well; for your advocate is in 
 your lover's heart, and spsaks her own language; it is not 
 you but she herself who can defend and clear you of the 
 charge. But in slighter intimacies, and for a less strin- 
 gent imion? Indeed, is it worth while? We are all 
 incompris,^ only more or less concerned for the mischance; 
 all trying wrongly to do right; all fawning at each other's 
 feet like dumb, neglected lap-dogs. Sometimes we catch 
 an eye — this is our opportunity in the ages — ^and we wag 
 our tail with a poor smile. " 7* that allf " All ? If you 
 only knew ! But how can they know ? They do not love 
 us; the more fools we to squander life on the indifferent. 
 
 But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear, 
 is excellent; for it is only by trying to understand other s 
 that we can get ou r own hearts understood; and in mat- 
 ters of human feeling the clement judge is the most suo- 
 cessful pleader. 
 
 > Not underctood. 
 
TALK AND TALKERS » 
 
 "Sir, we had a good talk."— Johnson. 
 
 "As we must account for every idle word, so we must for eveiy idle 
 silence." — Feankun. 
 
 There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; 
 to be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a 
 fact, a thought, or an illustration, pat to every subject; 
 and not only to cheer the flight of time among our inti- 
 mates, but bear our part in that great international con- 
 gress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first de- 
 clared, public errors first corrected, and the course of 
 public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the 
 right. No measure comes before Parliament but it has 
 been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; 
 no book is written that has not been largely composed by 
 their assistance. Literature in many of its branches is no 
 other than the shadow of good talk; but the imitation 
 falls far short of the original in life, freedom and effect. 
 There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, compar- 
 ing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, 
 tentative, continually, "in further search and progress;" 
 while written words remain fixed, become idols even to 
 the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies 
 
 ' Composed at Davos in the Alps during the winter of 1881-1882, 
 and printed in The ComhiU Magazine the following ApriL The 
 end of the essay describes with admirable skill the conversational 
 abilities of Stevenson's various friends; but a full appreciation of 
 these word-portraits requires so much familiarity with Stevenson's 
 life that they have here been omitted. In August of the same year 
 the ComhiU pubUshed Talk and Talkers. {A Sequel.) Both papers 
 were reprinted in Memories and Portraits, 1887. 
 
 170 
 
TALK AND TALKERS 171 
 
 of obvious error in the amber of the truth. Last and 
 chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can 
 only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy 
 free and may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the 
 freezing immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it 
 would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like 
 literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dis- 
 solved in laughter, and speech runs forth out of the con- 
 temporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery 
 and cheering, like schoolboys out of school. And it is in 
 talk alone that we can learn our period and ourselves. In 
 short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his chief 
 business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious 
 speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of 
 pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; 
 it completes ouv education, founds and fosters our friend- 
 ships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any 
 state of health. 
 
 The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are 
 still a kind of contest; and if we would not forego all that 
 is valuable in our lot, we must continually face some 
 other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a fall whether in 
 love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power of 
 character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures. 
 Men and women contend for each other in the lists of 
 love, like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit decide 
 their challenges in the sports of the body; and the sed- 
 entary sit down to chess or conversation. All sluggish 
 and pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, solitary 
 and selfish; and every durable bond between human 
 beings is founded in or heightened by some element of 
 competition. Now, the relation that has the least root 
 in matter is imdoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and 
 hence, I suppose, it is that good talk most commonly 
 arises among friends. Talk is, indeed, both the scene 
 
172 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 and instrument of friendship. It is in talk alone that 
 the friends can measure strength, and enjoy that ami- 
 cable counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge 
 of relations and the sport of life. 
 
 A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours 
 must first be accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; 
 hour, company and circumstance be suited; and then, 
 at a fit juncture, the subject, the quarry of two heated 
 minds, spring up like a deer out of the wood. Not that 
 the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he has all 
 and more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows 
 the stream of conversation as an angler follows the wind- 
 ings of a brook, not dallying where he fails to "kill." 
 He trusts implicitly to hazard; and he is rewarded by con- 
 tinual variety, continual pleasure, and those changing 
 prospects of the truth that are the best of education. 
 There is nothing in a subject, so called, that we should 
 regard it as an idol, or follow it beyond the promptings of 
 desire. Indeed, there are few subjects; and so far as they 
 are truly talkable, more than the half of them may be re- 
 duced to three: that I am I, that you are you, and that 
 there are other people dimly understood to be not quite 
 the same as either. Wherever talk may range, it still runs 
 half the time on these eternal lines. The theme being 
 set, each plays on himself as on an instrument; asserts and 
 justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and 
 opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own 
 surprise and the admiration of his adversary. All nat- 
 ural talk is a festival of ostentation; and by the laws of 
 the game each accepts and fans the vanity of the other. 
 It is from that reason that we venture to lay ourselves so 
 open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that we 
 swell in each other's eyes to such a vast proportion. For 
 talkers, once launched, begin to overflow the limits of 
 their ordinary selves, tower up to the height of thdr 
 
TALK AND TALKEES 173 
 
 secret pretensions, and give themselves out for the 
 heroes, brave, pious, musical and wise, that in their most 
 shining moments they aspire to be. So they weave for 
 themselves with words and for a while inhabit a palace of 
 delights, temple at once and theatre, where they fill the 
 round of the world's dignities, and feast with the gods, 
 exulting in Kudos.' And when the talk is over, each 
 goes his way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, 
 still trailing clouds of glory; each declines from the height 
 of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension. 
 I remember, in the entr'acte of an afternoon performance, 
 coming forth into the sunshine, in a beautiful green, gar- 
 dened corner of a romantic city; and as I sat and smoked, 
 the music moving in my blood, I seemed to sit there and 
 evaporate The Flying Dutchman^ (for it was that I had 
 been hearing) with a wonderful sense of life, warmth, well- 
 being and pride; and the noises of the city, voices, bells 
 and marching feet, fell together in my ears like a sympho- 
 nious orchestra. In the same way, the excitement of a 
 good talk lives for a long while after in the blood, the 
 heart still hot within you, the brain still simmering, and 
 the physical earth swimming around you with the col- 
 ours of the sunset. 
 
 Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large 
 surface of life, rather than dig mines into geolo^cal 
 strata. Masses of experience, anecdote, incident, cross- 
 lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole flotsani 
 and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter 
 in hand from every point of the compass, and from every 
 degree of mental elevation and abasement — these are the 
 material with which talk is fortified, the food on which 
 the talkers thrive. Such argument as is proper to the 
 exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk should 
 
 I 
 ' The Greek word for glory, renown. 
 * Wagner's opera, Der Fliegende Hollander. 
 
174 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 proceed by instances; by the apposite, not the expository. 
 It should keep close along the lines of humanity, near 
 the bosoms and businesses of men, at the level where his- 
 tory, fiction and experience intersect and illuminate each 
 other. I am I, and You are You, with all my heart; but 
 conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten 
 when, instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by 
 jowl, the spirit housed in the live body, and the very 
 clothes uttering voices to corroborate the story in the face. 
 Not less surprising is the change when we leave off to 
 speak of generalities — the bad, the good, the miser, and 
 all the characters of Theophrastus* — and call up other 
 men, by anecdote or instance, in their very trick and 
 feature; or trading on a common knowledge, toss each 
 other famous names, still glowing with the hues of life. 
 Communication is no longer by words, but by the instan- 
 cing of whole biographies, epics, systems of philosophy, 
 and epochs of history, in bulk. That which is under- 
 stood excels that which is spoken in quantity and quality 
 alike; ideas thus figured and personified, change hands, 
 as we may say, like coin; and the speakers imply without 
 effort the most obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers 
 who have a large common ground of reading will, for 
 this reason, come the sooner to the grapple of genuine 
 converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon, Con- 
 suelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steen- 
 son,* they can leave generalities and begin at once to 
 speak by figures. 
 
 Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most 
 frequently and that embrace the widest range of facts. 
 A few pleasures bear discussion for their own sake, but 
 
 > A Greek philosopher who died 288 B. C. His Ethical Characters 
 delineates various moral types of humanity. 
 
 « Characters in various novels, Consuelo in George Sand's Consudo, 
 Clarissa Harlowe in„ Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin in sev- 
 eral novels of Balzac, and Steenie Steenson in Scott's RedgaunUet. 
 
TALK AND TALKERS 175 
 
 only those which are most social or most radically hu- 
 man; and even these can only be discussed among their 
 devotees. A technicality is always welcome to the ex- 
 pert, whether in athletics, art or law; I have heard the 
 best kind of talk on technicalities from such rare and 
 happy persons as both know and love their business. 
 No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two 
 minutes at a time, which makes me suspect we hear 
 too much of it in literature. The weather is regarded 
 as the very nadir and scoff of conversational topics. 
 And yet the weather, the dramatic element in scenery, 
 is far more tractable in language, and far more human 
 both in import and suggestion than the stable features 
 of the landscape. Sailors and shepherds, and the peo- 
 ple generally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and 
 it is often excitingly presented in literature. But the 
 tendency of all living talk draws it back and back into 
 the common focus of humanity. Talk is a creature of 
 the street and market-place, feeding on gossip; and its 
 last resort is still in a discussion on morals. That is the 
 heroic form of gossip; heroic in virtue of its high pre- 
 tensions; but still gossip, because it turns on personali- 
 ties. You can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen at all, 
 off moral or theological discussion. These are to all the 
 world what law is to lawyers; they are everybody's 
 technicalities; the medium through which all consider 
 life, and the dialect in which they express their judgments. 
 I knew three young men who walked together daily for 
 some two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in 
 cloudless summer weather; daily they talked with un- 
 abated zest, and yet scarce wandered tiiat whole time be- 
 yond two subjects — theology and love. And perhaps 
 neither a court of love nor an assembly of divines would 
 have granted their premises or welcomed their conclu- 
 sions. 
 
176 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any 
 more than by private thinking. That is not the profit. 
 The profit is in the exercise, and above all in the expe- 
 rience; for when we reason at large on any subject, 
 we review our state and history in life. From time to 
 time, however, and specially, I think, in talking art, talk 
 becomes effective, conquering like war, widening the 
 boundaries of knowledge like an exploration. A point 
 arises; the question takes a problematical, a baffling, 
 yet a likely air; the talkers begin to feel lively presenti- 
 ments of some conclusion near at hand; towards this 
 they strive with emulous ardour, each by his own path, 
 and struggling for first utterance; and then one leaps 
 upon the summit of that matter with a shout, and almost 
 at the same moment the other is beside him; and behold 
 they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is illusory, 
 a mere cat's cradle having been wound and unwound 
 out of words. But the sense of joint discovery is none 
 the less giddy and inspiriting. And in the life of the 
 talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither few 
 nor far apart; they are attained with speed and pleasure, 
 in the hour of mirth; and by the nature of the process, 
 they are always worthily shared. 
 
 There is a certain attitude, combative at once and 
 deferential, eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, 
 which marks out at once the talkable man. It is not 
 , eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a certain 
 proportion of all of these that I love to encounter in my 
 amicable adversaries. They must not be pontiffs hold- 
 ing doctrine, but huntsmen questing after elements of 
 truth. Neither must they be boys to be instructed, but 
 fellow-teachers with whom I may wrangle and agree 
 on equal terms. We must reach some solution, some 
 shadow of consent; for without that, eager talk becomes 
 a torture. But we do not wish to reach it cheaply, or 
 
TALK AND TALKERS 177 
 
 quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein pleasure 
 lies. . . . 
 
 One last remark occurs: It is the mark of genuine 
 conversation that the sayings can scarce be quoted with 
 their full effect beyond the circle of common friends. 
 To have their proper weight they should appear in a 
 biography, and with the portrait of the speaker. Good 
 talk is dramatic; it is like an impromptu piece of acting 
 where each should represent himself to the greatest ad- 
 vantage; and that is the best kind of talk where each 
 speaker is most fully and candidly himself, and where, 
 if you were to shift the speeches round from one to an- 
 other, there would be the greatest loss in significance 
 and perspicuity. It is for this reason that talk depends 
 so wholly on our company. We should like to intro- 
 duce Falstaff and Mercutio, or Falstaff and Sir Toby; but 
 Falstaff in talk with Cordelia seems even painful.* Most 
 of us, by the Protean^ quality of man, can talk to some 
 degree with all; but the true talk, that strikes out all the 
 slumbering best of us, comes only with the peculiar 
 brethren of our spirits, is founded as deep as love in the 
 co:hstitution of our being, and is a thing to relish with 
 all our energy, while yet we have it, and to be grateful 
 for for ever. 
 
 ' Falstaff in Henry IV, Mercutio in Borneo and Juliet, Sir Toby 
 Belch in Twdfih Night are comic of witty figures; but Cordelia, in 
 Lear, is tragic. 
 
 * In Greek mythology Proteus was a sea-god especially noted tor 
 his power of clmnging rapidly from one form to another. 
 
BEGGARS' 
 
 In a pleasant, airy, up-hill country, it was my fortune 
 when I was young to make the acquaintance of a certain 
 beggar. I call him beggar, though he usually allowed 
 his coat and his shoes (which were open-mouthed, indeed) 
 to beg for him. He was the wreck of an athletic man, tall, 
 gaunt, and bronzed; far gone in consumption, with that 
 disquieting smile of the mortally stricken on his face; 
 but still active afoot, still with the brisk military carriage, 
 the ready military salute. Three ways led through this 
 piece of country; and as I was inconstant in my choice, I 
 believe he must often have awaited me in vain. But 
 often enough, he caught me; often enough, from some 
 place of ambush by the roadside, he would spring sud- 
 denly forth in the regulation attitude, and launching at 
 once into his inconsequential talk, fall into step with me 
 upon my farther course. "A fine morning, sir, though 
 perhaps a trifle inclining to rain. I hope I see you well, 
 sir. Why, no, sir, I don't feel as hearty myself as I could 
 wish, but I am keeping about my ordinary. I am pleased 
 to meet you on the road, sir. I assure you I quite look 
 
 • Written in the latter part of 1887 while Stevenson was preparing 
 for his winter at Saranac. This was one of twelve articles which 
 the author, by agreement, contributed to Scribner's Magazine dur- 
 ing the year 1888, Beggars appearing in the March number. The 
 essay contains five sections, only the first two of which are her« 
 given. These two are, in Stevenson's opinion, better than the re- 
 mainder, and are included by him more than once in the list of bis 
 own best works. Beggars was republished in the volume, Across th^ 
 Plains, 1892. 
 
 178 
 
BEGGAES 179 
 
 forward to one of our little conversations." He loved 
 the sound of his own voice inordinately, and though 
 (with something too off-hand to call servility) he would 
 always hasten to agree with anything you said, yet he 
 could never suffer you to say it to an end. By what tran- 
 sition he slid to his favourite subject I have no mem- 
 ory; but we had never been long together on the way be- 
 fore he was dealing, in a very military manner, with the 
 English poets. "Shelley was a fine poet, sir, though a 
 trifle atheistical in his opinions. His Queen Mab, sir, is 
 quite an atheistical work. Scott, sir, is not so poetical a 
 Writer. With the works of Shakespeare I am not so 
 well acquainted, but he was a fine poet. Keats — John 
 Keats, sir — he was a very fine poet." With such ref- 
 erences, such trivial criticism, such loving parade of his 
 own knowledge, he would beguile the road, striding for- 
 ward up-hill, his staff now clapped to the ribs of his 
 deep, resonant chest, now swinging in the air with the 
 remembered jauntiness of the private soldier; and all 
 the while his toes looking out of his boots, and his shirt 
 looking out of his elbows, and death looking out of 
 his smile, and his big, crazy frame shaken by accesses of 
 cough. 
 
 He would often go the whole way home with me: 
 often to borrow a book, and that book always a poet. 
 Off he would march, to continue his mendicant rounds, 
 with the voliune slipped into the pocket of his ragged 
 coat; and although he would sometimes keep it quite a 
 while, yet it came always back again at last, not much the 
 worse for its travels into beggardom. And in this way, 
 doubtless, his knowledge grew and his glib, random 
 criticism took a wider range. But my library was not 
 the first he had drawn upon: at our first encounter, he 
 was already brimful of Shelley and the atheistical Queen 
 Mab, and "Keats— John Keats, sir." And I have often 
 
180 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 wondered how he came by these acquirements; just as I 
 often wondered how he fell to be a beggar. He had 
 served through the Mutiny* — of which (like so many peo- 
 ple) he could tell practically nothing beyond the names 
 of places, and that it was "difficult work, sir," and very 
 hot, or that so-and-so was " a very fine commander, sir." 
 He was far too smart a man to have remained a private; 
 in the nature of things, he must have won his stripes. 
 And yet here he was without a pension. When I touched 
 on this problem, he would content himself with diffidently 
 offering me advice. " A man should be very careful when 
 he is young, sir. If you '11 excuse me saying so, a spirited 
 young gentleman like yourself, sir, should be very careful. 
 I was perhaps a trifle inclined to atheistical opinions 
 myself." For (perhaps with a deeper wisdom than we 
 are inclined in these days to admit) he plainly bracketed 
 agnosticism with beer and skittles. 
 
 Keats — John Keats, sir — and Shelley were his favour- 
 ite bards. I caxmot remember if I tried him with Ros- 
 setti; but I know his taste to a hair, and if ever I did, he 
 must have doted on that author. What took him was 
 a richness in the speech; he loved the exotic, the unex- 
 pected word; the moving cadence of a phrase; a vague 
 sense of emotion (about nothing) in the very letters of the 
 alphabet: the romance of language. His honest head 
 was very nearly empty, his intellect like a child's; and 
 when he read his favourite authors, he can almost never 
 have understood what he was reading. Yet the taste 
 was not only genuine, it was exclusive; I tried in vain to 
 offer him novels; he would none of them; he cared for 
 nothing but romantic language that he could not under- 
 stand. The case may be commoner than we suppose. I 
 am reminded of a lad who was laid in the next cot to 
 
 • The great uprising of the Hindoos against their English rulers. 
 1857-1859. 
 
BEGGARS 181 
 
 a friend of mine in a public hospital, and who was no 
 sooner installed than he sent out (perhaps with his last 
 pence) for a cheap Shakespeare. My friend pricked up 
 his ears; fell at once in talk with his new neighbour, and 
 was ready, when the book arrived, to make a singular dis- 
 covery, por this lover of great literature understood not 
 one sentence out of twelve, and his favourite part was 
 that of which he understood the least — the inimitable, 
 mouth-filling rodomontade of the ghost in Hamlet. It 
 was a bright day in hospital when my friend expounded 
 the sense of this beloved jargon: a task for which I am 
 willing to believe my friend was very fit, though I can 
 never regard it as an easy one. I know indeed a point or 
 two, on which I would gladly question Mr. Shakespeare, 
 that lover of big words, could he revisit the glimpses of the 
 moon, or could I myself climb backward to the spacious 
 days of Elizabeth. But in the second case, I should most 
 likely pretermit these questionings, and take my place 
 instead in the pit at the Blackfriars,' to hear the actor in 
 his favourite part, playing up to Mr. Burbage," and rolling 
 out — as I seem to hear him — ^with a ponderous gusto — 
 
 "Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd." 
 
 What a pleasant chance, if we could go there in a partyl 
 aud what a surprise for Mr. Burbage, when the ghost 
 received the honours of the evening! 
 
 As for my old soldier, like Mr. Burbage and Mr. 
 Shakespeare, he is long since dead; and now lies buried, 
 I suppose, and nameless and quite forgotten, in some 
 poor city graveyard. — But not for me, you brave heart, 
 have you been buried! For me, you are still afoot, tast- 
 ing the Sim and air, and striding southward. By the 
 
 ' One of the theatres with which Shakespeare was connected. 
 ' Kichard Burbage, the foremost tragic actor of Shakespeare's 
 time- 
 
182 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 groves of Comiston and beside the Hermitage of Braid, 
 by the Hunters' Tryst, and where the curlews and 
 plovers cry around Fairmilehead, I see and hear you, 
 stalwartly carrying your deadly sickness, cheerfully ~ 
 discoursing of uncomprehended poets. 
 
 n 
 
 The thought of the old soldier recalls that of another 
 tramp, his counterpart. This was a little, lean, and fiery 
 man, with the eyes of a dog and the face of a gipsy; whom 
 I found one morning encamped with his wife and children 
 and his grinder's wheel, beside the burn of Kinnaird. 
 To this beloved dell I went, at that time, daily; and daily 
 the knife-grinder and I (for as long as his tent continued 
 pleasantly to interrupt my little wilderness) sat on two 
 stones, and smoked, and plucked grass, and talked to the 
 tune of the brown water. His children were mere whelps, 
 they fought and bit among the fern like vermin. His 
 wife was a mere squaw; I saw her gather brush and tend 
 the kettle, but she never ventured to address her lord while 
 I was present. The tent was a mere gipsy hovel, like a 
 sty for pigs. But the grinder himself had the fine self- 
 sufficiency and grave politeness of the hunter and the 
 savage; he did me the honours of this dell, which had 
 been mine but the day before, took me far into the secrets 
 of his life, and used me (I am proud to remember) as a 
 friend. 
 
 Like my old soldier, he was far gone in the national 
 complaint. Unlike him, he had a vulgar taste in letters; 
 scarce flying higher than the story papers; probably 
 finding no difference, certainly seeking none, between 
 Tannahill and Burns;* his noblest thoughts, whether of 
 
 'Robert Tannahill (1774-1810), a minor Scotch poet. Robert 
 Burns (1759-1796), the greatest lyric poet of Scotland. 
 
' BEGGARS 183 
 
 poetry or music, adequately embodied in that somewhat 
 obvious ditty, 
 
 "Will ye gang, lassie, gang 
 To the braes o' Balquidder:" 
 
 ■ — which is indeed apt to echo in the ears of Scottish 
 children, and to him, in view of his experience, must have 
 foimd a special directness of address. But if he had no 
 fine sense of poetry in letters, he felt with a deep joy the 
 poetry of life. You should have heard him speak of what 
 he loved; of the tent pitched beside the talking water; 
 of the stars overhead at night; of the blest return of morn- 
 ing, the peep of day over the moors, the awaking birds 
 among the birches; how he abhorred the long winter shut 
 in cities; and with what delight, at the return of the 
 spring, he once more pitched his camp in. the living out- 
 of-doors. But we were a pair of tramps; and to you, who 
 are doubtless sedentary and a consistent first-class pas- 
 senger in life, he would scarce have laid himself so open; — 
 to you, he might have been content to tell his story of a 
 ghost — that of a buccaneer with his pistols as he lived — 
 whom he had once encountered in a seaside cave near 
 Buckie; and that would have been enough, for that would 
 have shown you the mettle of the man. Here was a piece 
 of experience solidly and livingly built up in words, 
 here was a story created, teres atque rotundiis} 
 
 And to think of the old soldier, that lover of the lit- 
 erary bards! He had visited stranger spots than any 
 seaside cave; encountered men more terrible than any 
 spirit; done and dared and suffered in that incredible, 
 unsimg epic of the Mutiny War; played his part with the 
 field force of Delhi, beleaguering and beleaguered; shared 
 in that enduring, savage anger and contempt of death 
 and decency that, for long months together, bedevii'd ani? 
 > Smooth-polishad and rounded, a quotation from Horace. 
 
184 SELECTIONS FEOM STEVENSON 
 
 inspired the army; was hurled to and fro in the battle- 
 smoke of the assault; was there, perhaps, where Nichol- 
 son* fell; was there when the attacking column, with hell 
 upon every side, found the soldier's enemy — strong drink, 
 and the lives of tens of thousands trembled in the scale, 
 and the fate of the flag of England staggered. And of all 
 this he had no more to say than "hot work, sir," or "the 
 army suffered a great deal, sir," or "I believe General 
 Wilson, sir, was not very highly thought of in the papers." 
 His life was naught to him, the vivid pages of experi- 
 ence quite blank: in words his pleasure lay — melodious, 
 agitated words — printed words, about that which he had 
 never seen and was connatally incapable of comprehend- 
 ing. We have here two temperaments face to face; both 
 untrained, unsophisticated, surprised (we may say) in the 
 egg; both boldly charactered: — that of the artist, the 
 lover and artificer of words; that of the maker, the seeer, 
 the lover and forger of experience. If the one had a 
 daughter and the other had a son, and these married, 
 might not some illustrious writer count descent from the 
 beggar-soldier and the needy knife-grinder? 
 
 ' John Nicholson, a British general, died of lus wounds received 
 at Delhi, September, 1857. 
 
PULVIS ET UMBRA » > 
 
 We look for some reward of our endeavours and are 
 disappointed; not success, not happiness, not even peace 
 of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. 
 Our frailties are invincible, are virtues barren; the battle 
 goes sore against us to the going down of the sun. The 
 canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and we look 
 abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them 
 change with every climate, and no country where some 
 action is not honoured for a virtue and none where it is 
 not branded for a vice; and we look in our experience, 
 and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the 
 best a municipal fitness. It is not strange if we are 
 tempted to despair of good. We ask too much. Our 
 religions and moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, 
 till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only 
 please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In 
 the harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel. 
 The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten 
 
 ' This, like Beggars, was one of the twelve articles contributed te 
 Scribner's Magazine during 1888; and with Beggars it was included 
 in Across the Plains, 1892. " I think there is some fiije writing in 
 it," wrote Stevenson to Colvin, "some very apt and piegnant 
 phrases. Pidvis et Umbra, I call it; I might have called it a Dar- 
 winian Sermon." To Miss Adelaide Boodle he says, "I wrote it 
 with great feeling and conviction; to me it seemed bracing and health- 
 fij. . . . But I find that to some people this vision of mine is a 
 nightmare, and extinguishes all ground of faith in God or pleasure 
 in man. ... If my view be everything but the nonsense that it 
 may be — ^to me it seems self-evident and blinding truth — surely of 
 all things it makes this world holier." The title is from Horace, 
 Pulvis el umbra sumus, "we are dust and shadow," or "dust and 
 
 185 
 
186 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 commandments; and the bones and revolutions of the 
 Kosmos,' in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, 
 more ancient still. 
 
 Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many 
 doubtful things and all of them appalling. There seems 
 no substance to this solid globe on which we stamp: 
 nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios 
 carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity 
 that swings the incommensurable sims and worlds 
 through space, is but a figment varying inversely as the 
 squares of distances; and the suns and worlds them- 
 selves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NHg and 
 HgO.^ Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; 
 that way madness lies; science carries us into zones of 
 speculation, where there is no habitable city for the 
 mind of man. 
 
 Biit take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our 
 senses give it us. We behold space sown with rota- 
 tory islands, suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks 
 of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting, 
 like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. 
 All of these we take to be made of something we call mat- 
 ter: a thing which no analysis can help us to conceive; 
 to whose incredible properties no familiarity can recon- 
 cile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by the 
 lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call 
 life; seized through all its atoms with a pediculous' 
 malady; swelling in tumours that become independent, 
 sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory; 
 one splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, 
 
 'The orderly system of the universe. 
 
 •Chemical formulas for ammonia and water respectively. 
 
 ■ Infested with lice. 
 
PULVIS ET UMBRA 187 
 
 as the malady proceeds through varying stages. This 
 vital putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet 
 strikes us with occasional disgust, and the profusion of 
 worms in a piece of ancient turf, or the air of a marsh 
 darkened with insects, will sometimes check our breath- 
 ing so that we aspire for cleaner places. But none is 
 clean: the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure 
 spring, where it bursts out of the mountain, is a mere 
 issue of worms; even in the hard rock the crystal is 
 forming. 
 
 In two main shapes this eruption covers the counte- 
 nance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one 
 in some degree the inversion of the other: the second 
 rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its 
 natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of 
 insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds: 
 a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered, 
 the heart stops. To what passes with the anchored ver- 
 min, we have little clue: doubtless they have their joys 
 and sorrows, their delights and killing agonies: it ap- 
 pears not how. But pi the locomotory, to which we our- 
 selves belong, we can tell more. These share with us a 
 thousand miracles: the miracles of sight, of hearing, of 
 the projection of sound, things that bridge space; the 
 miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is 
 conceived, and when it is gone, its image kept living in 
 the brains of man and brute; the miracle of reproduction, 
 with its imperious desires and staggering consequences. 
 And to put the last touch upon this mountain mass of the 
 revolting and the inconceivable, all these prey upon each 
 other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming them 
 inside themselves, and by that summary process, growing 
 fat: the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less 
 than the lion of the desert; for the vegetarian is only the 
 eater of the dumb. 
 
188 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory 
 life, and more drenched with blood, both animal and 
 vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through space 
 with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to 
 the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles 
 away. 
 
 ) 11 
 
 What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease 
 of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying 
 drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bring- 
 ing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair 
 like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his 
 face; a thing to set children screaming; — and yet looked 
 at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surpris- 
 ing are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast 
 among so many hardships, filled with desires so incom- 
 mensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, sav- 
 agely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon 
 his fellow lives: who should have, blamed him had he 
 been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely bar- 
 barous? And we look and behold him instead filled 
 with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admi- 
 rably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst 
 his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the 
 attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle for an egg 
 \or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate 
 with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with 
 long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart 
 of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the 
 point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of 
 something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: 
 an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were pos- 
 sible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he 
 
PULVIS ET UMBRA 189 
 
 will not stoop. The design in most men is one of con- 
 formity; here and there, in picked natures, it transcends 
 itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with 
 independence; but m all, in their degrees, it is a bosom 
 thought: — Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs and 
 cats whom we know fairly well, and doubtless some simi- 
 lar point of honour sways the elephant, the oyster, and 
 the louse, of whom we know so litde: — But in man, at 
 least, it sways with so complete an empire that merely 
 selfish things come second, even with the selfish: that ap- 
 petites are starved, fears are conquered, pains supported; 
 that almost the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a 
 glance, although it were a child's; and all but the most 
 cowardly stand amid the risks of war; and the more 
 noble, having strongly conceived an act as due to their 
 ideal, affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, 
 with their singular origin and perverted practice, they 
 think they are to be rewarded in some future life: 
 stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and 
 think this blow, which they solicit, will strike them 
 senseless for eternity. I shall be reminded what a 
 tragedy of misconception and misconduct man at large 
 presents: of organised injustice, cowardly violence and 
 treacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of 
 the best. They cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is 
 indeed marked for failure in his efforts to do right. But 
 where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold more 
 remarkable that all should continue to strive; and surely 
 we shotild find it both touching and inspiriting, that in a 
 field from which success is banished, our race should not 
 cease to labour. 
 
 If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rota- 
 tory isle, be a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, 
 on this nearer sight, he startles uS with an admiring won- 
 der. It matters not where we look, under what climate 
 
190 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 we observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth 
 of ignorance, burthened with what erroneous morality; 
 by camp-fires in Assiniboia,* the snow powdering his 
 shoulders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, pass- 
 ing the ceremonial calumet^ and uttering his grave 
 opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at sea, a man 
 inured to halrdship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope 
 a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened trull who sells herself 
 to rob him, and he for all that simple, innocent, cheerful, 
 kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to drown, for 
 others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent 
 millions to mechanical employments, without hope of 
 change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, 
 and yet true to his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to 
 his neighbours, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright 
 gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering with the drunken wife 
 that ruins him; in India (a woman this time) kneeling 
 with broken cries and streaming tears, as she drowns her 
 child in the sacred river; in the brothel, the discard of 
 society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, 
 a fool, a thief, the comrade of thieves, and even here keep- 
 ing the point of honour and the touch of pity, often repay- 
 ing the world's scorn with service, often standing firm 
 upon a scruple, and at a certain cost, rejecting riches: — 
 everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, every- 
 where some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere 
 the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness: — ah! if I could 
 show you this I if I could show you these men and 
 women, all the world over, in every stage of history, under 
 every abuse of error, under every circumstance of fail- 
 ure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still ob- 
 scurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in 
 the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honour, the 
 
 ' A district in central Canada. 
 * The Indian pipe of peace. 
 
PULVIS ET UMBRA I9i 
 
 poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to escape, and 
 yet they cannot; it is not alone their privilege and glory, 
 but their doom; they are condemned to some nobility; 
 all their lives long, the desire of good is at their heels, the 
 implacable hunter. 
 
 Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most strange 
 and consoling: that this ennobled lemur,^ this hair- 
 
 (" crowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor of a few years 
 and sorrows, should yet deny himself his rare delights, and 
 
 v. add to his frequent pains, and live for an ideal, however 
 misconceived. Nor can we stop with man. A new doc- 
 trine,^ received with screams a little while ago by cant- 
 ing moralists, and still not properly worked into the 
 body of our thoughts, lights us a step farther into the 
 heart of this rough but noble universe. For nowadays 
 the pride of man denies in vain his kinship with the 
 original dust. He stands no longer like a thing apart. 
 Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another genus: 
 and in him too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus 
 of an unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. 
 Does it stop with the dog? We look at our feel where 
 the groimd is blackened with the swarming ant: a creature 
 so small, so far from us in the hierarchy of brutes, that 
 we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings; 
 and here also, in his ordered polities and rigorous jus- 
 tice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of in- 
 dividual sin. Does it stop, then, with the ant ? Rather 
 this desire of well-doing and this doom of frailty run 
 through all the grades of life: rather is this earth, from the 
 frosty top of Everest to the next margin of the inter- 
 nal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple 
 of pious tears and perseverance. The whole creation 
 groaneih and travaileth together. It is the common and 
 
 • A small animal allied to the monkey. 
 'The theory of evolution. 
 
192 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 the god-like law of life. The browsers, the biters, the 
 barkers, the hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel 
 in the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the dust, as 
 they share with us the gift of life, share with us the love 
 of an ideal: strive like us — like us are tempted to grow 
 weary of the struggle — to do well; like us receive at times 
 unmerited refreshment^ visitings of support, returns of 
 courage; and are condemned like us to be crucified be- 
 tween that double law of the members and the will. Are 
 they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of some reward, 
 some sugar with the drug? do they, too, stand aghast at 
 unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, in 
 our partiality, we take to be just, and the prosperity of 
 such as, in our blindness, we call wicked? It may be, 
 and yet God knows what they should look for. Even 
 while they look, even while they repent, the foot of man 
 treads them by thousands in the dust, the yelping hounds 
 burst upon their trail, the bullet speeds, the knives are 
 heating in the den of the vivisectionist; or the dew falls, 
 and the generation of a day is blotted out. For these are 
 creatures, compared with whom our weakness is strength, 
 our ignorance wisdom, our brief span eternity. 
 
 And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of terror 
 and under the imminent hand of death, God forbid it 
 should be man the erected, the reasoner, the wise in his 
 own eyes — God forbid it should be man that wearies in 
 well-doing, that despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters 
 the language of complaint. Let it be enough for faith, 
 that the whole creation groans in mortal frailly, strives 
 with inconquerable constancy: Surely not all in vain. 
 
FATHER DAMIEN 
 
FATHER DAMIEN> 
 
 AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REVEREND DR. 
 HYDE OF HONOLULU 
 
 Stdnet, February 25, 1890. 
 SiE, — It may probably occur to you that we have met, 
 and visited, and conversed; on my side, with interest. 
 You may remember that you have done me several 
 courtesies, for which I was prepared to be gratefjul. But 
 there are duties which come before gratitude, an^ of- 
 fences which justly divide friends, far more acquaint- 
 ances. Your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage is a 
 document which, in my sight, if you had filled me with 
 bread when I was starving, if you had sat up to nurse my 
 father when he lay a-dying, would yet absolve me from 
 the bonds of gratitude. You know enough, doubtless, 
 of the process of canonisation to be aware that, a hundred 
 years after the death of Damien, there will appear a man 
 
 ' Father Damien died April 15, 1889. Stevenson visited Molokai, 
 the island of the lepers, in May of the same year. While he was in 
 Sydney, Australia, in February of 1890, he read Dr. Hyde's letter 
 and heard at the same time a report that a proposed memorial to 
 Damien in London had been abandoned on account of it, or of 
 charges similar to those which it contained. The fiery invective 
 printed above was the result. It was first published on March 
 27th of this year in pamphlet form at Sydney; afterwards reprinted 
 in The Scots Observer at Edinburgh, and in the collected works. 
 Stevenson's letters describing his visit to Molokai (printed on pp. 
 30-36 of these selections) should be read in connection with Father 
 Damien. In justice to Dr. Hyde, it should be noted that he was 
 possessed of an independent fortune, and so did not grow rich in 
 the course of his "evangelical calling"; furthermore, that his letter 
 to the Rev. H. B. Gage seems not to have been intended for publii- 
 eation. 
 
 195 
 
196 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 charged with the painful office of the devil's advocate. 
 After that noble brother of mine, and of all frail clay, shaR 
 have lain a century at rest, one shall accuse, one defend 
 him. The circumstance is unusual that the devil's advo- 
 cate should be a volunteer, should be a member of a sect 
 immediately rival, and should make haste to take upon 
 himself his ugly office ere the bones are cold; unusual, and 
 of a taste which I shall leave my readers free to qualify; 
 unusual, and to me inspiring. If I have at all learned the 
 trade of using words to convey truth and to arouse emo- 
 tion, you have at last furnished me with a subject. For 
 it is in the interest of all mankind and the cause of pub- 
 lic decency in every quarter of the world, not only that 
 Damien should be righted, but that you and your letter 
 should be displayed at length, in their true colours, to 
 the public eye. 
 
 To do this properly, I must begin by quoting you at 
 large: I shall then proceed to criticise your utterance 
 from several points of view, divine and human, in the 
 course of which I shall attempt to draw again and with 
 more specification the character of the dead saint whom 
 it has pleased you to vilify: so much being done, I shall 
 say farewell to you forever. 
 
 "Honolulu, August 2, 1889. 
 "Rev. H. B. Gage. 
 
 "Dear Brother, — In answer to your inquiries about 
 Father Damien, I can only reply that we who knew the 
 man are surprised at the extravagant newspaper lauda- 
 tions, as if he was a most saintly philanthropist. The 
 simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man, headstrong 
 and bigoted. He was not sent to Molokai, but went there 
 without orders; did not stay at the leper settlement (be- 
 fore he became one himself), but circulated freely over 
 the whole island (less than half the island is devoted t» 
 
FATHER DAMIEN 197 
 
 the lepers), and he came often to Honolulu. He had 
 no hand in the reforms and improvements inaugurated, 
 which were the work of our Board of Health, as occasion 
 required and means were provided. He was not a pure 
 man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of which 
 he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness. 
 Others have done much for the lepers, our own ministers, 
 the government physicians, and so forth, but never with 
 the Catholic idea of meriting eternal life. — Yours, etc., 
 
 "CM. Hyde."' 
 
 To deal fitly with a letter so extraordinary, I must 
 draw at the outset on my private knowledge of the signa- 
 tory and his sect. It may offend others; scarcely you, 
 who have been so busy to collect, so bold to publish, gos- 
 sip on your rivals. And this is perhaps the moment when 
 I may best explain to you the character of what you are to 
 read: I conceive you as a man quite beyond and below 
 the reticences of civility: with what measure you mete, 
 with that shall it be measured you again; with you, at last, 
 I rejoice to feel the button off the foil and to plunge home. 
 And if in aught that I shall say I should offend others, 
 your colleagues, whom I respect and remember with 
 affection, I can but offer them my regret; I am not free, 
 I am inspired by the consideration of interests far more 
 large; and such pain as can be inflicted by anything from 
 me must be indeed trifling when compared with the pain 
 with which they read your letter. It is not the hangman, 
 but the criminal, that brings dishonour on the house. 
 
 You belong, sir, to a sect — I believe my sect, and that 
 in which my ancestors laboured — which has enjoyed, and 
 partly failed to utilise, an exceptional advantage in the 
 islands of Hawaii. The first missionaries came; they 
 found the land already self-purged of its old and bloody 
 ' From the Sydney Presbyterian, October 26, 1889. 
 
198 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 faith; they were embraced, almost on their arrival, with 
 enthusiasm; what troubles they supported came far more 
 from whites than from Hawaiians; and to these last they 
 stood (in a rough figure; in the shoes of God. This is 
 not the place to enter into the degree or causes of their 
 failure, such as it is. One element alone is pertinent, 
 and must here be plainly dealt with. In the course of 
 their evangelical calling, they — or too many of them — 
 grew rich. It may be news to you that the houses of 
 missionaries are a cause of mocking on the streets of 
 Honolulu. It will at least be news to you, that when I 
 returned your civil visit, the driver of my cab commented 
 on the size, the taste, and the comfort of your home. It 
 would have been news certainly to myself, had any one 
 told me that afternoon that I should live to drag such 
 matter into print. But you see, sir, how you degrade 
 better men to your own level; and it is needful that those 
 who are to judge betwixt you and me, betwixt Damien 
 and the devil's advocate, should understand your letter 
 to have been penned in a house which could raise, and 
 that very justly, the envy and the comments of the passers- 
 by. I think (to employ a phrase of yours which I admire) 
 it "should be attributed" to you that you have never 
 visited the scene of Damien's life and death. If you 
 had, and had recalled it, and looked about your pleasant 
 rooms, even your pen perhaps would have been stayed. 
 
 Your sect (and remember, as far as any sect avows 
 me, it is mine) has not done ill in a worldly sense in the 
 Hawaiian Kingdom. When calamity befell their inno- 
 cent parishioners, when leprosy descended and took root 
 in the Eight Islands, a quid pro quo was to be looked for. 
 To that prosperous mission, and to you, as one of its 
 adornments, God had sent at last an opportunity. I 
 know I am touching here upon a nerve acutely sensitive. 
 I know that others of your colleagues look back on the 
 
FATHER DAMIEN • 199 
 
 inertia of your Church, and the intrusive and decisive 
 heroism of Damien, with something almost to be called 
 remorse. I am sure it is so with yourself; I am per- 
 suaded your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not 
 essentially ignoble, and the one human trait to be espied 
 in that performance. You were thinking of the lost 
 chance, the past day; of that which should have been 
 conceived and was not; of the service due and not 
 rendered. Time was, said the voice in your ear, in your 
 pleasant room, as you sat raging and writing; and if the 
 words written were base beyond parallel, the rage, I am 
 happy to repeat — it is the only compliment I shall pay 
 you — the rage was almost virtuous. But, sir, when we 
 have failed, and another has succeeded; when we have 
 stood by, and another has stepped in; when we sit and 
 grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain, un- 
 couth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of 
 God, and succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying, 
 and is himself afflicted in his turn, and dies upon the field 
 of honour — the battle cannot be retrieved as your un- 
 happy irritation has suggested. It is a lost battle, and 
 lost forever. One thing remained to you in your defeat 
 — some rags of common honour; and these you have 
 made haste to cast away. 
 
 Common honour; not the honour of having done any- 
 thing right, but the honour of not having done aught 
 conspicuously foul; the honour of the inert: that was what 
 remained to you. We are not all expected to be Damiens ; 
 a man may conceive his duty more narrowly, he may 
 love his comforts better; and none will cast a stone at him 
 for that. But will a gentleman of your reverend pro- 
 fession allow me an example from the fields of gallantry ? 
 When two gentlemen .compete for the favour of a lady, 
 and the one succeeds and the other is rejected, and (as 
 will sometimes happen) matter damaging to the success- 
 
200 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 ful rival's credit reaches the ear of the defeated, it is held 
 by plain men of no pretensions that his mouth is, in the 
 circumstance, almost necessarily closed. Your Church 
 and Damien's were in Hawaii upon a rivalry to do well: 
 to help, to edify, to set divine examples. You having 
 (in one huge instance) failed, and Damien succeeded, I 
 marvel it should not have occurred to you that you were 
 doomed to silence; that when you had been outstripped 
 in that high rivalry, and sat inglorious in the midst of 
 your well-being, in your pleasant room — and Damien, 
 crowned with glories and horrors, toiled and rotted in that 
 pigstye of his under the cliffs of Kalawao — ^you, the elect 
 who would not, were the last man on earth to collect and 
 propagate gossip on the volunteer who would and did. 
 
 I think I see you — for I try to see you in the flesh as 
 I write these sentences- — I think I see you leap at the word 
 pigstye, a hyperbolical expression at the best. " He had 
 no hand in the reforms," he was "a coarse, dirty man"; 
 these were your own words; and you may think it possible 
 that I am come to support you with fresh evidence. In 
 a sense, it is even so. Damien has been too much de- 
 picted with a conventional halo and conventional features; 
 so drawn by men who perhaps had not the eye to remark 
 or the pen to express the individual; or who perhaps were 
 only blinded and silenced by generous admiration, such as 
 I partly envy for myself — such as you, if your soul were 
 enlightened, would envy on your bended knees. It is 
 the least defect of such a method of portraiture that it 
 makes the path easy for the devil's advocate, and leaves 
 for the misuse of the slanderer a considerable field of 
 truth. For the truth that is suppressed by friends is 
 the readiest weapon of the enemy. The world, in your 
 despite, may perhaps owe you something, if your letter 
 be the means of substituting once for all a credible like- 
 ness for a wax abstraction. For, if that world at all re- 
 
FATHER DAMIEN 201 
 
 member you, on the day when Damien of Molokai shall 
 be named Saint, it will be in virtue of one work: your 
 letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage, 
 
 You may ask on what authority I speak. It was my 
 inclement destiny to become acquainted, not with Da- 
 mien, but with Dr. Hyde. When I visited the lazaretto 
 Damien was already in his resting grave. But such in- 
 formation as I have, I gathered on the spot in conver- 
 sation with those who knew him well and long: some in- 
 deed who revered his memory; but others who had 
 sparred and wrangled with him, who beheld him with 
 no halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, 
 and through whose unprepared and scarcely partial com- 
 munications the plain, human features of the man shone 
 on me convincingly. These gave me what knowledge 
 I possess; and I learnt it in that scene where it could 
 be most completely and sensitively understood — Kala- 
 wao, which you have never visited, about which you 
 have never so much as endeavoured to inform yourself: 
 for, brief as your letter is, you have found the means to 
 stumble into that confession. "Less than one-half oi the 
 island," you say, " is devoted to the lepers." Molokai — 
 "Molokai ahina," the "grey," lofty, and most desolate 
 island — along all its northern side plunges a front of preci- 
 pice into a sea of unusual profundity. This range of cliff 
 is, from east to west, the true end and frontier of the 
 island. Only in one spot there projects into the ocean 
 a certain triangular and rugged down, grassy, stony, 
 windy, and rising in the midst into a hill with a dead 
 crater: the whole bearing to the cliff that overhangs it 
 somewhat the same relation as a bracket to a wall. With 
 this hint you will now be able to pick out the leper station 
 on a map; you will be able to judge how much of Molokai 
 is thus cut off between the surf and precipice, whethe^r 
 less than a half, or less than a quarter, or a fifth, or a 
 
202 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 tenth — or say, a twentieth; and the next time you burst 
 into print you will be in a position to share with us the 
 issue of your calculations. 
 
 I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with 
 cheerfulness of that place which oxen and wainropes 
 could not drag you to behold. You, who do not even 
 know its situation on the map, probably denoimce sen- 
 sational descriptions, stretching your limbs the while in 
 your pleasant parlour on Beretania Street. When I was 
 pulled ashore there one early morning, there sat with 
 me in the boat two sisters, bidding farewell (in humble 
 imitation of Damien) to the lights and Joys of human life. 
 One of these wept silently; I could not withhold myself 
 from joining her. Had you been there, it is my belief 
 that nature would have triumphed even in you; and as 
 the boat drew but a little nearer, and you beheld the stairs 
 crowded with abominable deformations of our common 
 manhood, and saw yourself landing in the midst of such 
 a population as only now and then surrounds us in the 
 horror of a nightmare — ^what a haggard eye you would 
 have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards the 
 house on Beretania Street! Had you gone on; had you 
 found every fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had 
 you visited the hospital and seen the butt-ends of human 
 beings lying there almost unrecognisable, but still breath- 
 ing, still thinking, still remembering; you would have 
 understood that life in the lazaretto is an ordeal from 
 which the nerves of a man's spirit shrink, even as his eye 
 quails under the brightness of the sun; you would have 
 telt it was (even to-day) a pitiful place to visit and a hell 
 ito dwell in. It is not the fear of possible infection. That 
 seems a little thing when compared with the pain, the 
 pity, and the disgust of the visitor's surroundings, and 
 the atmosphere of affliction, disease, and physical dis- 
 grace in which he breathes. I do not think I am a man 
 
FATHER DAMIEN 203 
 
 more than u'nially timid; but I never recall the days and 
 nights I spent upon that island promontory (eight days 
 and seven nights), without heartfelt thankfulness that I 
 am somewhere else. I find in my diary that I speak of 
 my stay as a "grinding experience": I have once jotted 
 in the margin, "Harrowing is the word"; and when 
 the Moholii bore me at last towards the outer world, I 
 kept repeating to myself, with a new conception of their 
 pregnancy, those simple words of the song — 
 
 " T IS the most distressful country that ever yet was seen." 
 
 And observe: thstt which I saw and suffered from was 
 a settlement purged, bettered, beautified; the new village 
 built, the hospital and the Bishop-Home excellently ar- 
 ranged; the sisters, the doctor, and the missionaries, all 
 indefatigable in their noble tasks. It was a different 
 place when Damien came there, and made his great re- 
 nxmciation, and slept that first night under a tree amidst 
 his rotting brethren: alone with pestilence; and looking 
 forward (with what courage, with what pitiful sinkings 
 of dread, God only knows) to a lifetime of dressing sores 
 and stumps. 
 
 You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights 
 as painful abound in cancer hospitals and are confronted 
 daily by doctors and nurses. I have long learned to ad- 
 mire and envy the doctors and the nurses. But there is 
 no cancer hospital so large and populous as Kalawao and 
 Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like 
 every inch of length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the 
 note of the impression; for what daunts the onlooker is 
 that monstrous sum of human suffering by which he 
 stands surrounded. Lastly, no doctor or nurse is called 
 upon to enter once for all the doors of that gehenna; they 
 do not say farewell, they need not abandon hope, on its 
 sad threshold; they but go for a time to their high calling. 
 
204 SELECTIONS' FROM STEVENSON 
 
 and can look forward as they go to relief, to recreation, 
 and to rest. But Damien shut to with his own hand the 
 doors of his own sepulchre. 
 
 I shall now extract three passages from my diary at 
 Kalawao. 
 
 A. "Damien is dead and already somewhat ungrate- 
 fully remembered in the field of his labours and suffer- 
 ings. ' He was a good man, but very officious,' says one. 
 Another tells me he had fallen (as other priests so easily 
 do) into something of the ways and habits of thought of 
 a Kanaka; but he had the wit to recognise the fact, and 
 the good sense to laugh at" [over] "it. A plain man it 
 seems he was; I cannot find he was a popular." 
 
 B. "After Ragsdale's death" [Ragsdale was a famous 
 Luna, or overseer, of the unruly settlement] "there fol- 
 lowed a brief term of office by Father Damien which 
 served only to publish the weakness of that noble man. 
 He was rough in his ways, and he had no control. Au- 
 thority was relaxed; Damien's life was threatened, and 
 he was soon eager to resign." 
 
 C. " Of Damien I begin to have an idea. He seems 
 to have been a man of the peasant class, certainly of the 
 peasant type: shrewd; ignorant and bigoted, yet with an 
 open mind, and capable of receiving and digesting a re- 
 proof if it were bluntly administered; superbly generous 
 in the least thing as well as in the greatest, and as ready 
 to give his last shirt (although not without human grum- 
 bling) as he had been to sacrifice his life; essentially indis- 
 creet and ofiicious, which made him a troublesome col- 
 league; domineering in all his ways, which made him 
 incurably unpopular with the Kanakas, but yet destitute 
 of real authority, so that his boys laughed at him and he 
 must carry out his wishes by the means of bribes. He 
 learned to have a mania for doctoring; and set up the 
 Kanakas against the remedies of his regular rivals: per- 
 
FATHER DAMIEN 205 
 
 haps (if anything matter at all in the treatment of such a 
 disease) the worst thing that he did, and certainly the 
 easiest. The best and worst of the man appear very 
 plainly in his dealings with Mr. .Chapman's money; he 
 had originally laid it out" [intended to lay it out] "en- 
 tirely for the benefit of Catholics, and even so not wisely; 
 but after a long, plain talk, he admitted his error fully 
 and revised the list. The sad state of the boys' home 
 is in part the result of his lack of control; in part, of his 
 own slovenly ways and false ideas of hygiene. Brother 
 officials used to call it 'Damien's Chinatown.' 'Well,' 
 they would say, 'your Chinatown keeps growing.* And 
 he would laugh with perfect good-nature, and adhere to 
 his errors with perfect obstinacy. So much I have gath- 
 ered of truth about this plain, noble human brother and 
 father of ours; his imperfections are the traits of his face, 
 by which we know him for our fellow; his martyrdom 
 and his example nothing can lessen or annul; and only 
 a person here on the spot can properly appreciate their 
 greatness." 
 
 I have set down these private passages, as you per- 
 ceive, without correction; thanks to you, the public has 
 them in their bluntness. They are almost a list of the 
 man's faults, for it is rather these that I was seeking: 
 with his virtues, with the heroic profile of his life, I and 
 the world were already sufficiently acquainted. I was 
 besides a little suspicious of Catholic testimony; in no 
 ill sense, but merely because Damien's admirers and 
 disciples were the least likely to be critical. I know you 
 will be more suspicious still; and the facts set down above 
 were one and all collected from the lips of Protestants 
 who had opposed the father in his life. Yet I am 
 strangely deceived, or they build up the image of a man, 
 with all his weaknesses, essentially heroic, and alive with 
 rugged honesty, generosity, and mirth. 
 
206 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Take it for what it is, rough private jottings of thi 
 worst sides of Damien's character, collected from the 
 lips of those who had laboured with and (in your own 
 phrase) "knew the man"; — though I question whether 
 Damien would have said that he knew you. Take it, 
 and observe with wonder how well you were served by 
 your gossips, how ill by your intelligence and sympa- 
 thy; in how many points of fact we are at one, and how 
 widely our appreciations vary. There is something 
 wrong here; either with you or me. It is possible, for 
 instance, that you, who seem to have so many ears in 
 Kalawao, had heard of the affair of Mr. Chapman's 
 money, and were singly struck by Damien's intended 
 Wrong-doing. I was struck with that also, and set it 
 fairly down; but I was struck much more by the fact that 
 he had the honesty of mind to be convinced. I may here 
 tell you that it was a long business; that one of his col- 
 leagues sat with him late into the night, multiplying 
 arguments and accusations; that the father listened as 
 usual with "perfect good-nature and perfect obstinacy"; 
 but at the last, when he was persuaded — "Yes," said he, 
 "I am very much obliged to you; you have done me a 
 service; it would have been a theft." There are many 
 (not Catholics merely) who require their heroes and 
 saints to be infallible; to these the story will be paiiBiful; 
 not to the true lovers, patrons, and servants of mankind. 
 
 And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you 
 are one of those who have an eye for faults and failures; 
 that you take a pleasure to find and publish them; and 
 that, having foxmd them, you make haste to forget the 
 overvailipg virtues and the real success which had alone 
 introduced them to your knowledge. It is a dangerous 
 frame of mind. That you may understand how danger^ 
 ous, and into what a situation it has already brought 
 you, we will (if you please) go hand-in-hand through the 
 
FATHER DAMIEN 207 
 
 difisrent phrases of your letter, and candidly examine 
 each from the point of view of its truth, its appositeness, 
 and its charity. 
 
 Damien was coarse. 
 
 It is very possible. You make us sorry for the lepers 
 who had only a coarse old peasant for their friend and 
 father. But you, who were so refined, why were you 
 not there, to cheer them with the lights of culture ? Or 
 may I remind you that we have some reason to doubt 
 if John the Baptist were genteel; and in the case of 
 Peter, on whose career you doubtless dwell approvingly 
 in the pulpit, no doubt at all he was a "coarse, head- 
 strong" fisherman! Yet even in our Protestant Bibles 
 Peter is called Saint. 
 
 Damien was 
 
 He was. Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this 
 dirty comrade! But the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food 
 in a fine house. 
 
 Damien was headstrong. 
 
 I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his 
 strong head and heart. 
 
 Damien was bigoted. 
 
 I am not fond of bigots myself, because they are not 
 fond of me. But what is meant by bigotry, that we 
 should regard it as a blemish in a priest? Damien be- 
 lieved his own religion with the simplicity of a peasant 
 or a child; as I would I could suppose that you do. 
 For this, I wonder at him some way off; and had that 
 been his only character, should have avoided him in life. 
 But the point of interest in Damien, which has caused 
 him to be so much talked about and made him at last 
 the subject of your pen and mine, was that, in him, his 
 
208 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 bigotry, his intense and narrow faith, wrought potently 
 for good, and strengthened him to be one of the world's 
 heroes and exemplars. 
 
 Damien was not sent to Molokai, but went there with- 
 out orders. 
 
 Is this a misreading? or do you really mean the words 
 for blame? I have heard Christ, in the pulpits of our 
 Qiurch, held up for imitation on the ground that His 
 sacrifice was voluntary. Does Dr. Hyde think otherwise ? 
 
 Damien did not stay at the settlement, etc. 
 
 It is true he was allowed many indulgences. Am I 
 to understand that you blame the father for profiting by 
 these, or the officers for granting them ? In either case, 
 it is a mighty Spartan standard to issue from the house 
 on Beretania Street; and I am convinced you will find 
 youEself with few supporters. 
 
 Damien had no hand in the reforms, etc. 
 
 I think even you will admit that I have already been 
 frank in my description of the man I am defending; but 
 before I take you up upon this head, I will be franker 
 still, and tell you that perhaps nowhere in the world can 
 a man taste a more pleasurable sense of contrast than 
 when he passes from Damien's "Chinatown" at Kala- 
 wao to the beautiful Bishop-Home at Kalaupapa. At 
 this point, in my desire to make all fair for you, I will 
 break my rule and adduce Catholic testimony. Here is 
 a passage from my diary about my visit to the China- 
 town, from which you will see how it is (even now) re- 
 garded by its own officials: "We went round all the 
 dormitories, refectories, etc. — dark and dingy enough, 
 with a superficial cleanliness, which he" [Mr. Dutton, 
 the lay brother] "did not seek to defend. *It is almost 
 
FATHER DAMIEN 209 
 
 decent,' said he; * the sisters will make that all right when 
 we get them here.' " And yet I gathered it was already 
 better since Damien was dead, and far better than when 
 he was there alone and had his own (not always excellent) 
 way. I have now come far enough to meet you on a com- 
 mon ground of fact; and I tell you that, to a mmd not 
 prejudiced by jealousy, all the reforms of the lazaretto, 
 and even those which he most vigorously opposed, are 
 properly the work of Damien. They are the evidence of 
 his success; they are what his heroism provoked from 
 the reluctant and the careless. Many were before him 
 in the field; Mr. Meyer, for instance, of whose faithful 
 work we hear too little: there have been many since; and 
 some had more worldly wisdom, though none had more 
 devotion, than our saint. Before his day, even you will 
 confess, they had effected little. It was his part, by one 
 striking act of martyrdom, to direct all men's eyes on that 
 distressful country. At a blow, and with the price of his 
 life, he made the place illustrious and public. And that, 
 if you will consider largely, was the one reform needful; 
 pregnant of all that should succeed. It brought money; 
 it brought (best individual addition of them all) the sis- 
 ters; it brought supervision, for public opinion and pub- 
 lic interest landed with the man at Kalawao. If ever 
 any man brought reforms, and died to bring them, it 
 was he. There is not a clean cup or towel in the Bishop- 
 Home, but dirty Damien washed it. 
 
 Damien was not a pure man in his relations with 
 women, etc. 
 
 How do you know that? Is this the nature of the con- 
 versation in that house on Beretania Street which the 
 cabman envied, driving past? — racy details of the mis- 
 conduct of the poor peasant priest, toiling imder the cliffs 
 of Molokai? 
 
210 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Many have visited the station before me; they seem 
 not to have heard the rumour. When I was there I 
 heard many shocking tales, for my informants were men 
 speaking with the plainness of the laity; and I heard 
 plenty of complaints of Damien. Why was this never 
 mentioned? and how came it to you in the retirement of 
 your clerical parlour? 
 
 But I must not even seem to deceive you. This scan- 
 dal, when I read it in your letter, was not new to me. I 
 had heard it once before; and I must tell you how. 
 There came to Samoa a man from Honolulu; he, in a 
 public-house on the beach, volunteered the statement 
 that Damien had "contracted the disease from having 
 connection with the female lepers"; and I find a joy in 
 telling you how the report was welcomed in a public- 
 house. A man sprang to his feet; I am not at liberty to 
 give his name, but from what I heard I doubt if you 
 would care to have him to dinner in Beretania Street. 
 
 "You miserable little "(here is a word I dare not 
 
 print, it would so shock your ears). " You miserable lit- 
 tle ," he cried, " if the story were a thousand times 
 
 true, can't you see you are a million times a lower 
 
 for daring to repeat it?" I wish it could be told of you 
 that when the report reached you in your house, per- 
 haps after family worship, you had found in your soul 
 enough holy anger to receive it with the same expres- 
 sions: ay, even with that one which I dare not print; it 
 would not need to have been blotted away, like Uncle 
 Toby's oath, by the tears of the recording angel; it would 
 have been counted to you for your brightest righteous- 
 ness. But you have deliberately chosen the part of the 
 man from Honolulu, and you have played it with im- 
 provements of your own. The man from Honolulu — 
 miserable, leering creature — commimicated the tale 
 to a rude knot of beach-combing drinkers in a public- 
 
FATHER DAMIEN 211 
 
 house, where (I will so far agree with your temperance 
 opimons) man is not always at his noblest; and the man 
 from Honolulu had himself been drinking — drinking, we 
 may charitably fancy, to excess. It was to your " Dear 
 Brother, the Reverend H. B. Gage," that you chose to 
 communicate the sickening story; and the blue ribbon 
 which adorns your portly bosom forbids me to allow you 
 the extenuating plea that you were drunk when it was 
 done. Your "dear brother" — a brother indeed — ^made 
 haste to deliver up your letter (as a means of grace, per- 
 haps) to the religious papers; where, after many months, 
 I found and read and wondered at it; and whence I have 
 now reproduced it for the wonder of others. And you 
 and your dear brother have, by this cycle of operations, 
 built up a contrast very edifying to examine in detail. 
 The man whom you would not care to have to dinner, on 
 the one side; on tha other, the Reverend Dr. Hyde and 
 the Reverend H. B. Gage: the Apia bar-room, the Hono- 
 lulu manse. 
 
 But I fear you scarce appreciate how you appear to 
 your fellow-men; and to bring it home to you, I will sup- 
 pose your story to be true. I will suppose — and God 
 forgive me for supposing it — that Damien faltered and 
 stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose that, 
 in the horror of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of 
 incipient disease, he, who was doing so much more than 
 he had sworn, failed in the letter of his priestly oath — he, 
 who was so much a better man than either you or me, 
 who did what we have never dreamed of daring — he too 
 tasted of our common frailty. " O, lago, the pity of it!" 
 The least tender should be moved to tears; the most in- 
 credulous to prayer. And all that you could do was to 
 pen your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage! 
 
 Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have 
 drawn of your own heart ? I will try yet once again to 
 
212 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 make it clearer. You had a father: suppose this tale 
 
 were about him, and some informant brought it to you, 
 
 proof in hand: I am not making too high an estimate of 
 
 your emotional nature when I suppose you would regret 
 
 the circumstance ? that you would feel the tale of fraUty 
 
 the more keenly since it shamed the author of your days ? 
 
 and that the last thing you would do would be to publish 
 
 it in the religious press ? Well, the man who tried to do 
 
 what Damien did, is my father, and the father of 
 
 the man in the Apia bar, and the father of all 
 
 who love goodness; and he was your 
 
 father too, if God had given 
 
 you grace to see it. 
 
STORIES 
 
*«-«^,««^ <«*-^,i^ A..«.o<_ . " ^^ '^^ 
 
 fU^ STORIES / ^^ 
 
 A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT » 
 
 It was late in November, 1456. The snow fell over 
 Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the 
 wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices; some- 
 times there was a lull, and flake after flake descended 
 out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, intermi- 
 nable. To poor people, looking jip under moist eye- 
 brows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. 
 Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative 
 that afternoon, at a tavern window: was it only Pagan 
 Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus ? or were tl^ holy 
 angels moulting? He was only a poor Master of Arts, 
 
 * Published in Temple Bar in October, 1877, this story was the 
 first of Stevenson's to be printed. It was inspired by a study of 
 the life of Frangois Villon (1431-? 1484), an early French poet, one 
 of the great masters of gay scurrility in verse, and the author of the 
 most famous of ballades, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" 
 Stevenson's study of this reprobate and genius had already borne 
 fruit in an essay, Francois VUlon, Student, Poet, and Housebreaker, 
 which had been published in The Comhill Magazine for August of 
 this year, and is reprinted in the volume entitled Familiar Studies of 
 Men and Books. In that essay, which is chiefly biographical, Dom 
 Nicholas, Tabary, and Montigny appear as historical figures, com- 
 panion pickpockets with Villon, and gripped at last, as he waSj by 
 the law. The chaplain of St. Benott-le-B^toum€, who adopted 
 Villon, and the poet's mother also find a place in this historical study, 
 but the Seigneur de Brisetout is probably fictitious. Stevenson re- 
 fers to a record of the murder of Thevenin in a house by the ceme- 
 tery of St. John. Its possibilities seem to have caught his eye, for 
 in the above-mentioned essay he says, " If time had only spared us 
 some particulars, might not this last [the murder] have furnished ua 
 with the matter of a grisly writer's tale?" Time did not spare the 
 particulars, but in A Lodging for the Night Stevenson has invented 
 them. This story was reprinted in the voliuue entitled New Arabian, 
 Nights, 1882. 
 
 215 
 
216 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 he went on; and as the question somewhat touched upon 
 divinity, he durst not venture to conclude. A silly old 
 priest from Montargis, who was among the company, 
 treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in honour of 
 the jest and grimaces with which it was accompanied, and 
 swore on his own white beard that he had been just such 
 another irreverent dog when he was Villon's age. 
 
 The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freez- 
 ing; and the flakes were large, damp, and adhesive. 
 The whole city was sheeted up. An army might have 
 marched from end to end and not a footfall given the 
 alarm. If there were any belated birds in heaven, they 
 saw the island like a large white patch, and the bridges 
 like slim white spars, on the black ground of the river. 
 High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery 
 of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; 
 many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque 
 or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed 
 into great false noses, drooping towards the point. The 
 crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. 
 In the intervals of the wind, there was a dull sound of 
 dripping about the precincts of the church. 
 
 The cemetery of St. John had taken its own share of 
 the snow. All the graves were decently covered; tall 
 white housetops stood around in grave array; worthy 
 burghers were long ago in bed, be-nightcapped like their 
 domiciles; there was no light in all the neighbourhood 
 but a little peep from a lamp that hung swinging 
 in the church choir, and tossed the shadows to and fro 
 in time to its oscillations. The clock was hard on ten 
 when the patrol went by with halberds and a lantern, 
 beating their hands; and they saw nothing suspicious 
 about the cemetery of St. John. 
 
 Yet there was a small house, backed up against the 
 cemetery wall, which was still awake, and awake to evfl 
 
A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT 217 
 
 purpose, in that snoring district. There was not much 
 to betray it from without; only a stream of warm vapour 
 from the chimney-top, a patch where the snow melted 
 on the roof, and a few half-obliterated footprints at the 
 door. But within, behind the shuttered wmdows. Mas- 
 ter Francis Villon the poet, and some of the thievish crew 
 with whom he consorted, were keeping the night alive 
 and passing round the bottle. 
 
 A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and 
 ruddy glow from the arched chimney. Before this strad- 
 dled Dom Nicolas, the Picardy monk, with his skirts 
 picked up and his fat legs bared to the comfortable 
 warmth. His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and 
 the firelight only escaped on either side of his bioad per- 
 son, and in a little pool between his outspread feet. His 
 face had the beery, bruised appearance of the continual 
 drinker's; it was covered with a network of congested 
 veins; purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale 
 violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched 
 him on the other side. His cowl had half fallen back, and 
 made a strange excrescence on either side of his bull neck. 
 So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half with 
 the shadow of his portly frame. 
 
 On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled 
 together over a scrap of parchment; Villon making a bal- 
 lade which he was to call the "Ballade of Eoast Fish,'* 
 and Tabary spluttering admiration at his shoulder. The 
 poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with hol- 
 low cheeks and thin black locks. He carried his four- 
 and-twenty years with feverish animation. Greed had 
 made folds about his eyes, evil smiles had puckered his 
 mouth. The wolf and pig struggled together in his face. 
 It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly countenance. 
 His hands were small and prehensile, with fingers knot- 
 ted like a cord; and they were continually flickering in 
 
218 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 front of him in violent and expressive pantomime. As 
 for Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility 
 breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips: he 
 had become a thief, just as he might have become the 
 most decent of burgesses, by the imperious chance that 
 rules the lives of human geese and human donkeys. 
 
 At the monk's other hand, Montigny and Thevenin 
 Pensete played a game of chance. About the first there 
 clung some flavour of good birth and training, as about 
 a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in the 
 person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. 
 Thevenin, poor soul, was in great feather: he had done 
 a good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg 
 St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining from 
 Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald 
 head shone rosily in a g arland of red curls f his little pro- 
 tuberant stomach shookwith silent chucklings as he swept 
 in his gains. 
 
 "Doubles or quits?" said Thevenin. 
 
 Montigny nodded grimly. 
 
 "Some may prefer to dine in state," wrote Villon, "On 
 bread and cheese on silver plate. Or, or — help me out, 
 Guidol" 
 
 Tabary giggled. 
 
 " Or parsley on a golden dish," scribbled the poet. 
 
 The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow 
 before it, and sometimes raised its voice in a victorious 
 whoop, and made sepulchral grumblings in the chimney. 
 The cold was growing sharper as the night went on. 
 Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the gust with some- 
 thing between a whistle and a groan. It was an eerie, 
 uncomfortable talent of the poet's, much detested by the 
 Picardy monk. 
 
 "Can't you hear it rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. 
 "They are all dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up 
 
A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT 219 
 
 there. You may dance, my gallants, you'll be none the 
 warmer! "Whew! what a gust! Down went somebody 
 just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged med- 
 lar-tree!— I say, Dom Nicolas, it'll be cold to-night on 
 the St. Denis Road?" he asked, 
 
 Dom Nicolas winked both his big eyes, and seemed 
 to choke upon his Adam's apple, lyiontfaucon, the great 
 ^ grisly Paris gibbet, stood hard by the St. Denis Road, 
 and the pleasantry touched him on the raw. As for 
 Tabary, he laughed immoderately over the medlars; he 
 had never heard anything more light-hearted; and he held 
 his sides and crowed. Villon fetched him a fillip on the 
 nose, which turned his mirth into an attack of coughing. 
 
 "Oh, stop that row," said Villon, "and think of 
 rhymes to 'fish.'" 
 
 " Doubles or quits," said Montigny doggedly. 
 
 " With all my heart," quoth Thevenin. 
 
 "Is there any more in that bottle?" asked the monk. 
 
 "Open another," said Villon. "How do you ever 
 hope to fill that big hogshead, your body, with little 
 things like bottles? And how do you expect to get to 
 heaven ? How many angels, do you fancy, can be spared 
 to carry up a single monk from Picardy? Or do you 
 think yourself another Elias — and they'll send the coach 
 for you?" 
 
 " Homimbus impossibile," * replied the monk as he filled 
 his glass. 
 
 Tabary was in ecstasies. 
 
 Villon filliped his nose again. 
 
 " Laugh at my jokes, if you like," he said. 
 
 "It was very good," objected Tabary. 
 
 Villon made a face at him, "Think of rhymes to 
 •fish,'" he said, "What have you to do with Latin? 
 You '11 wish you knew none of it at the great assizes, 
 ' Impossible to man. 
 
220 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 when the devil calls for Guido Tabary, clericus — the devil 
 with the hump-back and red-hot finger-nails. Talking of 
 the devil," he added in a whisper, "look at Montignyl" 
 
 All three peered covertly at the gamester. He did not 
 seem to be enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little to 
 a side; one nostril nearly shut, and the other much in- 
 flated. The black dog was on his back, as people say, 
 in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed hard 
 under the gruesome burden. 
 
 "He look? as if he could knife him," whispered Ta- 
 bary, with round eyes. 
 
 The monk shuddered, and turned his face and spread 
 his open hands to the red embers. It was the cold that 
 thus affected Dom Nicolas, and not any excess of moral 
 sensibility. 
 
 " Come now," said Villon — " about this ballade. How 
 does it run so far ? " And beating time with his hand, he 
 read it aloud to Tabary. 
 
 They were interrupted at the fourth rhyme by a brief 
 and fatal movement among the gamesters. The round 
 was completed, and Thevenin was just opening his 
 mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny leaped 
 up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to the heart. 
 The blow took effect before he had time to utter a cry, 
 before he had time to move. A tremor or two con- 
 vulsed his frame; his hands opened and shut, his heels 
 rattled on the floor; then his head rolled backward over 
 one shoulder with the eyes wide open; and Thevenin 
 Pensete's spirit had returned to Him who made it. 
 
 Every one sprang to his feet; but the business was over 
 in two twos. The four living fellows looked at each other 
 in rather a ghastly fashion; the dead man contemplating 
 a comer of the roof with a singular and ugly leer. 
 
 "My God I" said Tabary; and he began to pray in 
 Latin. 
 
A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT 221 
 
 Villon broke out into hysterical lighter. He came a 
 step forward and ducked a ridiculous bow at Thevenin, 
 and laughed still louder. Then he sat down suddenly, 
 all of a heap, upon a stool, and continued laughing bit- 
 terly, as though he would shake himself to pieces. 
 
 Montigny recovered his composure first. 
 
 " Let 's see what he has about him," he remarked, and 
 he picked the dead man's pockets with a practised hand, 
 and divided the money into four equal portions on the 
 table. "There 's for you," he said. 
 
 The monk received his share with a deep sigh, and a 
 single stealthy glance at the dead Thevenin, who was 
 beginning to sink into himself and topple sideways off 
 the chair. 
 
 " We 're all in for it," cried Villon, swallowing his 
 mirth. " It 's a hanging job for every man jack of us 
 that 's here — ^not to speak of those who aren 't." He 
 made a shocking gesture in the air with his raised right 
 hand, and put out his tongue and threw his head on one 
 side,' so as to counterfeit the appearance of one who has 
 been hanged. Then he pocketed his share of the spoil, 
 and executed a shufBe with his feet as if to restore the 
 circulation. 
 
 Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at 
 the money, and retired to the other end of the apartment. 
 
 Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and 
 drew out the dagger, which was followed by a jet of 
 blood. 
 
 "You fellows had better be moving," he said, as he 
 wiped the blade on his victim's doublet. 
 
 "I think we had," returned Villon, with a gulp. 
 "Damn his'fat head I" he broke out. "It sticks in my 
 throat like phlegm. What right has a man to have red 
 hair when he is dead?" And he fell all of a heap agOn 
 Upon the stool, and fairly covered his face with his hands. 
 
222 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud, even Ta/- 
 bary feebly chiming in. 
 
 " Cry baby," said the monk. 
 
 "I always said he was a woman," added Montigny, 
 with a sneer. "Sit up, can't you?" he went on, giving 
 another shake to the murdered body. "Tread out that 
 fire, Nick!" 
 
 But Nick was better employed; he was quietly taking 
 Villon's purse, as the poet sat, limp and trembling, on 
 the stool where he had been making a ballade not three 
 minutes before. Montigny and Tabary dumbly de- 
 manded a share of the booty, which the monk silently 
 promised as he passed the litde bag into the bosom of his 
 gown. In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for 
 practical existence. 
 
 No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Vil- 
 lon shook himself, jumped to his feet, and began help- 
 ing to scatter and extinguish the embers. Meanwhile 
 Montigny opened the door and cautiously peered into 
 the street. The coast was clear; there was no meddle- 
 some patrol in sight. Still it was judged wiser to slip 
 out severally; and as Villon was himself in a hurry to 
 escape from the neighbourhood of the dead Thevenin, 
 and the rest were in a still greater hurry to get rid of him 
 before he should discover the loss of his money, he was 
 the first by general consent to issue forth into the street. 
 
 The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from 
 heaven. Only a few vapours, as thin as moonlight, 
 fleeted rapidly across the stars. It was bitter cold; and 
 by a common optical effect, things seemed almost more 
 definite than in the broadest daylight. The sleeping city 
 was absolutely still; a company of white hoods, a field full 
 of little alps, below the twinkling stars. Villon cursed bis 
 fortune. Would it were still snowingi Now, wherever 
 he went, he left an indelible trail behind him on the 
 
A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT 223 
 
 glittering streets; wherever he went he was still tethered 
 to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he 
 went he must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope 
 that bound him to the crime and would bind him to the 
 gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him 
 with a new significance. He snapped his fingers as if 
 to pluck up his own spirits, and phoosing a street at ran- 
 doin, stepped boldly forward in the snow. 
 
 Two things preoccupied him as be went; the aspect 
 of the gallows at Montfaucon in this bright, windy phase 
 of the night's existence, for one; and for another, the look 
 of the dead man with his bald head and gariand of red 
 curls. Both struck cold upon his heart, and he kept 
 quickening his pace as if he could escape from unpleasant 
 thoughts by mere fleetness of foot. Sometimes he looked 
 back over his shoulder with a sudden nervous jejrk; but 
 he was the only moving thing in the white streets, except 
 when the wind swooped round a comer and threw up the 
 snow, which was beginning to freeze, in spouts of glitter- 
 ing dust. 
 
 Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump 
 and a couple of lanterns. The clump was in motion, and 
 the lanterns swung as though carried by men walking. 
 It was a patrol. And though it was merely crossing his 
 line of march he judged it wiser to get out of eyeshot as 
 speedily as he could. He was not in the humour to be 
 challenged, and he was conscious of making a very con- 
 spicuous mark upon the snow. Just on his left hand 
 there stood a great hotel, with some turrets and a large 
 porch before the door; it was half-ruinous, he remem- 
 bered, and had long stood empty; and so he made three 
 steps of it, and jumped into the shelter of the porch. It 
 was pretty dark inside, after the glimmer of the snowy 
 streets, and he was groping forward with outspread 
 hands, when he stumbled over some substance which of- 
 
224 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 fered an indescribable mixture of resistances, hard and 
 soft, firm and loose. His heart gave a leap, and he 
 sprang two steps back and stared dreadfully at the ob- 
 stacle. Then he gave a little laugh of relief. It was only 
 a woman, and she dead. He knelt beside her to make 
 sure upon this latter point. She was freezing cold, and 
 rigid like a stick. A little ragged finery fluttered in the 
 wind about her hair, and her cheeks had been heavily 
 rouged that same afternoon. Her pockets were quite 
 empty; but in her stocking, underneath the garter, Villon 
 found two of the small coins that went by the name of 
 whites. It was little enough; but it was always some- 
 thing; and the poet was moved with a deep sense of pathos 
 that she should have died before she had spent her money. 
 That seemed to him a dark and pitiable mystery; and he 
 looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, and 
 back again to the coins, shaking his head over the riddle 
 of man's life. Henry V. of England, dying at Vinceimes 
 just after he had conquered France, and this poor jade 
 cut off by a cold draught in a great man's doorway, 
 before she had time to spend her couple of whites — it 
 seemed a cruel way to carry on the world. Two whites 
 would have taken such a little while to squander; and yet 
 it would have been one more good taste in the mouth, 
 one more smack of the lips, before the devil got the soul, 
 and the body was left to birds and vermin. He would 
 like to use all his tallow before the light was blown out 
 and the lantern broken. 
 
 While these thoughts were passing through his mind, 
 he was feeling, half mechanically, for his purse. Sud- 
 denly his heart stopped beating; a feeling of cold scales 
 passed up the back of his legs, and a cold blow seemed 
 to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment; 
 then he felt again with one feverish movement; and then 
 his loss burst upon him, and he was covered at once with 
 
A LODGmG FOR THE NIGHT 225 
 
 perspiration. To spendthrifts money is so living and 
 actual — it is such a thin veil between them and their 
 pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune — that 
 of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the 
 Emperor of Rome imtil they are spent. For such a per- 
 son to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking re- 
 verse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, 
 in a breath. And all the more if he has put his head in 
 the halter for it; if he may be hanged to-morrow for that 
 same purse, so dearly earned, so foolishly departed! Vil- 
 lon stood and cursed; he threw the two whites into the 
 street; he shook his fist at heaven; he stamped, and was 
 not horrified to find himself trampling the poor corpse. 
 Then he began rapidly to retrace his steps towards the 
 house beside the cemetery. He had forgotten all fear 
 of the patrol, which was long gone by at any rate, and had 
 no idea but that of his lost purse. It was in vain that he 
 looked right and left upon the snow: nothing was to be 
 seen. He had not dropped it in the streets. Had it fallen 
 in the house? He would have liked dearly to go in and 
 see; but the idea of the grisly occupant unmanned him. 
 And he saw besides, as he drew near, that their efforts to 
 put out the fire had been unsuccessful; on the contrary, it 
 had broken into a blaze, and a changeful light played in 
 the chinks of door and window, and revived his terror 
 for the authorities and Paris gibbet. 
 
 He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped 
 about upon the snow for the money he had thrown away 
 in his childish passion. But he could only find one 
 white; the other had probably struck sideways and sunk 
 deeply in. With a single white in his pocket, all his 
 projects for a rousing night in some wild tavern vanished 
 utterly away. And it was not only pleasure that fled 
 laughing from his grasp; positive discomfort, positive 
 pain, attacked him as he stood ruefully before the porch. 
 
226 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 His perspiration had dried upon him; and although the 
 wind had now fallen, a binding frost was setting in 
 stronger with every hour, and he felt benumbed and sick 
 at heart. What was to be done ? Late as was the hour, 
 improbable as was success, he would try the house of his 
 adopted father, the chaplain of St. Benoft. 
 
 He ran there all the way, and knocked timidly. There 
 was no answer. He knocked again and again, taking 
 heart with every stroke; and at last steps were heard 
 approaching from within. A barred wicket fell open 
 in the iron-studded door, and emitted a gush of yellow 
 light. 
 
 " Hold up your face to the wicket," said the chaplain 
 from within. 
 
 " It 's only me," whimpered Villon. 
 
 "Oh, it 's only you, is it?" returned the chaplain; and 
 he cursed him with foul unpriestly oaths for disturbing 
 him at such an hour, and bade him be off to hell, where 
 he came from. 
 
 "My hands are blue to the wrist," pleaded Villon; 
 "my feet are dead and full of twinges; my nose aches 
 with the sharp air; the cold lies at my heart. I may be 
 dead before morning. Only this once, father, and before 
 God, I will never ask again 1" 
 
 "You should have come earlier," said the ecclesiastic 
 coolly. "Young men require a lesson now and then." 
 He shut the wicket and retired deliberately into the in- 
 terior of the house. 
 
 Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with 
 his hands and feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chap- 
 lain. 
 
 "Wormy old fox!" he cried. "If I had my hand un- 
 der your twist/ I would send you flying headlong into 
 the bottomless pit." 
 
 ' Between your legs. 
 
A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT 223 
 
 A door shut in the mterior, faintly audible to the poet 
 do\m long passages. He passed his hand over his mouth 
 with an oath. And then the humour of the situation 
 struck him, and he laughed and looked lightly up to 
 heaven, where the stars seemed to be winkhig over his 
 discomfiture. 
 
 What was to be done? It looked very like a night in 
 the frosty streets. The idea of the dead woman popped 
 into his imagmation, and gave him a hearty fright; what 
 had happened to her in the early night might very well 
 happen to him before morning. And he so young! and 
 with such immense possibilities of disorderly amusement 
 before himl He felt quite pathetic over the notion of his 
 own fate, as if it had been some one else's, and made a 
 little imaginative vignette of the scene in the morning 
 when they should find his body. 
 
 He passed all his chances under review, turning the 
 white between his thumb and forefinger. Unfortunately 
 he was on bad terms with some old friends who would 
 once have taken pity on him in such a plight. He had 
 lampooned them in verses; he had beaten and cheated 
 them; and yet now, when he was in so close a pinch, 
 he thought there was at least one who might perhaps 
 relent. It was a chance. It was worth trying at least, 
 and he would go and see. 
 
 On the way, two little accidents happened to him 
 which coloured his musings in a very different manner. 
 For, first, he fell in with the track of a patrol, and walked 
 in it for some hundred yards, although it lay out of his 
 direction. And this spirited him up; at least he had 
 confused his trail; for he was still possessed with the 
 idea of people tracking him all about Paris over the 
 snow, and collaring him next morning before he was 
 awake. The other matter affected him quite differently. 
 He passed a street comer, where, not so long before, a 
 
228 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 woman and her child had been devoured by wolves. 
 This was just the kind of weather, he reflected, when 
 wolves might take it into their heads to enter Paris again; 
 and a lone man in these deserted streets would run the 
 chance of something worse than a mere scare. He 
 stopped and looked upon the place with an impleasant 
 interest — it was a centre where several lanes intersected 
 each other; and he looked down them all, one after an- 
 other, and held his breath to listen, lest he should detect 
 some galloping black things on the snow or hear the sound 
 of howling between him and the river. He remembered 
 his mother telling him the story and pointing out the spot, 
 while he was yet a child. His mother! if he only knew 
 where she lived, he might make sure at least of shelter. 
 He determined he would inquire upon the morrow; nay, 
 he would go and see her too, poor old girl! So thinking, 
 he arrived at his destination — ^his last hope for the night. 
 The house was quite dark, like its neighbours; and 
 yet after a few taps, he heard a movement overhead, a 
 door opening, and a cautious voice asking who was 
 there. The poet named himself in a loud whisper, and 
 waited, not without some trepidation, the result. Nor 
 had he to Wait long. A window was suddenly opened, 
 and a pailful of slops splashed down upon the doorstep. 
 Villon had not been unprepared for something of the 
 sort, and had put himself as much in shelter as the nature 
 of the porch admitted; but for all that, he was deplorably 
 drenched below the waist. His hose began to freeze al- 
 most at once. Death from cold and exposure stared him 
 in the face; he remembered he was of phthisical tendency, 
 and began coughing tentatively. But the gravity of the 
 danger steadied his nerves. He stopped a few hundred 
 yards from the door where he had been so rudely used, 
 and reflected with his finger to his nose. He could only 
 see one way of getting a lodging, and that was to take it 
 
/ 
 
 A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT 229 
 
 He had noticed a house not far away, which looked as if it 
 might be easily broken into, and thither he betook him- 
 self promptly, entertaining himself on the way with the 
 idea of a room still hot, with a table still loaded with the 
 remains of supper, where he might pass the rest of the 
 black hours and whence he should issue, on the morrow, 
 with an armful of valuable plate. He even considered 
 on what viands and what wines he should prefer; and as 
 he was calling the roll of his favourite dainties, roast 
 fish presented itself to his mind with an odd mixture of 
 amusement and horror. 
 
 " I shall never finish that ballade," he thought to him- 
 self; and then, with another shudder at the recollection, 
 "Oh, damn his fat head!" he repeated fervently, and 
 spat upon the snow. 
 
 The house in question looked dark at first sight; but 
 as Villon made a preliminary inspection in search of the 
 handiest point of attack, a little twinkle of light caught 
 his eye from behind a curtained window. 
 
 "The devil!" he thought. "People awakel Some 
 student or some saint, confound the crew! Can't they 
 get drunk and lie in bed snoring like their neighbours! 
 What's the good of curfew, and poor devils of bell- 
 ringers jumping at a rope's end in bell-towers ? What 's 
 the use of day, if people sit up all night ? The gripes to 
 them!" He grinned as he saw where his logic was lead- 
 ing him. " Every man to his business, after all," added 
 he, " and if they 're awake, by the Lord, I may come by a 
 supper honestly for once, and cheat the devil." 
 
 He went boldly to the door and knocked with an 
 assured hand. On both previous occasions, he had 
 knocked timidly and with some dread of attracting no- 
 tice; but now when he had just discarded the thought of 
 a burglarious entry, knocking at a door seemed a mighty 
 simple and innocent proceeding. The sound of his 
 
230 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 blows echoed through the house with thin, phantasmal 
 reverberations, as though it were quite empty; bat these 
 had scarcely died away before a measured tread drew 
 near, a couple of bolts were withdrawn, and one wing 
 was opened broadly, as though no guile or fear of guile 
 were known to those within. A tall figure of a man, 
 muscular and spare, but a little bent confronted Villon. 
 The head was massive in bulk, but finely sculptured; the 
 nose blunt at the bottom, but refining upward to where 
 it joined a pair of strong and honest eyebrows; the mouth 
 and eyes surrounded with delicate markings, and the 
 whole face based upon a thick white beard, boldly and 
 squarely trimmed. Seen as it was by the light of a flicker- 
 ing hand-lamp, it looked perhaps nobler than it had a 
 right to do; but it was a fine face, honourable rather than 
 intelligent, strong, simple, and righteous. 
 
 "You knock late, sir," said the old man in resonant, 
 courteous tones. 
 
 Villon cringed and brought up many servile words of 
 apology; at a crisis of this sort the beggar was uppermost i 
 in him, and the man of genius hid his head with confusion. J 
 
 " You are cold," repeated the old man, " and hungry ? 
 Well, step in." And he ordered him into the hoiise with 
 a noble enough gesture. 
 
 "Some great seigneur," thought ViUon, as his host, 
 setting down the lamp on the flagged pavement of the 
 entry, shot the bolts once more into their places. 
 
 " You will pardon me if I go in front," he said, when 
 this was done; and he preceded the poet upstairs into a 
 large apartment, warmed with a pan of charcoal and 
 lit by a great lamp hanging from the roof. It was very 
 bare of furniture: only some gold plate on a sideboard; 
 some folios; and a stand of armour between the windows. 
 Some smart tapestry hung upon the walls, representing 
 the crucifixion of pur Lord in one piece, and in another 
 
A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT 231 
 
 a scene of shepherds and shepherdesses by a running 
 stream. Over the chimney was a shield of arms. 
 
 "Will you seat yourself," said the old man, "and for- 
 ^ve me if I leave you ? I am alone in my house to-night, 
 and if you are to eat I must forage for you myself." 
 
 No sooner was his host gone than Villon leaped from 
 the chair on which he had just seated himself, and began 
 examining the room, with the stealth and passion of a cat. 
 He weighed the gold flagons in his hand, opened all the 
 folios, and investigated the arms upon the shield, and the 
 stuff with which the seats were lined. He raised the 
 window curtains, and saw that the windows were set 
 with rich stained glass in figures, so far as he could see, 
 of martial import. Then he stood in the middle of the 
 room, drew a long breath, and retaining it with puffed 
 cheeks, looked round and roimd him, tuiming on his heels, 
 as if to impress every feature of the apartment on his 
 memory. 
 
 " Seven pieces of plate," he said. " If there had been 
 ten, I would have risked it. A fine house, and a fine old 
 master, so help me all the saints!" 
 
 And just then, hearing the old man's tread returning 
 along the corridor, he stole back to his chair, and began 
 humbly toasting his wet legs before the charcoal pan. 
 
 His entertainer had a plate of meat in one hand and a 
 jug of wine in the other. He set down the plate upon the 
 table, motioning Villon to draw in his chair, and going to 
 the sideboard, brought back two goblets which he filled. 
 
 ■" I drink your better fortune," he said, gravely touch- 
 ing Villon's cup with his own. 
 
 "To our better acquaintance," said the poet, growing 
 bold. A mere man of the people would have been awed 
 by the courtesy of the old seignem-, but Villon was hard- 
 ened in that matter; he had made mirth for greaj; lords 
 before now, and found them as black rascals as himself. 
 
232 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 And so he devoted himself to the viands with a ravenous 
 gusto, while the old mail, leaning backward, watched him 
 with steady, curious eyes. 
 
 " You have blood on your shoulder, my man," he said. 
 
 Montigny must have laid his wet right hand upon him 
 as he left the house. He cursed Montigny in his heart. 
 
 " It was none of my shedding," he stammered. 
 
 "I had not supposed so," returned his host quietly. 
 "A brawl?" 
 
 " Well, something of that sort," Villon admitted with 
 a quaver. 
 
 "Perhaps a fellow murdered?" 
 
 " Oh, no, not murdered," said the poet, more and more 
 confused. " It was all fair play — mxurdered by accident. 
 I had no hand in it, God strike me dead!" he added 
 fervently. 
 
 " One rogue the fewer, I dare say," observed the mas- 
 ter of the house. 
 
 "You may dare to say that," agreed Villon, infinitely 
 relieved. "As big a rogue as there is between here and 
 Jerusalem. He turned up his toes like a lamb. But it 
 was a nasty thing to look at. I dare say you 've seen dead 
 men in your time, my lord?" he added, glancing at the 
 armour. 
 
 "Many," said the old man. "I have followed the 
 wars, as you imagine." 
 
 Villon laid down his knife and fork, which he had just 
 taken up again. 
 
 "Were any of them bald?" he asked. 
 
 " Oh yes, and with hair as white as mine." 
 
 " I don't think I should mind the white so much," said 
 Villon. "His was red." And he had a return of his 
 shuddermg and tendency to laughter, which he drowned 
 with a great draught of wine. " I 'm a little put out when 
 I think of it," he went on. "I knew him — damn himi 
 
A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT . 233 
 
 And then the cold ^ves a man fancies — or the fancies give 
 a man cold, I don't know which." 
 
 "Have you any money?" asked the old man. 
 
 " I have one white," returned the poet, laughing. " I 
 got it out of a dead jade's stockmg in a porch. She was 
 as dead as Caesar, poor wench, and as cold as a church, 
 with bits of ribbon sticking in her hair. This is a hard 
 worid in winter for wolves and wenches and poor rogues 
 like me." 
 
 "I," said the old man, "am Enguerrand de la Feuil- 
 Ifee, seigneur de Brisetout, bailly du Patatrac. Who and 
 what may you be?" 
 
 Villon rose and made a suitable reverence. "I am 
 called Francis Villon," he said, "a poor Master of Arts 
 of this imiversity. I know some Latin, and a deal of 
 vice. I can make chansons, ballades, lais, virelais, and 
 roundels,* and I am very fond of wine. I was bom in a 
 garret, and I shall not improbably die upon the gallows. 
 I may add, my lord, that from this night forward I am 
 your lordship's very obsequious servant to command." 
 
 "No servant of mine," said the knight; "my guest for 
 this evening, and no more." 
 
 "A very grateful guest," said Villon politely, and he 
 drank in dumb show to his entertainer. 
 
 "You are shrewd," began the old man, tapping his 
 forehead, "very shrewd; you have learning; you are a 
 clerk; and /et you take a small piece of money off a dead 
 woman in the street. Is it not a kind of theft?" 
 
 " It is a kind of theft much practised in the wars, my 
 lord." 
 
 "The wars are the field of honour," returned the old 
 man proudly. " There a man plays his life upon the cast; 
 he fights in the name of his lord the king, his Lord God, 
 and all their lordships the holy saints and angels." 
 ' Various forms of French verse. 
 
234 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 "Put it," said Villon, "that I were really a thief, 
 should I not play my life also, and against heavier 
 odds?" 
 
 " For gain but not for honour." 
 
 " Gain ?" repeated Villon with a shrug. " Gain! The 
 poor fellow wants supper, and takes it. So does the sol- 
 dier in a campaign. Why, what are all these requisi- 
 tions we hear so much about? If they are not gain to 
 those who take them, they are loss enough to the others. 
 The men-at-arms drink by a good fire, while the burgher 
 bites his nails to buy them wine and wood. I have seen 
 a good many ploughmen swinging on trees about the 
 country; ay, I have seen thirty on one elm, and a very 
 poor figure they made; and when I asked some one how 
 all these came to be hanged, I was told it was because they 
 could not scrape together eaough crowns to satisfy the 
 men-at-arms." 
 
 "These things are a necessity of war, which the low- 
 born must endure with constancy. It is true that some 
 captains drive overhard; there are spirits in every rank 
 not easily moved by pity; and indeed many follow arms 
 who are no better than brigands." 
 
 "You see," said the poet, "you caimot separate the 
 soldier from the brigand; and what is a thief but an 
 isolated brigand with circumspect manners ? I steal a 
 couple of mutton chops, without so much as disturbing 
 people's sleep; the farmer grumbles a bit, but sups none 
 the less wholesomely on what remains. You come up 
 blowing gloriously on a trumpet, take away the whole 
 sheep, and beat the farmer pitifully into the bargaio. I 
 have no trumpet; I am only Tom, Dick, or Harry; I am 
 a rogue and a dog, and hanging 's too good for me — with 
 all my heart; but just ask the farmer which of us he pre- 
 fers, just find out which of us he lies awake to curse on 
 cold nights." 
 
A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT 235 
 
 "Look at us two," said his lordship. "I am old, 
 strong, and honoured. If I were turned from my house 
 to-morrow, hundreds would be proud to shelter me. 
 Poor people would go out and pass the night in the streets 
 with their children, if I merely hinted that I wished to 
 be alone. And I find you up, wandering homeless, and 
 picking farthings off dead women by the wayside! I 
 fear no man and nothing; I have seen you tremble and 
 lose countenance at a word. I wait God's summons con- 
 tentedly in my own house, or, if it please the king to call 
 me out again, upon the field of battle. You look for the 
 gallows; a rough, swift death, without hope or honour. 
 Is there no difference between these two?" 
 
 " As far as to the moon," Villon acquiesced. " But if 
 I had been bom lord of Brisetout, and you had been the 
 poor scholar Francis, would the difference have been any 
 the less ? Should not I have been warming my knees at 
 this charcoal pan, and would not you have been groping 
 for farthings in the snow? Should not I have been the 
 soldier, and you the thief?" 
 
 "A thief?" cried the old man. "la thief I If you 
 understood your words, you would repent them." 
 
 Villon turned out his hands with a gesture of inimi- 
 table impudence. "If your lordship had done me the 
 honour to follow my argument!" he said. 
 
 "I do you too much honour in submitting to your 
 presence," said the knight. "Learn to curb your tongue 
 when you speak with old and honourable men, or some 
 one hastier than I may reprove you in a sharper fashion." 
 And he rose and paced the lower end of the apartment, 
 struggling with anger and antipathy. Villon surrepti- 
 tiously refilled his cup, and settled himself more com- 
 fortably in the chair, crossing his knees and leaning his 
 head upon one hand and the elbow against the back of 
 the chair. He was now replete and warm; and he was 
 
236 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 in nowise frightened for his host, having gauged him 
 as justly as was possible between two such different char- 
 acters. The night was far spent, and in a very comfort- 
 able fashion after all; and he felt morally certain of a 
 safe departure on the morrow. 
 
 "Tell me one thing," said the old man, pausing in his 
 walk. "Are you really a thief?" 
 
 "I claim the sacred rights of hospitality," returned 
 the poet. "My lord, I am." 
 
 "You are very young," the knight continued. 
 
 "I should never have been so old," replied Villon, 
 showing his fingers, "if I had not helped myself with 
 these ten talents. They have been my nursing mothers 
 and my nursing fathers." 
 
 "You may still repent and change." 
 
 "I repent daily," said the poet. "There are few peo- 
 ple more given to repentance than poor Francis. As for 
 change, let somebody change my circumstances. A man 
 must continue to eat, if it were only that he may continue 
 to repent." 
 
 "The change must begin in the heart," returned the 
 old man solemnly. 
 
 " My dear lord," answered Villon, " do you really fancy 
 that I steal for pleasure? I hate stealing, like any other 
 piece of work or of danger. My teeth chatter when I see 
 a gallows. But I must eat, I must drink, I must mix in 
 society of some sort. What the devil! Man is not a 
 solitary animal — Cui Deus fcBtninam tradit} Make me 
 king's pantler — make me abbot of St. Denis; make me 
 bailly of the Patatrac; and then I shall be changed indeed. 
 But as long as you leave me the poor scholar Francis 
 Villon, without a farthing, why, of course, I remain the 
 same." 
 
 " The grace of God is all-powerful." 
 • To ■whdm God gave woman. 
 
A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT / 
 
 237 
 
 "I should be a heretic to question it," said Francis. 
 "It has made you lord of Brisetout and bailly of the 
 Patatrac; it has given me nothing but the quick wits un- 
 der my hat and these ten toes upon my hands. May I 
 help myself to wine? I thank you respectfully. By 
 God's grace, you have a very superior vintage." 
 
 The lord of Brisetout walked to and fro with his hands 
 behind his back. Perhaps he was not yet quite settled in 
 his mind about the parallel between thieves and soldiers; 
 perhaps Villon had interested him by some cross-thread 
 of sympathy; perhaps his wits were simply muddled by 
 so much unfamiliar reasoning; but whatever the cause, 
 he somehow yearned to convert the young man to a bet- 
 ter way of thinking, and could not make up his mind to 
 drive him forth again into the street. 
 
 "There is something more than I can understand in 
 this," he said at length. "Yoxu- mouth is full of subt- 
 leties, and the devil has led you very far astray; but the 
 devil is only a very weak spirit before God's truth, and all 
 his subtleties vanish at a word of true honour, like dark- 
 ness at morning. Listen to me once more. I learned 
 long ago that a gentleman should live chivalrously and 
 lovingly to God, and the king, and his lady; and though 
 I have seen many strange things done, I have still striven 
 to command my ways upon that rule. It is not only 
 written in all noble histories, but in every man's heart, 
 if he will take care to read. You speak of food and wine, 
 and I know very well that hunger is a difficult trial to en- 
 dure; but you do not speak of other wants; you say noth- 
 ing of honour, of faith to God and other men, of courtesy, 
 of love without reproach. It may be that I am not very 
 wise — and yet I think I am — but you seem to me like one 
 who has lost his way and made a great error in life. You 
 are attending to the little wants, and you have totally for- 
 gotten the great and only real ones, like a man who should 
 
238 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 be doctoring toothache on the Judgment Day. For such 
 things as honour and love and faith are not only nobler 
 than food and drink, but indeed I think we desire them 
 more, and suffer more sharply for their absence. I speak 
 to you as I think you will most easily understand me. 
 Are you not, while careful to fill your belly, disregarding 
 another appetite in your heart, which spoils the pleasure 
 of your life and keeps you continually wretched?" 
 
 Villon was sensibly nettled under all this sermonizing. 
 " You think I have no sense of honour I " he cried. " I *m 
 poor enough, God knows! It 's hard to see rich people 
 with their gloves, and you blowing in your hands. An 
 empty belly is a bitter thing, although you speak so 
 lightly of it. If you had had as many as I, perhaps you 
 would change your tune. Any way I 'm a thief — ^make 
 the most of that — ^but I 'm not a devil from hell, God strike 
 me dead. I would have you to know I 've an honour 
 of my own, as good as yours, though I don't prate about 
 it all day long, as if it was a God's miracle to have any. 
 It seems quite natural to me; I keep it in its box till it 's 
 wanted. Why now, look you here, how long have I been 
 in this room with you? Did you not tell me you were 
 alone in the house? Look at your gold plate! You 're 
 strong, if you like, but you 're old and unarmed, and I 
 have my knife. What did I want but a jerk of the elbow 
 and here would have been you with the cold steel in your 
 bowels, and there would have been me, linking in the 
 street^, with an armful of golden cups! Did you suppose 
 I hadn't wit enough to see that ? And I scorned the ac- 
 tion. There are your damned goblets, as safe as in a 
 ' church; there are you, with your heart ticking as good as 
 new; and here am I, ready to go out again as poor as I 
 came in, with my one white that you threw in my teeth! 
 And you think I have no sense of honour — God strike 
 me deadl" 
 
A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT 239 
 
 The old man stretched out his right arm. " I will tell 
 Vou what you are," he said. " You are a rogue, my man, 
 an impudent and black-hearted rogue and vagabond. I 
 have passed an hour with you. Oh! believe me, I feel 
 myself disgraced! And you have eaten and drunk at 
 my table. But now I am sick at your presence; the day 
 has come, and the night-bird should be oflE to his roost. 
 Will you go before, or after?" 
 
 "Which you please," returned the poet, rising. "I 
 believe you to be strictly honourable." He thought- 
 fully emptied his cup. "I wish I could add you were 
 intelligent," he went on, knocking on his head with his 
 knuckles. "Age! age] the brains stiff and rheumatic." 
 
 The old man preceded him from a point of self-respect. 
 Villon followed, whistling, with his thumbs in his girdle. 
 
 " God pity you," said the lord of Brisetout at the door. 
 
 "Good-bye, papa," returned Villon with a yawn. 
 "Many thanks for the cold mutton." 
 
 The door closed behind him. The dawn was breaking 
 over the white roofs. A chill, uncomfortable morning 
 ushered in the day. Villon stood and heartily stretched 
 himself in the middle of the road. 
 
 "A very dull old gentleman," he thought. "I wonder 
 what his goblets may be worth." 
 
A a &-J-). >■ „t 
 
 WILL O' THE MILL^ 
 
 THE PLAIN AND THE STARS 
 
 The Mill where Will lived with his adopted parents 
 stood in a falling valley between pinewoods and great 
 mountains. Above, hill after hill soared upwards until 
 they soared out of the depth of the hardiest timber, and 
 stood naked against the sky. Some way up, a long grey 
 village lay like a seam or a rag of vapour on a wooded hill- 
 side; and when the wind was favourable, the sound of the 
 church bells would drop down, thin and silvery, to Will, 
 /^elow, the valley grew ever steeper and steeper, and at 
 the same time widened out on either hand; and from an 
 eminence beside the mill it was possible to see its whole 
 length and away beyond it over a wide plain, where the 
 river turned and shone, and moved on from city to city 
 on its voyage towards the sea. It chanced that over this 
 valley there lay a pass into a neighbouring kingdom, so 
 that, quiet and rural as it was, the road th%t ran along be- 
 side the river was .a high thoroughfare between two splen- 
 did and powerful societies. All through the summer. 
 
 'Written in 1877, probably in Edinburgh after a return from 
 France, at the time of a sudden burst of activity in story-telling. 
 The mountain scenery is a reminiscence of the Brenner Pass over 
 which Stevenson journeyed on his retvim from Italy in 1863 when 
 he was only thirteen years old, combined with some memories of 
 the valleys of Baden. He told Graham Balfour, afterwards his bi- 
 ographer, that it was an experiment in what could be said for a 
 theory of life opposite to his own. His own theory is expressed in 
 one of his favourite maxims, "Acts may be forgiven; not even God 
 can forgive the hanger-back." PubUshed in Tlw CornhiU Magazine, 
 January, 1878, and afterwards in the volume entitled The Merry 
 Men, and Other Tales, 1887. 
 
 240 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 241 
 
 travelling-carriages came crawling up, or went plunging 
 briskly downwards past the mill; and as it happened that 
 the other side was very much easier of ascent, the path 
 was not much frequented, except by people going in one 
 direction; and of aU the carriages that Will saw go by, 
 five-sixths were plunging briskly downwards and only 
 one-sixth crawling up. Much more was this the case 
 with fftot-passengers. All the light-footed tourists, all the 
 pedlars laden with strange wares, were tending down- 
 ward like the river that accompanied their path. Nor 
 was this all; for when Will was yet a child a disastrous 
 war arose over a great part of the world. The newspapers 
 were full of defeats and victories, the earth rang with 
 cavalry hoofs, and often for days together and for miles 
 around the coil of battle terrified good people from their 
 labours in the field. Of all this, nothing was heard for a 
 long time in the valley; but at last one of the commanders 
 pushed an army over the pass by forced marches, and 
 for three days horse and foot, cannon and tumbril,* drum 
 and standard, kept pouring downward past the mill. All 
 day the child stood and watched them on their passage — 
 the rhythmical stride, the pale, unshaven faces tanned 
 about the eyes, the discoloured regimentals and the tat- 
 tered flags, filled him with a sense of weariness, pity, 
 and wonder; and all night long, after he was in bed, he 
 could hear the cannon poimding and the feet trampling, 
 and the great armament sweeping onward and downward 
 past the mill. No one in the valley ever heard the fate of 
 the expedition, for they lay out of the way of gossip in 
 those troublous times; but Will saw one thing plainly, 
 that not a man returned. Whither had they all gone? 
 Whither went all the tourists and pedlars with strange 
 wares? whither all the brisk barouches with servants in 
 the dicky ? whither the water of the stream, ever cours- 
 
 • The two-wheeled cart for carrjring tools, etc., which acts as 
 tender for a battery. 
 
242 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 ing downward and ever renewed from above ? Even the 
 wind blew oftener down the valley, and carried the dead 
 leaves along with it in the fall. It seemed like a great 
 conspiracy of things animate and inanimate; they all went 
 downward, fleetly and gaily downward, and only he, it 
 seemed, remained behind, like a stock upon the wayside. 
 It sometimes made him glad when he noticed how the 
 fishes kept their heads up stream. They, at least, stood 
 faithfully by him, while all else were posting downward to 
 the unknown world. 
 
 One evening he asked the miller where the river went. 
 
 "It goes down the valley," answered he, "and turns 
 a power of mills — six score mills, they say, from here to 
 Unterdeck — and it none the wearier after all. And then it 
 goes out into the lowlands, and waters the great com coun- 
 try, and runs through a sight of fine cities (so they say) 
 where kings live all alone in great palaces, with a sentry 
 walking up and down before the door. And it goes under 
 bridges with stone men upon them, looking down and 
 smiling so curious at the water, and living folks leaning 
 their elbows on the wall and looking over too. And then 
 it goes on and on, and down through marshes and sands, 
 xmtil at last it falls into the sea, where the ships are that 
 bring parrots and tobacco from the Indies. Ay, it has 
 a long trot before it as it goes singing over our weir, bless 
 its heart!" 
 
 "And what is the sea?" asked Will. 
 
 "The seal" cried the miller. "Lord help us all, it is 
 the greatest thing God made ! That is where all the water 
 in the world runs down into a great salt lake. There it 
 lies, as flat as my hand and as innocent-like as a child; 
 but they do say when the wind blows it gets up into water- 
 mountains bigger than any of ours, and swallows down 
 great ships bigger than our mill, and makes such a roar- 
 ing that you can hear it miles away upon the land. There 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 243 
 
 are great fish in it five times bigger than a bull, and one 
 old serpent as long as our river and as old as all the world, 
 with whiskers like a man, and a crown of silver on her 
 head." 
 
 Will thought he had never heard anything like this, 
 and he kept on asking question after question about the 
 world that lay away down the river, with all its perils and 
 marvels, until the old miller became quite interested him- 
 self, and at last took him by the hand and led him to the 
 hill-top that overlooks the valley and the plain. The sun 
 was near setting, and hung low down in a cloudless sky. 
 Everything was defined and glorified in golden ligHt. 
 Will had never seen so great an expanse of country in his 
 life; he stood and gazed with all his eyes. He could see 
 the cities, and the woods and fields, and the bright 
 curves of the river, and far away to where the rim of 
 the plain trenched along the shining heavens. An over- 
 mastering emotion seized upon the boy, soul and body; 
 his heart beat so thickly that he could not breathe; the 
 scene swam before his eyes; the sun seemed to wheel 
 round and round, and throw off, as it turned, strange 
 shapes which disappeared with the rapidity of thought, 
 and were succeeded by others. Will covered his face 
 with his hands, and burst into a violent fit of tears; and 
 the poor miller, sadly disappointed and perplexed, saw 
 nothing better for it thaii to take him up in his arms and 
 carry him home in silence. 
 
 From that day forward Will was full ■^f new hopes and 
 longings. Something kept tugging at nis heart-strings; 
 the running water carried his desires along with it as 
 he dreamed over its fleeting surface; the wind, as it ran 
 over innumerable tree-tops, hailed him with encouraging 
 words; branches beckoned downward; the open road, as 
 it shouldered round the angles and went turning and van- 
 ishing faster and faster down the valley, tortured him 
 
244 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 with its solicitations. He spent long whiles on the emi- 
 nence, looking down the river-shed and abroad on the flat 
 lowlands, and watched the clouds that travelled forth 
 upon the sluggish wind and trailed their purple shadows 
 on the plain; or he would linger by the wayside, and follow 
 the carriages with his eyes as they rattled downward by 
 the river. It did not matter what it was; everything that 
 went that way, were it cloud or carriage, bird or brown 
 water in the stream, he felt his heart flow out after it in 
 an ecstasy of longing. 
 
 We are told by men of science that all the ventures of 
 mariners on the sea, all that counter-marching of tribei 
 and races that confounds old history with its dust and 
 rumour, sprang from nothing more abstruse than the 
 laws of supply and demand, and a certain natural institct 
 for cheap rations. To any one thinking deeply, this will 
 seem a dull and pitiful explanation. The tribes that came 
 swarming out of the North and East, if they were indeed 
 pressed onward from behind by others, were drawn at the 
 same time by the magnetic influence of the South and 
 West. The fame of other lands had reached them; the 
 name of the eternal city rang in their ears; they were not 
 colonists, but pilgrims; they travelled towards wine and 
 gold and sunshine, but their hearts were set on something 
 higher. That divine unrest, that old stin^ng trouble of 
 humanity that makes all high achievements and all miser- 
 able failure, the same that spread wings with Icarus, the 
 same that sent Columbus into the desolate Atlantic, in- 
 spired and supported these barbarians on their perilous 
 march. There is one legend which profoundly repre- 
 sents their spirit, of how a flying party of these wanderers 
 encountered a very old man shod with iron. The old 
 man asked them whither they were going; and they an- 
 swered with one voice: "To the Eternal City!" He 
 looked upon them gravely. " I have sought it," he said, 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 245 
 
 " over the most part of the world. Three such pairs as I 
 now carry on my feet have I worn out upon this pilgrim- 
 age, and now the fourth is growing slender underneath 
 my steps. And all this while I have not found the city." 
 And he turned and went his own way alone, leaving them 
 astonished. 
 
 And yet this would scarcely parallel the intensity of 
 Will's feeling for the plain. If he could only go far 
 enough out there, he felt as if his eyesight would be purged 
 and clarified, as if his hearing would grow more delicate, 
 and his very breath would come and go with luxury. He 
 was transplanted and withering where he was; he lay in a 
 strange country and was sick for home. Bit by bit, he 
 pieced together broken notions of the world below: of the 
 river, ever moving and growing until it sailed forth into the 
 majestic ocean; of the cities, full of brisk and beautiful 
 people, playing foimtains, bands of music and marble 
 palaces, and lighted up at night from end to end with 
 artificial stars of gold; of the great churches, wise imiver- 
 sities, brave armies, and untold money lying stored in 
 vaults; of the high-flying vice that moved in the sunshine, 
 and the stealth and swiftness of midnight murder. I have 
 said he was sick as if for home: the figure halts. He was 
 like some one lying in twilit, formless pre-existence, and 
 stretching out his hands lovingly towards many-coloured, 
 many-sounding life. It was no wonder he was unhappy, 
 he would go and tell the fish: they were made for their 
 life, wished for no more than worms and running water, 
 and a hole below a falling bank; but he was differently 
 designed, full of desires and aspirations, itching at the 
 fingers, lusting with the eyes, whom the whole variegated 
 world could not satisfy with aspects. The true life, the 
 true bright sunshine, lay far out upon the plain. And OI 
 to see this sunlight once before he died! to move with a 
 jocund spirit in a golden land! to hear the trained singers 
 
246 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 and sweet church bells, and see the holiday gardensl 
 "And O fish!" he would cry, "if you would only turn 
 your noses down stream, you could swim so easily into 
 the fabled waters and see the vast ships passing over your 
 head like clouds, and -hear the great water-hills making 
 music over you all day long!" But the fish kept looking 
 patiently in their own direction, until Will hardly knew 
 whether to laugh or cry. 
 
 Hitherto the traffic on the road had passed by Will, like 
 something seen in a picture: he had perhaps exchanged 
 salutations with a tourist, or caught sight of an old gentle- 
 man in a travelling-cap at a carriage window; but for the 
 most part it had been a mere symbol, which he contem- 
 plated from apart and with something of a superstitious 
 feeling. A time came at last when this was to be changed. 
 The miller, who was a greedy man in his way, and never 
 forewent an opportunity of honest profit, turned the mill- 
 house into a little wayside inn, and, several pieces of good 
 fortime falling in opportunely, built stables and got the 
 position of post-master on the road. It now became 
 Will's duty to wait upon people, as they sat to break their 
 fasts in the little arbour at the top of the mill garden; and 
 you may be sure that he kept his ears open, and learned 
 many new things about the outside world as he brought 
 the omelette or the wine. Nay, he would often get into 
 conversation with single guests, and by adroit questions 
 and polite attention, not only gratify his own curiosity, 
 but win the good-will of the travellers. Many compli- 
 mented the old couple on their serving-boy; and a pro- 
 fessor was eager to take him away with him, and have him 
 properly educated in the plain. The miller and his wife 
 were mightily astonished and even more pleased. They 
 thought it a very good thing that they should have opened 
 their inn. "You see," the old man would remark, "he 
 has a kind of talent for a publican; he never would have 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 247 
 
 made anything else!" And so life wagged on in the val- 
 ley, with high satisfaction to all concerned but Will, 
 Every carriage that left the inn-door seemed to take a 
 part of him away with it; and when people jestingly of- 
 fered him a lift, he could with diflBculty command his 
 emotion. Night after night he would dream that he 
 w^s awakened by flustered servants, and that a splendid 
 equipage waited at the door to carry him down into 
 the plain; night after night; imtil the dream, which had 
 seemed all jollity to him at first, began to take on a col- 
 our of gravity, and the nocturnal summons and waiting 
 equipage occupied a place in his mind as something tp 
 be both feared and hoped for. T^ J„-i - : . 
 
 One day, when Will was about sixteen, a fat young e 
 man arrived at sunset to pass the night. He was a con- ' 
 tented-looking fellow, with a jolly eye, and carried a knap- 
 sack. While dinner was preparing, he sat in the arbour 
 to read a book; but as soon as he had begun to observe 
 Will, the book was laid aside; he was plainly one of those 
 who prefer living people to people made of ink and paper. 
 Will, on his part, although he had not been much inter- 
 ested in the stranger at first sight, soon began to take a 
 great deal of pleasure in his talk, which was full of good 
 nature and good sense, and at last conceived a great re- 
 spect for his character and wisdom. They sat far into the 
 night; and about two in the morning Will opened his 
 heart to the young man, and told him how he longed to 
 leave the valley and what bright hopes he had connected 
 with the cities of the plain. The young man whistled, 
 and then broke into a smile. 
 
 "My yoimg friend," he remarked, "you are a very 
 curious little fellow to be sure, and wish a great many 
 things which you will never get. Why, you would feel 
 quite ashamed if you knew how the little fellows in these 
 fairy cities of yours are all after the same sort of nonsense, 
 
248 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 and keep breaking their hearts to get up into the mount- 
 ains. And let me tell you, those who go down into the 
 plains are a very short while there before they wish them- 
 selves heartily back again. The air is not so light nor 
 so pure; nor is the s\m any bri^ter. As for the beautiful 
 men and women, you would see many of them in rags and 
 many of them deformed with horrible disorders; and a 
 city is so hard a place for people who are poor and sensi- 
 tive that many choose to die by their own hand." 
 
 "You must think me very simple," answered Will. 
 "Although I have never been out of this valley, believe 
 me, I have used my eyes. I know how one thing lives 
 on another; for instance, how the fish hangs in the eddy 
 to catch his fellows; and the shepherd, who makes so 
 pretty a picture carrying home the lamb, is only carrying 
 it home for dinner. I do not expect to find all things right 
 in your cities. That is not what troubles me; it might 
 have been ±hat once upon a time; but although I live here 
 always, I have asked many questions and learned a great 
 deal in these last years, and certainly enough to cure me 
 of my old fancies. But you would not have me die like 
 a dog and not see all that is to be seen, and do all that a 
 man can do, let it be good or evil ? you would not have me 
 spend all my days between this road here and the river, 
 and not so much as make a motion to be up and live my 
 life ? — I would rather die out of hand," he cried, " than 
 linger on as I am doing." 
 
 "Thousands of people," said the young man, "live 
 and die like you, and are none the less happy." 
 
 "Ah!" said Will, "if there are thousands who would 
 like, why should not one of them have my place?" 
 
 It was quite dark; there was a hanging lamp in the 
 arbour which lit up the table and the faces of the speak- 
 ers; and along the arch, the leaves upon the trellis stood 
 out illuminated against the night sky, a pattern of trans- 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 249 
 
 parent green upon a dusky purple. The fat young man 
 rose, and, taking Will by the arm, led him out under the 
 open heavens. 
 
 "Did you ever look at the stars?" he asked, pomting 
 upwards. 
 
 " Often and often," answered Will. 
 
 "And do you know what they are?" 
 
 "I have fancied many things." 
 
 "They are worlds like ours," said the yoimg man. 
 " Some of them less; many of them a million times greater; 
 and some of the least sparkles that you see are not only 
 worlds, but whole clusters of worlds turning about each 
 other in the midst of space. We do not know what there 
 may be in any of them; perhaps the answer to all our dif- 
 ficulties or the cure of all our sufferings: and yet we can 
 never reach them; not all the skill of the craftiest of men 
 can fit out a ship for the nearest of these our neighbours, 
 nor would the life of the most aged suffice for such a jour- 
 ney. When a great battle has been lost or a dear friend 
 is dead, when we are hipped or in high spirits, there they 
 are tmweariedly shining overhead. We may stand down 
 here, a whole army of us together, and shout imtil we 
 break our hearts, and not a whisper reaches them. We 
 may climb the highest mountain, and we are no nearer 
 them. All we can do is to stand down here in the garden 
 and take off our hats; the starshine lights upon our heads, 
 and where mine is a little bald, I dare say you can see it 
 glisten in the darkness. The mountain and the mouse. 
 That is like to be all we shall ever have to do with 
 Arcttirus or Aldebaran. Can you apply a parable?" he 
 added, laying his hand upon Will's shoulder. " It is not 
 the same thing as a reason, but usually vastly more con- 
 vincing." 
 
 Will hung his head a little, and then raised it once more 
 to heaven. The stars seemed to expand and emit a 
 
250 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 sharper brilliancy; and as lie kept turning his eyes higher 
 and higher, they seemed to increase in nmltitude under 
 his gaze. 
 
 " I see," he said, turning to the young man. " We are 
 in a rat-trap." 
 
 "Something of that size. Did you ever see a squir- 
 rel turning in a cage ? and another squirrel sitting philo- 
 sophically over his nuts? I needn't ask you which of 
 them looked more of a fool." 
 
 THE parson's MAEJOKT 
 
 After some years the old people died, both in one win- 
 ter, very carefully tended by their adopted son, and very 
 quietly mourned when they were gone. People who had 
 heard of his roving fancies supposed he woidd hasten to 
 sell the property, and go down the river to push his for- 
 tunes. But there was never any sign of such an intention 
 on the part of Will. On the contrary, he had the inn set 
 on a better footing, and hired a couple of servants to assist 
 him in carrying it on; and there he settled down, a kind, 
 talkative, inscrutable young man, six feet three in his 
 stockings, with an iron constitution and a friendly voice. 
 He soon began to take rank in the district as a bit of an 
 oddity: it was not much to be wondered at from the first, 
 for he was always full of notions, and kept calling the 
 plainest common-sense in question; but what most raised 
 the report upon him was the odd circumstance of his 
 courtship with the parson's Marjory. 
 
 The parson's Marjory was a lass about nineteen, when 
 Will would be about thirty; well enough looking, and 
 much better educated than any other girl in that part of 
 the country, as became her parentage. She held her 
 head very high, and had already refused several offers of 
 marriage with a grand air, which had got her hard names 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 251 
 
 among the neighbours. For all that she was a good girl, 
 and one that would have made any man well contented. 
 
 Will had never seen much of her; for although the 
 church and parsonage were only two miles from his own 
 door, he was never known to go there but on Sundays, 
 It chanced, however, that the parsonage fell into disre- 
 pair, and had to be dismantled; and the parson and his 
 daughter took lodgings for a month or so, on very much 
 reduced terms, at Will's inn. Now, what with the inn, 
 and the mill, and the old miller's savings, our friend was 
 a man of substance; and besides that, he had a name for 
 good temper and shrewdness, which make a capital por- 
 tion in marriage; and so it was currently gossiped, among 
 their ill-wishers, that the parson and his daughter had 
 not chosen their temporary lodging with their eyes shut. 
 Will was about the last man in the world to be cajoled or 
 frightened into marriage. You had only to look into his 
 eyes, limpid and still like pools of water, and yet with a 
 sort of clear light that seemed to come from within, and 
 you would imderstand at once that here was one who 
 knew his own mind, and would stand to it immovably. 
 Marjory herself was no weakling by her looks, with strong 
 steady eyes and a resolute and quiet bearing. It might 
 be a question whether she was not Will's match in stead- 
 fastness, after all, or which of them would rule the roast 
 in marriage. But Marjory had never given it a thought, 
 and accompanied her father with the most unshaken 
 innocence and unconcern. 
 
 The season was still so early that Will's customers were 
 few and far between; but the lilacs were already flowermg, 
 and the weather was so mild that the party took dinner 
 under the trellis, with the noise of the river in their ears 
 and the woods ringing about them with the songs of birds. 
 Will soon began to take a particular pleasure in these din- 
 ners. The parson was rather a dull companion, with a 
 
252 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 habit of dozing at table; but nothing rude or cruel ever 
 fell from his lips. And as for the parson's daughter, she 
 suited her surroundings with the best grace imaginable; 
 and whatever she said seemed so pat and pretty that Will 
 conceived a great idea of her talents. He could see her 
 face, as she leaned forward, against a backgroimd of 
 rising pine woods; her eyes shone peaceably; the light lay 
 around her hair like a kerchief; something that was hardly 
 a smile rippled her pale cheeks, and Will could not con- 
 tain himself from gazing on her in an agreeable dismay. 
 She looked, even in her quietest moments, so complete in 
 herself, and so quick with life down to her finger tips and 
 the very skirts of her dress, that the remainder of created 
 things became no more than a blot by comparison; and if 
 Will glanced away from her to her surroimdings, the trees 
 looked inanimate and senseless, the clouds hung in 
 heaven like dead things, and even the mountain tops were 
 disenchanted. The whole valley could not compare in 
 looks with this one girl. 
 
 Will was always observant in the society of his fellow- 
 creatures; but his observation became almost painfully 
 eager in the case of Marjory. He listened to all she ut- 
 tered, and read her eyes, at the same time, for the im- 
 spoken commentary. Many kind, simple, and sincere 
 speeches found an echo in his heart. He became con- 
 scious of a soul beautifully poised upon itself, nothing 
 doubting, nothing desiring, clothed in peace. It was not 
 possible to separate her thoughts from her appearance. 
 The turn of her wrist, the still sound of her voice, the light 
 in her eyes, the lines of her body, fell in tune with her 
 grave and gentle words, like the accompaniment that sus- 
 tains and harmonises the voice of the singer. Her influ- 
 ence was one thing, not to be divided or discussed, only 
 to be felt with gratitude and joy. To Will, her presence 
 recalled something of his chUdbood, and the thought of 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 253 
 
 her took its place in his mind beside that of dawn, of 
 running water, and of the earliest violets and lilacs. It 
 is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the 
 first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken 
 in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic 
 strangeness which othenvise passes out of Hfe with the 
 coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what re- 
 news a man's character from the fountain upwards. 
 
 One day after dinner Will took a stroll among the firs; 
 a grave beatitude possessed him from top to toe, and he 
 kept smiling to himself and the landscape as he went. 
 The river ran between the stepping-stones with a pretty 
 wimple; a bird sang loudly in the wood; the hill-tops 
 looked immeasurably high, and as he glanced at them 
 from time to time seemed to contemplate his movements 
 with a beneficent but awful curiosity. His way took him 
 to the eminence which overlooked the plain; and there he 
 sat down upon a stone, and fell into deep and pleasant 
 thought. The plain lay abroad with its cities and silver 
 river; everything was asleep, except a great eddy of birds 
 which kept rising and falling and going round and round 
 in the blue air. He repeated Marjory's name aloud, and 
 the sound of it gratified his ear. He shut his eyes, and 
 her image sprang up before him, quietly luminous and 
 attended with good thoughts. The river might run for 
 ever; the birds fly higher and higher till they touched the 
 stars. He saw it was empty bustle after all; for here, 
 without stirring a foot, waiting patiently in his own nar- 
 row valley, he also had attained the better simlight. , 
 
 The next day Will made a sort of declaration across 
 the dinner-table, while the parson was filling his pipe. 
 
 "Miss Marjory," he said, "I never knew any one I 
 liked so well as you. I am mostly a cold, unkindly sort 
 of man; not from want of heart, but out of strangeness in 
 my way of thinking; and people seem far away from me. 
 
254 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 'Tis as if there were a circle round me, which kept every 
 one out but you; I can hear the others talking and laugh- 
 ing; but you come quite close. Maybe this is disagree- 
 able to you?" he asked. 
 
 Marjory made no answer. 
 
 "Speak up, girl," said the parson. 
 
 "Nay, now," returned Will, "I wouldn't press her, 
 parson. I feel tongue-tied myself, who am not used to 
 it; and she 's a woman, and little more than a child, when 
 all is said. But for my part, as far as I can imderstand 
 what people mean by it, I fancy I must be what they call 
 in love. I do not wish to be held as committing myself; 
 for I may be wrong; but that is how I believe things are 
 with me. And if Miss Marjory should feel any otherwise 
 on her part, mayhap she would be so kind as shake her 
 head." 
 
 Marjory was silent, and gave no sign that she had 
 heard. 
 
 "How is that, parson?" asked Will. 
 
 "The girl must speak," replied the parson, laying 
 down his pipe. "Here *s our neighbour who says he 
 loves you, Madge. Do you love him, ay or no?" 
 
 "I think I do," said Marjory faintly. 
 
 "Well, then, that 's all that could be wished I" cried 
 Will heartily. And he took her hand across the table, and 
 held it a moment in both of his with great satisfaction. 
 
 " You must marry," observed the parson, replacing his 
 pipe in his mouth. 
 
 "Is that the right thing to do, think you?" demanded 
 Will. 
 
 " It is indispensable," said the parson. 
 
 " Very well," replied the wooer. 
 
 Two or three days passed away with great delight to 
 Will, although a bystander might scarce have found it 
 out. He continued to take his meals opposite Marjory, 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 255 
 
 and to talk with her and gaze upon her in her father's 
 presence; but he made no attempt to see her alone, nor 
 in any other way changed his conduct towards her from 
 what it had been since the beginning. Perhaps the girl 
 was a little disappointed, and perhaps not unjustly; and 
 yet if it had been enough to be always in the thoughts of 
 another person, and so pervade and alter his whole life, 
 she might have been thoroughly contented. For she was 
 never out of Will's mind for an instant. He sat over the 
 stream, and watched the dust of the eddy, and the poised 
 fish, and straining weeds; he wandered out alone into the 
 purple even, with all the blackbirds piping round him in 
 the wood; he rose early in the morning, and saw the sky 
 turn from grey to gold, and the light leap upon the hill- 
 tops; and all the while he kept wondering if he had never 
 seen such things before, or how it was that they should 
 look so different now. The sound of his own mill-wheel, 
 or of the wind among the trees, confounded and charmed 
 his heart. The most enchanting thoughts presented 
 themselves unbidden in his mind. He was so happy that 
 he could not sleep at night, and so restless that he could 
 hardly sit still out of her company. And yet it seemed as 
 if he avoided her rather than sought her out. 
 
 One day, as he was coming home from a ramble. Will 
 found Marjory in the garden picking flowers, and as he 
 came up with her, slackened his pace and continued walk- 
 ing by her side. 
 
 "You like flowers?" he said. 
 
 " Indeed I love them dearly," she replied. " Do you ? " 
 
 "Why, no," said he, "not so much. They are a very 
 small affair, when all is done. I can fancy people caring 
 for them greatly, but not doing as you are just now." 
 
 "How?" she asked, pausing and looking up at him. 
 
 " Pluckmg them," said he. " They are a deal better off 
 where they are, and look a deal prettier, if you go to that." 
 
256 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 " I wish to have them for my own," she answered, " to 
 carry them near my heart, and keep them in my room. 
 They tempt me when they grow here; they seem to say, 
 'Come and do something with us'; but once I have cut 
 them and put them by, the charm is laid, and I can look 
 at them with quite an easy heart." 
 
 "You wish to possess them," replied Will, "in order 
 to think no more about them. It 's a bit like killing the 
 goose with the golden eggs. It 's a bit like what I wished 
 to do when I was a boy. Because I had a fancy for look- 
 ing out over the plain, I wished to go down there — ^where 
 I couldn't look out over it any longer. Was not that fine 
 reasoning? Dear, dear, if they only thought of it, all the 
 world would do like me; and you would let your flowers 
 alone, just as I stay up here in the mountains." Sud- 
 denly he broke off sharp. "By the Lord!" he cried. 
 And when she asked him what was wrong, he turned tlie 
 question off, and walked away into the house with rather 
 a humorous expression of face. 
 
 He was silent at table; and after the night had fallen 
 and the stars had come out overhead, he walked up and 
 down for hours in the court-yard and garden with an im- 
 even pace. There was still a light in the window of 
 Marjory's room: one little oblong patch of orange in a 
 world of dark blue hills and silver starlight. Will's mind 
 ran a great deal on the window; but his thoughts were not 
 very lover-like. "There she is in her room," he thought, 
 "and there are the stars overhead: — a blessing upon 
 both!" Both were good influences in his life; both 
 soothed and braced him in his profoimd contentment 
 with the world. And what more should he desire with 
 either? The fat young man and his councils were so 
 present to his mind that he threw back his head, and, 
 putting his Siands before his mouth, shouted aloud to the 
 populous li«avens. Whether from the position of his 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 257 
 
 head or the sudden strain of the exertion, he seemed to 
 see a momentary shock among the stars, and a diffusion 
 of frosty light pass from one to another along the sky. 
 At the same instant, a comer of the blind was lifted up 
 and lowered again at once. He laughed a loud ho-hol 
 " One and anotherl" thought Will. " The stars tremble, 
 and the blind goes up. Why, before Heaven, what a 
 great magician I must be! Now, if I were only a fool, 
 should not I be in a pretty way?" And he went off to 
 bed, chuckling to himself: "If I were only a fool!" 
 
 The next morning, pretty early, he saw her once more 
 in the garden, and sought her out. 
 
 " I have been thinking about getting married," he be- 
 gan abruptly; "and after having turned it all over, I have 
 made up my mind it 's not worth while." 
 
 She turned upon him for a single moment; but his 
 radiant, kindly appearance would, under the circum- 
 stances, have disconcerted an angel, and she looked down 
 again upon the ground in silence. He could see her 
 tremble. 
 
 "I hope you don't mind," he went on, a little taken 
 aback. "You ought not. I have turned it all over, and 
 upon my soul there's nothing in it. We should never be 
 one whit nearer than we are just now, and, if I am a wise 
 man, nothing like so happy." 
 
 "It is unnecessary to go round about with me," she 
 said. "I very well remember that you refused to com- 
 mit yourself; and now that I see you were mistaken, and 
 in reality have never cared for me, I can only feel sad that 
 I have been so far misled." 
 
 "I ask your pardon," said Will stoutly; "you do not 
 understand my meaning. As to whether I have ever 
 loved you or not, I must leave that to others. But for 
 one thing, my feeling is not changed; and for another, 
 vou may make it your boast that you have made my 
 
258 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 whole life and character something different from what 
 they were. I mean what I say; no less. I do not think 
 getting married is worth while. I would rather you 
 went on living with your father, so that I could walk over 
 and see you once, or maybe twice a week, as people go 
 to church, and then we should both be all the happier be- 
 tween whiles. That 's my notion. But I '11 marry you 
 if you will," he added. 
 
 "Do you know that you are insulting me?" she broke 
 out. 
 
 "Not I, Marjory," said he; "if there is anything in 
 a clear conscience, not I. I offer all my heart's best 
 affections; you can take it or want it, though I suspect 
 it 's beyond either your power or mine to change what 
 has once been done, and set me fancy-free. I '11 marry 
 you, if you like; but I tell you again and again, it 's not 
 worth while, and we had best stay friends. Though I 
 am a quiet man I have noticed a heap of things in my 
 life. Trust in me, and take things as I propose; or, if 
 you don't like that, say the word, and I '11 marry you out 
 of hand." 
 
 There was a considerable pause, and Will, who began 
 to feel uneasy, began to grow angry in consequence. 
 
 "It seems you are too proud to say your mind," he 
 said. " Believe me, that 's a pity. A clean shrift makes 
 simple living. Can a man be more downright or hon- 
 ourable to a woman than I have been ? I have said my 
 say, and given you your choice. Do you want me to 
 marry you? or will you take my friendship, as I think 
 best ? or have you had enough of me for good ? Speak 
 out for the dear God's sake I You know your father 
 told you a girl should speak her mind in these affairs.'* 
 
 She seemed to recover herself at that, turned without 
 a word, walked rapidly through the garden, and disap' 
 peared into the house, leaving Will in some confusio» 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 259 
 
 as to the result. He walked up and down the garden, 
 whistling softly to himself. Sometimes he stopped and 
 contemplated the sky and hill-tops; sometimes he went 
 down to the tail of the weir and sat there, looking fool- 
 ishly in the water. All this dubiety and perturbation 
 was so foreign to his nature and the life which he had res- 
 olutely chosen for himself, that he began to regret Mar- 
 jory's arrival. " After all," he thought, " I was as happy 
 as a man need be. I could come down here and watch 
 my fishes all day long if I wanted: I was as settled and 
 contented as my old mill." 
 
 Marjory came down to dinner, looking very trim and 
 quiet; and no sooner were all three at table than she made 
 her father a speech, with her eyes fixed upon her plate, 
 but showing no other sign of embarrassment or distress, 
 
 "Father," she began, "Mr, Will and I have been talk- 
 ing things over. We see that we have each made a mis- 
 take about our feelings, and he has agreed, at my request, 
 to give up all idea of marriage, and be no more than my 
 very good friend, as in the past. You see, there is no 
 shadow of a quarrel, and indeed I hope we shall see a 
 great deal of him in the future, for his visits will always 
 be welcome in our house. Of course, father, you will 
 know best, but perhaps we should do better to leave Mr. 
 Will's house for the present. I believe, after what has 
 passed, we should hardly be agreeable inmates for some 
 days." 
 
 Will, who had commanded himself with diflBculty from 
 the first, broke out upon this into an inarticulate noise, 
 and raised one hand with an appearance of real dismay, 
 as if he were about to interfere and contradict. But she 
 checked him at once, looking up at him with a swift 
 glance and an angry flush upon her cheek. 
 
 "You will perhaps have the good grace," she said, 
 " to let me explain these matters for myself." 
 
260 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Will was put entirely out of countenance by her ex- 
 pression and the ring of her voice. He held his peace, 
 concluding that there were some things about this girl 
 beyond his comprehension, in which he was exactly 
 right. 
 
 The poor parson was quite crestfallen. He tried to 
 prove that this was no more than a true lovers' tiff, which 
 would pass off before night; and when he was dislodged 
 from that position, he went on to argue that where there 
 was no quarrel there could be no call for a separation; 
 for the good man liked both his entertainment and his 
 host. It was curious to see how the girl managed them, 
 saying little all the time, and that very quietly, and yet 
 twisting them round her finger and insensibly leading 
 them wherever she would by feminine tact and general- 
 ship. It scarcely seemed to have been her doing — it 
 seemed as if things had merely so fallen out — that she 
 and her father took their departure that same afternoon 
 in a farm-cart, and went farther down the valley, to wait, 
 until their own house was ready for them, in another 
 hamlet. But Will had been observing closely, and was 
 well aware of her dexterity and resolution. When he 
 found himself alone he had a great many curious matters 
 to turn over in his mind. He was very sad and solitary, 
 to begin with. All the interest had gone out of his life; 
 and he might look up at the stars as long as he pleased, 
 he somehow failed to find support or consolation. And 
 then he was in such a turmoil of spirit about Marjory. 
 He had been puzzled and irritated at her behaviour, and 
 yet he could not keep himself from admiring it. He 
 thought he recognised a fine perverse angel in that still 
 soul which he had never hitherto suspected; and though 
 he saw it was an influence that would fit but ill with 
 his own life of artificial calm, he could not keep himself 
 from ardently desiring to possess it. Like a man who 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 261 
 
 has lived among shadows and now meets the sun, he 
 was both pained and delighted. 
 
 As the days went forward he passed from one extreme 
 to another; now pluming himself on the strength of his 
 determination, now despising his timid and silly caution. 
 The former was, perhaps, the true thought of his heart, 
 and represented the regular tenor of the man's reflections; 
 but the latter burst forth from time to time with an unruly 
 violence, and then he would forget all consideration, and 
 go up and down his house and garden or walk among the 
 fir woods like one who is beside himself with remorse. 
 To equable, steady-minded Will this state of matters was 
 intolerable; and he determined, at whatever cost, to bring 
 it to an end. So, one warm summer afternoon he put on 
 his best clothes, took a thorn switch ia his hand, and set 
 out down the valley by the river. As soon as he had 
 taken his determination, he had regained at a bound his 
 customary peace of heart, and he enjoyed the bright 
 weather and the variety of the scene without any admix- 
 ture of alarm or impleasant eagerness. It was nearly the 
 same to him how the matter turned out. If she accepted 
 him, he would have to marry her this tinie, which perhaps 
 was all for the best. If she refused him, he would have 
 done his utmost, and might follow his own way in the 
 future with an untroubled conscience. He hoped, on 
 the whole, she would refuse him; and then, again, as 
 he saw the brown roof which sheltered her, peeping 
 through some willows at an angle of the stream, he was 
 half inclined to reverse the wish, and more than half 
 ashamed of himself for this infirmity of purpose. 
 
 Marjory seemed glad to*see him, and gave him her 
 hand without afiFectation or delay. 
 
 "I have been thinking about this marriage," he began. ' 
 
 "So have I," she answered. "And I respect you 
 more and more for a very wise man. You understood 
 
262 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 me better than I understood myself; and I am now 
 quite certain that things are all for the best as they are." 
 
 "At the same time — " ventured Will. 
 
 "You must be tired," she interrapted. 'Take a seat 
 and let me fetch you a glass of wine. The afternoon is 
 so warm; and I wish you not to be displeased with your 
 visit. You must come quite often; once a week, if you 
 can spare the time; I am always so glad to see my 
 friends." 
 
 "Oh, very well," thought Will to himself. "It ap- 
 pears I was right after all." And he paid a very agree- 
 able visit, walked home again in capital spirits, and 
 gave himself no further concern about the matter. 
 
 For nearly three years Will and Marjory continued 
 on these terms, seeing each other once or twice a week 
 without any word of love between them; and for ail 
 that time I believe Will was nearly as happy as a man 
 can be. He rather stinted himself the pleasiu-e of see- 
 ing her; and he would often walk half-way over to the 
 parsonage, and then back again, as if to whet his appe- 
 tite. Indeed there was one comer of the road, whence 
 he could see the church-spire wedged into a crevice of 
 the valley between sloping fir woods, with a triangular 
 snatch of plain by way of background, which he greatly 
 affected as a place to sit and moralise in before return- 
 ing homewards; and the peasants got so much into the 
 habit of finding him there in the twilight that they gave 
 it the name of "Will o' the Mill's Comer." 
 
 At the end of the three years Marjory played him a 
 sad trick by suddenly marrying somebody else. Will 
 kept his coimtenance bravely, and merely remarked 
 that, for as little as he knew of women, he had acted very 
 prudently in not marrying her himself three years before. 
 She plainly knew very little of her own mind, and, in 
 spite of a deceptive manner, was as fickle and flighty as 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 263 
 
 the rest of them. He had to congratulate himself on 
 an escape, he said, and would take a higher opinion of 
 his own wisdom in consequence. But at heart, he was 
 reasonably displeased, moped a good deal for a month 
 or two, and fell away in flesh, to the astonishment of his 
 serving-lads. 
 
 It was perhaps a year after this marriage that Will 
 was awakened late one night by the sound of a horse 
 galloping on the road, followed by precipitate knocking 
 at the inn-door. He opened his window and saw a 
 farm servant, mounted and holding a led horse by the 
 bridle, who told him to make what haste he could and 
 go along with him; for Marjory was dying, and had 
 sent urgently to fetch him to her bedside. Will was no 
 horseman, and made so little speed upon the way that 
 the poor yoimg wife was very near her end before he 
 arrived. But they had some minutes' talk in private, 
 and he was present and wept very bitterly while she 
 breathed her last. 
 
 DEATH 
 
 Year after year went away into nothing, with great 
 explosions and outcries in the cities on the plain; red 
 revolt springing up and being suppressed in blood, battle 
 swaying hither and thither, patient astronomers in ob- 
 servatory towers picking out and christening new stars, 
 plays being performed in lighted theatres, people being 
 carried into hospitals on stretchers, and all the usual 
 turmoil and agitation of men's lives in crowded centres. 
 Up in Will's valley only the winds and seasons made an 
 epoch; the fish hung in the swift stream, the birds 
 circled overhead, the pine-tops rustled imdemeath the 
 stars, the tall hills stood over all; and Will went to and 
 fro, minding his wayside inn, imtil the snow began to 
 thicken on his head. His heart was young and vigorous 
 
264 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 and if his pulses kept a sober time, they still beat strong 
 and steady in his wrists. He carried a ruddy stain on 
 either cheek, like a ripe apple; he stooped a little, but 
 his step was still firm; and his sinewy hands were reached 
 out to all men with a friendly pressure. His face was 
 covered with those wrinkles which are got in open air, 
 and which, rightly looked at, are no more than a sort 
 of permanent sun-burning; such wrinkles heighten the 
 stupidity of stupid faces; but to a person like Will, with 
 his clear eyes and smiling mouth, only give another 
 charm by testifying to a simple and easy life. His talk 
 was full of wise sayings. He had a taste for other people; 
 and other people had a taste for him. When the valley 
 was full of tourists in the season, there were merry nights 
 in Will's arbour; and his views, which seemed whimsical 
 to his neighbours, were often enough admired by learned 
 people out of towns and colleges. Indeed, he had a 
 very noble old age, and grew daily better known; so 
 that his fame was heard of in the cities of the plain; and 
 young men who had been summer travellers spoke to- 
 gether in cafis of Will o* the Mill and his rough phil- 
 osophy. Many and many an invitation, you may be 
 sure, he had; but nothing could tempt him from his 
 upland valley. He would shake his head and smile 
 over his tobacco-pipe with a deal of meaning. "You 
 come too late," he would answer. "I am a dead man 
 now: I have lived and died already. Fifty years ago 
 you would have brought my heart into my mouth; and 
 now you do not even tempt me. But that is the object 
 of long living, that man should cease to care about life." 
 And again: "There is only one difference between a 
 long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the 
 sweets come last." Or once more: "When I was a 
 boy, I was a bit puzzled, and hardly knew whether it 
 was myself or the world that was curious and worth 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 265 
 
 looking into. Now, I know it is myself, and sdck to 
 that." 
 
 He never showed any symptoms of frailty, but kept 
 stalwart and firm to the last; but they say he grew less 
 talkative towards the end, and woijld listen to other peo- 
 ple by the hour in an amused and sympathetic silence. 
 Only, when he did speak, it was more to the poirit and 
 more charged with old experience. He drank a botde 
 of wine gladly; above all, at sunset on the hill-top or 
 quite late at night under the stars in the arbour. The 
 sight of something attractive and unattainable seasoned 
 his enjoyment, he would say; and he professed he had 
 lived long enough to admire a candle all the more when 
 he could compare it with a planet. 
 
 One night, in his seventy-second year, he awoke in 
 bed, in such uneasiness of body and mind that he arose 
 and dressed himself and went out to meditate in the 
 arbour. It was pitch dark, without a star; the river 
 was swollen, and the wet woods and meadows loaded 
 the air with perfume. It had thundered diu-ing the day, 
 and it promised more thimder for the morrow. A 
 murky, stifling night for a man of seventy-two! Whether 
 it was the weather or the wakefulness, or some little 
 touch of fever in his old limbs. Will's mind was besieged 
 by tumultuous and crying memories. His boyhood, the 
 night with the fat young man, the death of his adopted 
 parents, the summer days with Marjory, and many of 
 those small circumstances, which seem nothing to an- 
 other, and are yet the very gist of a man's own life to 
 himself — things seen, words heard, looks misconstrued 
 — ^arose from their forgotten comers and usurped hi? 
 attention. The dead themselves were with him, not 
 merely taking part in this thin show of memory that de- 
 filed before his brain, but revisiting his bodily senses as 
 they do in profound and vivid dreams. The fat young 
 
266 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 man leaned his elbows on the table opposite; Marjory 
 came and went with an apronful of flowers between the 
 garden and the arbour; he could hear the old parson 
 knocking out his pipe or blowing his resonant nose. 
 The tide of his consciousness ebbed and flowed; he was 
 sometimes half asleep and drowned in his recollections 
 of the past; and sometimes he was broad awake, won- 
 dering at himself. But about the middle of the night 
 he was startled by the voice of the dead miller calling 
 to him out of the house as he used to do on the arrival 
 of custom. The hallucination was so perfect that Will 
 sprang from his seat and stood listening for the sum- 
 mons to be repeated; and as he listened he became con- 
 scious of another noise besides the brawling of the river 
 and the ringing in his feverish ears. It was like the stir 
 of the horses and the creaking of harness, as though a 
 carriage with an impatient team had been brought up 
 upon the road before the court-yard gate. At such an 
 hour, upon this rough and dangerous pass, the supposi- 
 tion was no better than absurd; and Will dismissed it 
 from his mind, and resumed his seat upon the arbour 
 chair; and sleep closed over him again like running 
 water. He was once again awakened by the dead 
 miller's call, thinmer and more spectral than before; 
 and once again he heard the noise of an equipage upon 
 the road. And so thrice and four times, the same 
 dream, or the same fancy, presented itself to his senses: 
 until at length, smiling to himself as when one himiours 
 a nervous child, he proceeded towards the gate to set his 
 uncertainty at rest. 
 
 From the arboiu- to the gate was no great distance, 
 and yet it took Will some time; it seemed as if the dead 
 thickened around him in the court, and crossed his path 
 at every step. For, first, he was suddenly surprised by 
 an overpowering sweetness of heliotropes; it was as if 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 26? 
 
 his garden had been planted with this flower from end 
 to end, and the hot, damp night had drawn forth all 
 their perfumes in a breath. Now the heliotrope had 
 been Marjory's favourite flower, and since her death not 
 one of them had ever been planted in Will's ground. 
 
 "I must be gomg crazy," he thought. "Poor Mar- 
 jory and her heliotropes 1" 
 
 And with that he raised his eyes towards the window 
 that had once been hers. If he had been bewildered 
 before, he was now almost terrified; for there was a 
 light in the room; the window was an orange oblong as 
 of yore; and the comer of the blind was lifted and let 
 fall as on the night when he stood and shouted to the 
 stars in his perplexity. The illusion only endured an 
 instant; but it left him somewhat unmanned, rubbing 
 his eyes and staring at the outline of the house and the 
 black night behind it. While he thus stood, and it 
 seemed as if he must have stood there quite a long time, 
 there came a renewal of the noises on the road: and he 
 turned in time to meet a stranger, who was advancing 
 to meet him across the court. There was something 
 like the outline of a great carriage discernible on the road 
 behind the stranger, and, above that, a few black pine- 
 tops, like so many plumes. 
 
 ''Master Will?" asked the new-comer, in brief mUi- 
 «iry fashion. 
 
 "That same, sir," answered Will. "Can I do any- 
 thing to serve you?" 
 
 "I have heard you much spoken of. Master Will," 
 returned the other; "much spoken of, and well. And 
 though I have both hands full of business, I wish to 
 drink a bottle of wine with you in your arbour. Before 
 I go, I shall introduce myself." 
 
 Will led the way to the trellis, and got a lamp lighted 
 and a bottle uncorked. He was not altogether unused 
 
268 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 to such complimentary interviews, and hoped little 
 enough from this one, being schooled by many disap- 
 pointments. A sort of cloud had settled on his wits 
 and prevented him from remembering the strangeness 
 of the hour. He moved like a person in his sleep; and 
 it seemed as if the lamp caught fire and the bottle came 
 uncorked with the facility of thought. Still, he had 
 some curiosity about the appearance of his visitor, and 
 tried in vain to turn the light into his face; either he 
 handled the lamp clumsily, or there was a dimness over 
 his eyes; but he could make out little more than a 
 shadow at table with him. He stared and stared at this 
 shadow, as he wiped out the glasses, and began to feel 
 cold and strange about the heart. The silence weighed 
 upon him, for he could hear nothing now, not even the 
 river, but the drumming of his own arteries in his ears. 
 
 " Here 's to you," said the stranger roughly. 
 
 "Here is my service, sir," replied Will, sipping his 
 wine, which somehow tasted oddly. 
 
 "I understand you are a very positive fellow," pur- 
 sued the stranger. 
 
 Will made answer with a smile of some satisfaction 
 and a little nod. 
 
 "So am I," continued the other; "and it is the de- 
 light of my heart to tramp on people's corns. I will 
 have nobody positive but myself; not one. I have 
 I crossed the whims, in my time, of kings and generals 
 and great artists. And what would you say," he went 
 on, "if I had come up here on purpose to cross yours?" 
 
 Will had it on his tongue to make a sharp rejoinder; 
 but the politeness of an old innkeeper prevailed; and he 
 held his peace and made answer with a civil gesture of 
 the hand. 
 
 "I have," said the stranger. "And if I did not hold 
 you in a particular esteem, I should make no words 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 5s69 
 
 about the matter. It appears you pride yourself on 
 staying where you are. You mean to stick by yoiu" inn. 
 Now I mean you shall come for a turn with me in my 
 barouche; and before this bottle's empty, so you shall." 
 
 "That would be an odd thing, to be sure," replied 
 Will, with a chuckle. "Why, sir, I have grown here 
 like an old oak tree; the Devil himself could hardly root 
 me up; and for all I perceive you are a very entertaining 
 old gentleman, I would wager you another bottle you 
 lose your pains with me." 
 
 The dimness of Will's eyesight had been increasing 
 all this while; but he was somehow conscious of a sharp 
 and chilling scrutiny which irritated and yet overmas- 
 tered him. 
 
 "You need not think," he broke out suddenly, in an 
 explosive, febrile manner that startled and alarmed him- 
 self, " that I am a stay-at-home, because I fear anything 
 under God. God knows I am tired enough of it all; 
 and when the time comes for a longer journey than ever 
 you dream of, I reckon I shall find myself prepared." j / 
 
 The stranger emptied his glass and pushed it awayj/i 
 from him. He looked down for a little, and then, lean-'^ 
 ing over the table, tapped Will three times upon tha' 
 forearm with a single fiager. "The time has comel" he 
 said solemnly. i 
 
 An ugly thrill spread from the spot he touched. The 
 tones of his voice were dull and startling, and echoed 
 strangely in Will's heart. 
 
 "I beg your pardon," he said, with some discom- 
 posure. "What do you mean?" 
 
 "Look at me, and you will find your eyesight swim. 
 Raise your hand; it is dead-heavy. This is your last 
 bottle of wine. Master Will, and your last night upon 
 the earth." 
 
 ''You are a doctor?" quavered Will. 
 
270 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 "The best that ever was," replied the other; "for I 
 cure both mind and body with the same prescription. I 
 take away all pain and I forgive all sins; and where my 
 patients have gone wrong in life, I smooth out all com- 
 plications and set them free again upon their feet." 
 
 " I have no need of you," said Will. 
 
 "A time comes for all men, Master Will," replied the 
 doctor, "when the helm is taken out of their hands. 
 For you, because you were prudent and quiet, it has 
 been long of coming, and you have had long to disci- 
 pline yourself for its reception. You have seen what is 
 to be seen about your mill; you have sat close all your 
 days like a hare in its form; but now that is at an end; 
 and," added the doctor, getting on his feet, "you must 
 arise and come with me." 
 
 "You are a strange physician," said Will, looking 
 steadfastly upon his guest. 
 
 "I am a natural law," he replied, "and people call 
 me Death." 
 
 "Why did you not tell me so at first?" cried Will. 
 "I have been waiting for you these many years. Give 
 me your hand, and welcome." 
 
 " Lean upon my arm," said the stranger, " for already 
 your strength abates. Lean on me heavily as you need; 
 for though I am old, I am very strong. It is but three 
 steps to my carriage, and there all yoiur trouble ends. 
 Why, Will," he added, "I have been yearning for you 
 as if you were my own son; and of all tiie men that ever 
 I came for in my long days, I have come for you most 
 gladly. I am caustic, and sometimes offend people at 
 first sight; but I am a good friend at heart to such as 
 you." 
 
 "Since Marjory was taken," returned Will, "I de- 
 clare before God you were the only friend I had to look 
 for." 
 
WILL O' THE MILL 271 
 
 So the pair went arm in arm across the courtryard. 
 
 One of the servants awoke about this time and heard 
 the noise of horses pawing before he dropped asleep 
 again; all down the valley that night there was a rush- 
 ing as of a smooth and steady wind descending towards 
 the plain; and when the world rose next morning, sure 
 enough Will o' the Mill had gone at last upon his travels. 
 
THE SIRE DE MALIETROITS DOOR* 
 
 Denis de Beatjueu was not yet two-and-twenfy, 
 but he counted himself a grown man, and a very accom- 
 plished cavalier into the bargain. Lads were early 
 formed in that rough, warfaring epoch; and when one 
 has been in a pitched battle and a dozen raids, has killed 
 one's man in an honourable fashion, and knows a thing 
 or two of strategy and mankind, a certain swagger in the 
 gait is surely to be pardoned. He had put up his horse 
 with due care, and supped with due deliberation; and 
 then, in a very agreeable frame of mind, went out to 
 pay a visit in the grey of the evening. It was not a very 
 wise proceeding on the young man's part. He would 
 have done better to remain beside the fire or go decently 
 to bed. For the town was full of the troops of Burgundy 
 and England under a mixed command; and though 
 Denis was there on safe-conduct, his safe-conduct was 
 like to serve him, little on a chance encounter. 
 
 ' " Invented in France, first told over the fire one evemng in Paris, 
 and iiltimately written at Penzance." It was published in Temple 
 I Bar, in January, 1878, and reprinted in the volume entitled New 
 I Ar<]Man Niphts, 1882. The scene is Chateau Landon, a town south- 
 east of Paris and not far from the borders of the old duchy of Bur- 
 gundy. The time is September, 1429, presumably a little after 
 Charles VII and Jeanne d'Arc had made their ill-fated attack upon 
 Paris and had marched southward through this very district. The 
 Enghsh troops of the Duke of Bedford, with the BvTCundians, their 
 allies, were following, retaking the towns which the French had de- 
 serted. Chateau Landon was in the line of march, and Denis de 
 Beaulieu must have come into it, with his safe-conduct, from the 
 French king's forces. It is to be noted that in 1875, with Sir Walter 
 Simpson, who afterwards accompanied him upon the Inland Voyage, 
 Stevenson walked up the Valley of the Loing, and probably passed 
 through Chateau Landon. 
 
 272 
 
THE SIRE DE MALETROIT'S DOOR 273 
 
 It was September, 1429; the weather had fallen sharp; 
 a flighty piping wind, laden with showers, beat about 
 the township; and the dead leaves ran riot along the 
 streets. Here and there a window was already lighted 
 up; and the noise of men-at-arms making merry over 
 supper within, came forth in fits and was swallowed up 
 and carried away by the wind. The night fell swiftly; 
 the flag of England, fluttering on the spire-top, grew 
 ever fainter and fainter against the flying clouds — ^a 
 black speck like a swallow in the tumultuous, leaden 
 chaos of the sky. As the night fell the wind rose, and 
 began to hoot under archways and roar amid the tree- 
 tops in the valley below the town. 
 
 Denis de Beaulieu walked fast and was soon knocking 
 at his friend's door; but though he promised himself to 
 stay only a little while and make an early return, his wel- 
 come was so pleasant, and he found so much to delay 
 him, that it was already long past midnight before he 
 said good-bye upon the threshold. The wind had fallen 
 again in the meanwhile; the night was as black as the 
 grave; not a star, nor a glimmer of moonshine, slipped 
 through the canopy of cloud- Denis was ill-acquainted 
 with the intricate lanes of Chateau Landon; even by 
 daylight he had found some trouble in picking his way; 
 and in this absolute darkness he soon lost it altogether. 
 He was certain of one thing only— to keep mounting 
 the hill; for his friend's house lay at the lower end, or 
 tail, of Chateau Landon, while the inp was up at the 
 head, xmder the great church spire. With this clue to go 
 upon he stumbled and groped forward, now breathing 
 more freely in open places where there was a gpod slice 
 of sky overhead, now feeling along the wall in stifling 
 closes. It is an eerie and mysterious position to be thus 
 submerged in opaque blackness in an almost unknown 
 town. The silence is terrifying in its possibilities. Th« 
 
274 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 touch of cold window bars to the exploring hand starfles 
 the man like the touch of a toad; the inequalities of the 
 pavement shake his heart into his mouth; a piece of 
 denser darkness threatens an ambuscade or a chasm in 
 the pathway; and where the air is brighter, the houses 
 put on strange and bewildering appearances, as if to 
 lead him farther from his way. For Denis, who had to 
 regain his inn without attracting notice, there was real 
 danger as well as mere discomfort in the walk; and he 
 went warily and boldly at once, and at every comer 
 paused to make an observation. 
 
 He had been for some time threading a lane so narrow 
 that he could touch a wall with either hand when it be- 
 gan to open out and go sharply downward. Plainly 
 this lay no longer in the direction of his inn; but the 
 hope of a little more light tempted him forward to rec- 
 onnoitre. The lane ended in a terrace with a bartizan 
 wall,' which gave an outlook between high houses, as 
 out of an embrasure, into the valley lying dark and form- 
 less several hundred feet below. Denis looked down, 
 and could discern a few tree-tops waving and a single 
 speck of brightness where the river ran across a weir. 
 The weather was clearing up, and the sky had lightened, 
 so as to show the outline of the heavier clouds and the 
 dark margin of the hills. By the uncertain glimmer, 
 the house on his left hand should be a place of some pre- 
 tensions; it was surmounted by several pinnacles and 
 turret-tops; the roimd stem of a chapel, with a fringe of 
 flying buttresses, projected boldly from the main block; 
 and the door was sheltered under a deep porch carved 
 with figures and overhimg by two long gargoyles. The 
 windows of the chapel gleamed through their intricate 
 tracery with a light as of many tapers, and threw out the 
 buttresses and the peaked roof in a more intense black- 
 * A wall with jutting turrets. 
 
THE SIRE D£ MALETROrPS DOOR 275 
 
 ness against the sky. It was plainly the hotel of some 
 great family of the neighboxirhood; and as it reminded 
 Denis of a town house of his own at Bourges, he stood 
 for some time gazing up at it and maitally gauging the 
 skill of the architects and the consideration of the two 
 families. 
 
 There seemed to be no issue to the terrace but the 
 lane by which he had reached it; he could only retrace 
 his steps, but he had gained some notion of his where- 
 abouts, and hoped by this means to hit the main thor- 
 ough-fare and speedily regain the inn. He was reckon- 
 ing without that chapter of accidents which was to make 
 this night memorable above all others in his career; for 
 he had not gone back above a hundred yards before he 
 saw a light coming to meet him, and heard loud voices 
 speaking together in the echoing narrows of the lane. 
 It was a party of men-at-arms going the night round 
 with torches. Denis assured himself that they had all 
 been making free with the wine-bowl, and were in no 
 mood to be particular about safe-conducts or the nice- 
 ties of chivalrous war. It was as like as not that they 
 woidd kill him like a dog and leave him where he fell. 
 The situation was inspiriting but nervous. Their own 
 torches would conceal him from sight, he reflected; and 
 he hoped that they would drown the noise of his foot- 
 steps with their own empty voices. If he were but fleet 
 and silent, he might evade their notice altogether. 
 
 Unfortunately, as he turned to beat a retreat, his foot 
 rolled upon a pebble; he fell against the wall with an 
 ejaculation, and his sword rang loudly on the stones. 
 Two or three voices demanded who went there — ^some 
 in French, some in English; but Denis made no reply, 
 and ran the faster down the lane. Once upon the ter- 
 race, he paused to look back. They still kept calling 
 after him, and just then began to double the pace in 
 
276 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 pursuit, with a considerable clank of armour, and great 
 tossing of the torchlight to and fro in the narrow jaws 
 of the passage. 
 
 Denis cast a look around and darted into the porch. 
 There he might escape observation, or — if that were 
 too much to expect — ^was in a capital posture whether 
 for parley or defence. So thinking, he drew his sword 
 and tried to set his back against the door. To his 
 surprise, it yielded behind his weight; and though he 
 turned in a n:M)ment, continued to swing back on oiled 
 and noiseless hinges, imtil it stood wide open on a black 
 interior. When things fall out opportunely for the per- 
 son concerned, he is not apt to be critical about the how 
 or why, his own immediate personal convenience seem- 
 ing a sufficient reason for the strangest oddities and revo- 
 lutions in our sublunary things; and so Denis, without 
 a moment's hesitation, stepped within and partly closed 
 the door behind him to conceal his place of refuge. 
 Nothing was further from his thoughts than to close it 
 altogether; -but for some inexplicable reason — ^perhaps 
 by a spring or a weight — the ponderous mass of oak 
 whipped itself out of his fingers and clanked to, with a 
 formidable rumble and a noise like the falling of an 
 automatic bar. 
 
 The round, at that very moment, debouched upon the 
 terrace and proceeded to summon him with shouts and 
 curses. He heard them ferreting in the dark corners; 
 the stock of a lance even rattled along the outer surface 
 of the door behind which he stood; but these gentlemen 
 were in too high a humour to be long delayed, and soon 
 made off down a corkscrew pathway which had escaped 
 Denis's observation, and passed out of sight and hearing 
 along the battlements of the town. 
 
 Denis breathed again. He gave them a few minutes* 
 grace for fear of accidents, and then groped about for 
 
THE SIRE DE MALfiTROITS DOOR 277 
 
 some means of opening the door and slipping forth again. 
 The inner surface was quite smooth, not a handle, not 
 a moulding, not a projection of any sort. He got his 
 finger-nails round the edges and pulled, but the mass 
 was immovable. He shook it, it was as firm as a rock. 
 Denis de Beaulieu frowned and gave vent to a little 
 noiseless whistle. What ailed the door? he wondered. 
 Why was it open ? How came it to shut so easily and 
 so effectually after him ? There was something obscure 
 and underhand about all this, that was little to the 
 yoimg man's fancy. It looked like a snare; and yet 
 who could suppose a snare in such a quiet by-street and / 
 in a house of so prosperous and even noble an exterior? 
 And yet — snare or no snare, intentionally or uninten- 
 tionally — here he was, prettily trapped; and for the 
 life of him he could see no way out of it again. The 
 darkness began to weigh upon him. He gave ear; all 
 was silence without» but within and close by he seemed 
 to catch a faint sighing, a faint sobbing rustle, a little 
 stealthy creak — as though many persons were at his 
 side, holding themselves quite still, and governing even 
 their respiration with the extreme of slyness. The idea 
 went to his vitals with a shock, and he faced about 
 suddenly as if to defend his life. Then, for the first 
 time, he became aware of a light about the level of his 
 eyes and at some distance in the interior of the house — a 
 vertical thread of light, widening towards the bottom, 
 such as might escape between two wings of arras over a 
 doorway. To see anything was a relief to Denis; it 
 was like a piece of solid ground to a man labouring in a 
 morass; his mind seized upon it with avidity; and he 
 stood staring at it and trying to piece together some 
 logical conception of his surroundings. Plainly there 
 was a flight of steps ascending from his own level to 
 that of this illuminated doorway; and indeed he thought 
 
278 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 he could make out another thread of light, as fine as a 
 needle, and as faint as phosphorescence, which might 
 very well be reflected along the polished wood of a 
 handrail. Since he had begun to suspect that he was 
 not alone, his heart had continued to beat with smother- 
 ing violence, and an intolerable desire for action of any 
 sort had possessed itself of his spirit. He was in deadly 
 peril, he believed. What could be more natural than to 
 mount the staircase, lift the curtain, and confront his 
 difficulty at once? At least he would be dealing with 
 something tangible; at least he would be no longer in 
 the dark. He stepped slowly forward with outstretched 
 hands, imtil his foot struck the bottom step; then he 
 rapidly scaled the stairs, stood for a moment to compose 
 his expression, lifted the arras, and went in. 
 
 He found himself in a large apartment of polished 
 stone. There were three doors; one on each of three 
 sides; all similarly curtained with tdpestry. The fourth 
 side was occupied by two large windows and a great 
 stone chimney-piece, carved with the arms of the Mal6- 
 troits. Denis recognised the bearings, and'was gratified 
 to find himself in such good hands. The room was 
 strongly illuminated; but it contained little furniture ex- 
 cept a heavy table and a chair or two, the hearth was 
 innocent of fire, and the pavement was but sparsely 
 strewn with rushes clearly many days old. 
 
 On a high chair beside the chimney, and directly fac- 
 ing Denis as he entered, sat a little old gentleman in a 
 fur tippet. He sat with his legs crossed and his hands 
 folded, and a cup of spiced wine stood by his elbow on 
 a bracket on the wall. His coimtenance had a strongly 
 masculine cast; not properly human, but such as we see 
 in the bull, the goat, or the domestic boar; something 
 equivocal and wheedling, something greedy, brutal, and 
 dangerous. The upper lip was inordinately full, as 
 
It I 
 
 THE SIRE DE MAL^TROITS DOOR 279 
 
 though swollen by a blow or a toothache; and the smile, 
 the peaked eyebrows, and the small, strong eyes were 
 quaintly and almost comically evil in expression. Beau- 
 tiful white hair hung straight all round his head, like a 
 saint's, and fell in a single curl upon the tippet. His 
 beard and moustache were the pink of venerable sweet- 
 ness. Age, probably in consequence of inordinate pre- 
 cautions, had left no mark upon his hands; and the 
 Mal^troit hand was famous. It would be difficult to 
 imagine anything at once so fleshy and so delicate in 
 design; t he taper, sensual fingers were like those of one 
 of Leonardo's ' women; the fork of the thumb made a 
 dimpled protuberance when closed; the nails were per- 
 fectly shaped, and of a dead, surprising whiteness 
 rendered his aspect tenfold more redoubtable, that a 
 man with hands like these should keep them devoutly 
 folded like a virgin martyr — that a man with so intent 
 and startling an expression of face should sit patiently 
 on his seat and contemplate people with an unwinking 
 stare, like a god, or a god's statue. His quiescence 
 seemed ironical and treacherous, it fitted so poorly with 
 his looks. 
 
 Such was Alain, Sire de Mal^troit. 
 
 Denis and he looked silently at each other for a second 
 or two. 
 
 "Pray step in," said the Sire de Mal^troit. "I have 
 been expecting you all the evening." 
 
 He had not risen, but he accompanied his words with 
 a smile and a slight but courteous inclination of the 
 head. Partly from the smile, partly from the strange 
 musical murmur with which the Sire prefaced his obser- 
 vation, Denis felt a strong shudder of disgust^go through 
 his marrow. And what with disgust and honest con- 
 
 • Leonardo da Vinci, famous Italian painter of the time of the 
 Renaissance. 
 
280 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 fusion of mind, he could scarcely get words together in 
 reply. 
 
 " I fear," he said, " that this is a double accident. I 
 am not the person you suppose me. It seems you were 
 looking for a visit; but for my part, nothing was further 
 from my thoughts — ^nothing could be more contrary to 
 my wishes — than this intrusion." 
 
 "Well, well," replied the old gentleman indulgently, 
 "here you are, which is the main point. Seat yourself, 
 my friend, and put yourself entirely at your ease. We 
 shall arrange our litde affairs presently." 
 
 Denis perceived that the matter was still complicated 
 with some misconception, and he hastened to continue 
 his explanations. 
 
 "Your door . . ." he began. 
 
 " About my door ?" asked the other, raising his peaked 
 eyebrows. "A little piece of ingenuity." And he 
 shrugged his shoulders. "A hospitable fancy! By 
 your own account, you were not desirous of making my 
 acquaintance. We old people look for such reluctance 
 now and then; when it touches our honour, we cast 
 about until we find some way of overcoming it. You 
 arrive iminvited, but believe me, very welcome." 
 
 " You persist in error, sir," said Denis. " There can 
 be no question between you and me. I am a stranger 
 in this countryside. My name is Denis, damoiseau de 
 Beaulieu. If you see me in yoiu- house, it is only " 
 
 "My yoimg friend," interrupted the other, "you will 
 permit me to have my own ideas on that subject. They 
 probably differ from yours at the present moment," he 
 added, with a leer, " but time will show which of us is in 
 the right." 
 
 Denis was convinced he had to do with a lunatic. He 
 seated himself with a shrug, content to wait the upshot; 
 and a pause ensued, during which he thought he could 
 
THE SIRE DE MALIETROIT'S DOOR 281 
 
 distinguish a hurried gabbling as of prayer from behind 
 the arras immediately opposite him. Sometimes there 
 seemed to be but one person engaged, sometimes two; 
 and the vehemence of the voice, low as it was, seemed 
 to indicate either great haste or an agony of spirit. It 
 occurred to him that this piece of tapestry covered the 
 entrance to the chapel he had noticed from without. 
 
 The old gentleman meanwhile surveyed Denis from 
 head to foot with a smile, and from time to time emitted 
 little noises like a bird or a mouse, which seemed to in- 
 dicate a high degree of satisfaction. This state of mat- 
 ters became rapidly insupportable; and Denis, to put an 
 end to it, remarked politely that the wind had gone down. 
 
 The old gentleman fell into a fit of silent laughter, so 
 prolonged and violent that he became quite red in the 
 face. Denis got upon his feet at once, and put on his 
 hat with a floiu-ish. 
 
 "Sir," he said, "if you are iu your wits, you have 
 affronted me grossly. If you are out of them, I flatter 
 myself I can find better employment for my brains than 
 to talk with lunatics. My conscience is clear; you have 
 made a fool of me from the first moment; you have re- 
 fused to hear my explanations; and now there is no 
 power under God will make me stay here any longer; 
 and if I cannot make my way out in a more decent 
 fashion, I will hack your door in pieces with my sword." 
 
 The Sire de Mal^troit raised his right hand and 
 wagged it at Denis with the fore and Uttle fingers ex- 
 tended. 
 
 "My dear nephew," he said, "sit down." 
 
 " Nephew 1" retorted Denis, "you lie m yom: throat;" 
 and he snapped his fingers in his face. 
 
 "Sit down, you rogue!" cried the old gentleman, in 
 a sudden, harsh voice, like the barking of a dog. " Do 
 you fancy," he went on, "that when I had made my 
 
282 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 little contrivance for the door I had stopped short with 
 that ? If you prefer to be bound hand and foot till your 
 bones ache, rise and try to go away. If you choose to 
 remain a free young buck, agreeably conversing with an 
 old gentleman — ^why, sit where you are in peace, and 
 God be with you." 
 
 "Do you mean I am a prisoner?" demanded Denis. 
 
 " I state the facts," replied the other. " I would rather 
 leave the conclusion to yourself." 
 
 Denis sat down again. Externally he managed to 
 keep pretty calm, but within, he was now boiling with 
 anger, now chilled with apprehension. He no longer 
 felt convinced that he was dealing with a madman. 
 And if the old gentleman was sane, what, in God's 
 name, had he to look for? What absurd or tragical 
 adventure had befallen him? What countenance was 
 he to assume? 
 
 While he was thus unpleasantly reflecting, the arras 
 that overhung the chapel door was raised, and a tall 
 priest in his robes came forth and, giving a long, keen 
 stare at Denis, said something in an undertone to Sire 
 de Mal^troit. 
 
 "She is in a better frame of spirit?" asked the latter. 
 
 "She is more resigned, messire," replied the priest. 
 
 "Now the Lord help her, she is hard to please!" 
 sneered the old gentleman. "A likely stripling — ^not 
 ill-bom — and of her own choosing, too? Why, what 
 more would the jade have?" 
 
 "The situation is not usual for a young damsel," said 
 the other, "and somewhat trying to her blushes." 
 
 "She should have thought of that before she began the 
 dancel It was none of my choosing, God knows that: 
 but since she is in it, by our lady, she shall carry it to 
 the end." And then addressing Denis, "Monsieur de 
 Beaulieu," he asked, "may I present ycu to my niece? 
 
THE SIRE DE MALETROIT'S DOOR 283 
 
 She has been waiting your arrival, I may say, with even 
 greater impatience than myself." 
 
 Denis had resigned himself with a good grace — all 
 he desired was to know the worst of it as speedily as 
 possible; so he rose at once, and bowed in acquiescence. 
 The Sire de Mal^troit followed his example and limped, 
 with the assistance of the chaplain's arm, towards the 
 chapel door. The priest pulled aside the arras, and all 
 three entered. The building had considerable architec- 
 tural pretensions. A light groining sprang from six 
 stout columns, and hung down in two rich pendants 
 from the centre of the vault. The place terminated be- 
 hind the altar in a round end, embossed and honey- 
 combed with a superfluity of ornament in relief, and 
 pierced by many little windows shaped like stars, tre- 
 foils, or wheels. These windows were imperfectly glazed, 
 so that the night air circulated freely in the chapel. 
 The tapers, of which there must have been half a him- 
 dred burning on the altar, were unmercifully blown 
 about; and the light went through many difPerent phases 
 of brilliancy and semi-eclipse. On the steps in front of 
 the altar knelt a yoimg girl richly attired as a bride. A 
 chill settled over Denis as he observed her costume; he 
 fought with desperate energy against the conclusion that 
 was being thrust upon his mind; it could not — it should 
 not — be as he feared. 
 
 " Blanche," said the Sire, in his most flute-like tones, 
 "I have brought a friend to see you, my little girl; turn 
 round and give him your pretty hand. It is good to be 
 devout; but it is necessary to be polite, my niece." 
 
 The girl rose to her feet and turned toward the new- 
 comers. She moved all of a piece; and shame and ex- 
 haustion were expressed in every line of her fresh young 
 body; and she held her head down and kept her eyes 
 upon the pavement, as she came slowly forward. In 
 
284 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 the course of her advance, her eyes fell upon Denis de 
 Beaulieu's feet — feet of which he was justly vain, be it 
 remarked, and wore in the most elegant accoutrement 
 eveii while travelling. She paused — started, as if his 
 yellow boots had conveyed some shocking meaning — 
 ; and glanced suddenly up into the wearer's countenance. 
 i Their eyes met; shame gave place to horror and terror 
 in her looks; the blood left her lips; with a piercing 
 scream she covered her face with her hands and sank 
 upon the chapel floor. 
 
 "That is not the man!" she cried. "My uncle, that 
 is not the manl" 
 
 The Sire de Mal^troit chirped agreeably. " Of course 
 not," he said. " I expected as much. It was so unf or- 
 timate you could not remember his name." 
 
 "Indeed," she cried, "indeed, I have never seen this 
 person till this moment — I have never so much as set 
 eyes upon him — I never wish to see him again. Sir," 
 she said, turning to Denis, " if you are a gentleman, you 
 will bear me out. Have I ever seen you — have ifou 
 ever seen me — before this accursed hour?" 
 
 "To speak for myself, I have never had that pleasiire," 
 answered the young man. " This is the first time, mes- 
 sire, that I have met with your engaging niece." 
 
 The old gentleman shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 "I am distressed to hear it," he said. "But it is 
 never too late to begin. I had little more acquaintance 
 with my own late lady ere I married her; which proves," 
 he added, with a grimace, " that these impromptu mar- 
 riages may often produce an excellent understanding in 
 the long run. As the bridegroom is to have a voice in 
 the matter, I will give him two hours to make up for 
 lost time before we proceed with the ceremony." And 
 he turned toward the door, followed by the clergy- 
 man. 
 
THE SIRE DE MALlfiTROITS DOOR 285 
 
 The girl was on her feet in a moment. "My uncle, 
 you cannot be in earnest," she said. " I declare before 
 God I will stab myself rather than be forced on that 
 young man. The heart rises at it; God forbids such 
 marriages; you dishonour your white hair. Oh, my 
 imcle, pity me! There is not a woman in all the world 
 but would prefer death to such a nuptial. Is it possi- 
 ble," she added, faltering — "is it possible that you do 
 not. believe me — that you still think this" — and she 
 pointed at Denis with a tremor of anger and contempt 
 — "that you still think this to be the man?" 
 
 "Frankly," said the old gentleman, pausing on the 
 threshold, " I do. But let me explain to you once for 
 all, Blanche de Mal^troit, my way of thinking about this 
 affair. When you took it into your head to dishonour 
 my family and the name that I have bbrne, in peace and 
 war, for more than three-score years, you forfeited not 
 only the right to question my designs, but that of look- 
 ing me in the face. If your father had been alive, he 
 would have spat on you and turned you out of doors. 
 His was the hand of iron. You may bless your God you 
 have only to deal with the hand of velvet, mademoiselle. 
 It was my duty to get you married without delay. Out 
 of pure good-vnll, I have tried to find your own gallant 
 for you. And I believe I have succeeded. But before 
 God and all the holy angels, Blanche de Mal^troit, if I 
 have not, I care not one jack-straw. So let me recom- 
 mend you to be polite to our young friend; for upoq my 
 word, your next groom may be less appetising." 
 
 And with that he went out, with the chaplain at his 
 heels; and the arras fell behind the pair. 
 
 The girl turned upon Denis with flashing eyes. 
 
 "And what, sir," she demanded, "may be the mean- 
 ing of aU this?" 
 
 "God knows," returned Denis, gloomily. "I am a 
 
286 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 prisoner in this house, which seems full of mad people. 
 More I know not; and nothing do I understand." 
 
 "And pray how came you here?" she asked. 
 
 He told her as briefly as he could. "For the rest," he 
 added, " perhaps you will follow my example, and tell me 
 the answer to all these riddles, and what, in God's name, 
 is like to be the end of it." 
 
 She stood silent for a little, and he could'see her lips 
 tremble and her tearless eyes burn with a feverish lustre. 
 Then she pressed her forehead in both hands. > 
 
 "Alas, how my head aches!" she said wearily — "to 
 say nothing of my poor heart! But it is due to you to 
 know my story, unmaidenly as it must seem. I am 
 called Blanche de Mal^troit; I have been without 
 father or mother for — oh I for as long as I can recollect, 
 and indeed I have been most unhappy all my life. Three 
 months ago a young captain began to stand near me 
 every day in church. I could see that I pleased him; I 
 am much to blame, but I was so glad that any one should 
 love me; and when he passed me a letter, I took it home 
 with me and read it with great pleasure. Since that 
 time he has written many. He was so anxious to speak 
 with me, poor fellow! and kept asking me to leave the 
 door open some evening that we might have two words 
 upon the stair. For he knew how much my uncle 
 trusted me." She gave something like a sob at that, 
 and it was a moment before she could go on. "My 
 uncle is a hard man, but he is very shrewd," she said at 
 last. " He has performed many feats in war, and was a 
 great person at court, and much trusted by Queen Isa- 
 beau in old days. How he came to suspect me I cannot 
 tell; but it is hard to keep anything from his knowledge; 
 and this morning, as we came from mass, he took my 
 hand into his, forced it open, and read my little billet, 
 walking by my side all the while. When he finished, he 
 
THE SIRE DE MALIETROIT'S DOOR 287 
 
 gave, it back to me with great politeness. It contained 
 another request to have the door left open; and this has 
 been the ruin of us all. My uncle kept me strictly in my 
 room until evening, and then ordered me to dress my- 
 self as you see me — a hard mockery for a young girl, do 
 you not think so ? I suppose, when he could not prevail 
 with me to tell him the young captain's name, he must 
 have laid a trap for him: into which, alas! you have 
 fallen in the anger of God. I looked for much con- 
 fusion; for how could I tell whether he was willing to 
 take me for his wife on these sharp terms? He might 
 have been trifling with me from the first; or I might have 
 made myself too cheap in his eyes. But truly I had not 
 looked for such a shameful punishment as this! I could 
 not think that God would let a girl be so disgraced be- 
 fore a young man. And now I tell you all; and I can 
 scarcely hope that you will not despise me." 
 
 Denis made her a respectful inclination. 
 
 "Madam," he said, "you have honoured me by your 
 confidence. It remains for me to prove that I am not 
 unworthy of the honour. Is Messire de Mal^troit at 
 hand?" 
 
 " I believe he is writing in the salle without," she an- 
 swered. 
 
 "May I lead you thither, madam?" asked Denis, of- 
 fering his hand with his most courtly bearing. 
 
 She accepted it; and the pair passed out of the chapel, 
 Blanche in a very drooping and shamefast condition, 
 V»ut Denis strutting and ruffling in the consciousness of 
 a mission, and the boyish certainty of accomplishing it 
 with honour. 
 
 The Sire de Mal^troit rose to meet them with an ironi- 
 ca* obeisance. 
 
 "Sir," said Denis, with the grandest possible air, "I 
 believe I am to have some say in the matter of this mar- 
 
288 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 riage; and let me tell you at once, I will be no party tc 
 forcing the inclination of this young lady. Had it been 
 freely offered to me, I should have been proud to accept 
 her hand, for I perceive she is as good as she is beautiful; 
 but as things are, I have now the honour, messire, of 
 refusing." 
 
 Blanche looked at him with gratitude in her eyes; but 
 the old gentleman only smiled and smiled, until his smile 
 grew positively sickening to Denis. 
 
 "I am afraid," he said, "Monsieur de Beaulieu, that 
 you do not perfectly understand the choice I have oflFered 
 you. Follow me, I beseech you, to this window." And 
 he led the way to one of the large windows which stood 
 open on the night. " You observe," he went on, " there 
 is an iron ring in the upper masonry, and reeved through 
 that, a very eflScacious rope. Now, mark my words: if 
 you should find your disinclination to my niece's person 
 insurmountable, I shall have you hanged out of this 
 window before sunrise. I shall only proceed to such an 
 extremity with the greatest regret, you may believe me. 
 For it is not at all your death that I desire, but my 
 niece's establishment in life. At the same time, it must 
 come to that if you prove obstinate. Your family. 
 Monsieur de Beaulieu, is very well in its way; but if you 
 sprang from Charlemagne, you should not refuse the 
 hand of a Mal^troit with impunity — not if she had been 
 as common as the Paris road — not if she were as hideous 
 as the gargoyle over my door. Neither my niece nor 
 you, nor my own private feelings, move me at all in this 
 matter. The honour of my house has been compromised ; 
 I believe you to be the guilty person, at least you are now 
 in the secret; and you can hardly wonder if I request 
 you to wipe out the stain. If you will not, your blood 
 be on your own head! It will be no great satisfaction 
 to me to have your interesting relics kicking their heels 
 
THE SIRE DE MALETROIT'S DOOR 289 
 
 in the breeze below my windows, but half a loaf is better 
 than no bread, and if I cannot cure the dishonour, I 
 shall at least stop the scandal." 
 
 There was a pause. 
 
 "I believe there are other ways of settling such im- 
 broglios among gentlemen," said Denis. "You wear a 
 sword, and I hear you have used it with distinction." 
 
 The Sire de Mal^troit made a signal to the chaplain, 
 who crossed the room with long silent strides and raised 
 the arras over the third of the three doors. It was only 
 a moment before he let it fall again; but" Denis had time 
 to see a dusky passage full of armed men. 
 
 " When I was a little younger, I should have been de- 
 lighted to honour you. Monsieur de Beaulieu," said Sire 
 Alain; "but I am now too old. Faithful retainers are 
 the sinews of age, and I must employ the strength I have. 
 This is one of the hardest things to swallow as a man 
 grows up in years; but with a little patience, even this 
 becomes habitual. You and the lady seem to prefer the 
 salle for what remains of your two hours; and as I have 
 no desire to cross your preference, I shall resign it to 
 your use with all the pleasure in the world. No haste!" 
 he added, holding up his hand, as he saw a dangerous 
 look come into Denis de Beaulieu's face. "If your 
 mind revolt against hanging, it will be time enough two 
 hours hence to throw yourself out of the window or upon 
 the pikes of my retainers. Two hours of life are always 
 two hours. A great many things may turn up in even 
 as little a while as that. And, besides, if I understand 
 her appearance, my niece has something to say to you. 
 You will not disfigure your last hours by a want of 
 politeness to a lady?" 
 
 Denis looked at Blanche, and she made him an im- 
 ploring gesture. 
 
 It is likely that the old gentleman was hugely pleased 
 
290 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 at this symptom of an understanding; for he smiled Ou 
 both, and added sweetly: "If you will give me your 
 word of honour. Monsieur de Beaulieu, to await my re- 
 turn at the end of the two hours before attempting any- 
 thing desperate, I shall withdraw my retainers, and let 
 you speak in greater privacy with mademoiselle." 
 
 Denis again glanced at the girl, who seemed to be- 
 seech him to agree. 
 
 " I give you my word of honour," he said. 
 
 Messire de Mal^troit bowed, and proceeded to limp 
 about the apartment, clearing his throat the while with 
 that odd musical chirp which had already grown so 
 irritating in the ears of Denis de Beaulieu. He first 
 possessed himself of some papers which lay upon the 
 table; then he went to the mouth of the passage and 
 appeared to give an order to the men behind the arras; 
 and lastly he hobbled out through the door by which 
 Denis had come in, turning upon the threshold to address 
 a last smiling bow to the young couple, and followed by 
 the chaplain with a hand-lamp. 
 
 No sooner were they alone than Blanche advanced 
 towards Denis with her hands extended. Her face was 
 flushed and excited, and her eyes shone with tears. 
 
 "You shall not die I" she cried, "you shall marry me 
 after all." 
 
 "You seem to think, madam," replied Denis, "that I 
 stand much in fear of death." 
 
 " Oh, no, no," she said, " I see you are no poltroon. 
 It is for my own sake — I could not bear to have you 
 slain for such a scruple." 
 
 "I am afraid," returned Denis, "that you underrate 
 the difficulty, madam. What you may be too generous 
 to refuse, I may be too proud to accept. In a moment 
 of noble feeling towards me, you forgot what you per- 
 haps owe to others." 
 
THE SIRE DE MALETROIT'S DOOR 291 
 
 He had the decency to keep his eyes on the floor as 
 he said this, and after he had finished, so as not to spy 
 upon her confusion. She stood silent for a moment, 
 then walked suddenly away, and falling on her uncle's 
 chair, fairly burst out sobbing. Denis was in the acme 
 of embarrassment. He looked round, as if to seek for 
 inspiration, and seeing a stool, plumped down upon it for 
 something to do. There he sat playing with the guard 
 of his rapier, and wishing himself dead a thousand times 
 over, and buried in the nastiest kitchen-heap in France. 
 His eyes wandered round the apartment, but found 
 nothing to arrest them. There were such wide spaces 
 between the furniture, the light fell so badly and cheer- 
 lessly over all, the dark outside air looked in so coldly 
 through the windows, that he thought he had never seen 
 a church so vast, nor a tomb so melancholy. The regular 
 sobs of Blanche de Mal^troit measured out the time like 
 the ticking of a clock. He read the device upon the 
 shield over and over again, until his eyes became ob- 
 scured; he stared into shadowy corners until he imag- 
 ined they were swarming with horrible animals; and 
 every now and again he awoke with a start, to remember 
 that his last two hours were running, and death was on 
 the march. 
 
 Oftener and oftener, as the time went on, did his 
 glance settle on the girl herself. Her face was bowed 
 forward and covered with her hands, and she was shaken 
 at intervals by the convulsive hiccup of grief. Even 
 thus she was not an unpleasant object to dwell upon, so 
 plump and yet so fine, with a warm brown skin, and the 
 most beautiful hair, Denis thought, in the whole world 
 »f womankind. Her hands were like her uncle's; but 
 they were more in place at the end of her young arms, 
 and looked infinitely soft and caressing. He remem- 
 bered how her blue eyes had shone upon him, full of 
 
292 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 anger, pity, and innocence. And the more he dwelt on 
 her perfections, the uglier death looked, and the more 
 , deeply was he smitten with penitence at her continued 
 tears. Now he felt that no man CQuId have the courage 
 to leave a world which contained so beautifid a creature; 
 and now he would have given forty minutes of his last 
 hour to have unsaid his cruel speech. 
 
 Suddenly a hoarse and ragged peal of cockcrow rose 
 to their ears from the dark valley below the windows. 
 And this shattering noise in the silence of all around was 
 like a light in a dark place, and shook them both out of 
 their reflections. 
 
 "Alas, can I do nothing to help you?" she said, look- 
 ing up. 
 
 " Madam," replied Denis, with a fine irrelevancy, " if 
 I have said anything to wound you, believe me, it was 
 for your own sake and not for mine." 
 
 She thanked him with a tearful look. 
 
 "I feel your position cruelly," he went on. "The 
 world has been bitter hard on you. Your uncle is a 
 disgrace to mankind. Believe me, madam, there is no 
 young gentleman in all France but would be glad of my 
 opportunity, to die in doing you a momentary service." 
 
 " I know already that you can be very brave and gen- 
 erous," she answered. "What I want to know is 
 whether I can serve you — now or afterwards," she added, 
 with a quaver. 
 
 "Most certainly," he answered with a smile. "Let 
 me sit beside you as if I were a friend, instead of a foolish 
 intruder; try to forget how awkwardly we are placed to 
 one another; make my last moments go pleasantly; and 
 you will do me the chief service possible." 
 
 "You are very gallant," she added, with a yet deeper 
 sadness . . . "very gallant . . . and it somehow pains 
 me. But draw nearer, if you please; and if you find 
 
THE SIRE DE MAL^TROITS DOOR 293 
 
 anything to say to me, you will at least make certain of 
 a very friendly listener. Ahl Monsieur de Beaulieu," 
 she broke forth— "ah! Monsieur de Beaulieu, how can 
 I look you in the face ?" And she fell to weeping again 
 with a renewed effusion. 
 
 "Madam," said Denis, taking her hand in both of his, 
 "reflect on the little time I have before me, and the great 
 bitterness into which I am cast by the sight of your dis- 
 tress. Spare me, in my last moments, the spectacle of 
 what I cannot cure even with the sacrifice of my life." 
 
 "I am very selfish," answered Blanche. "I will be 
 braver. Monsieur de Beaulieu, for your sake. But think 
 if I can do you no kindness in the future — if you have 
 no friends to whom I could carry your adieux. Charge 
 me as heavily as you can; every burden will lighten, 
 by so little, the invaluable gratitude I owe you. Put it 
 in my power to do something more for you than weep." 
 
 " My mother is married again, and has a young family 
 to care for. My brother Guichard will inherit my fiefs; 
 and if I am not in error, that will content him amply for 
 my death. Life is a little vapour that passeth away, as 
 we are told by those in holy orders. When a man is in 
 a fair way and sees all life open in front of him, he seems 
 to himself to make a very important figure in the world. 
 His horse whinnies to him; the trumpets blow and the 
 girls look out of window as he rides into town before his 
 company; he receives many assurances of trust and re- 
 gard — sometimes by express in a letter — sometimes face 
 to face, with persons of great consequence falling on his 
 neck. It is not wonderful if his head is turned for a 
 time. But once he is dead, were he as brave as Hercules 
 or as wise as Solomon, he is soon forgotten. It is not 
 ten years since my father fell, with many other knights 
 around him, in a very fierce encounter, and I do not think 
 that any one of them, nor so much as the name of the 
 
294 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 fight, is now remembered. No, no, madam, the nearer 
 you come to it, you see that death is a dark and dust^ 
 corner, where a man gets into his tomb and has the door 
 shut after him till the judgment day. I have few friends 
 just now, and once I am dead I shall have none." 
 
 "Ah, Monsieur de Beaulieul" she exclaimed, "you 
 forget Blanche de Mal^troit." 
 
 "You have a sweet nature, madam, and you are 
 pleased to estimate a little service far beyond its worth." 
 
 "It is not that," she answered. "You mistake me if 
 you think I am easily touched by my own concerns. I 
 say so, because you are the noblest man I have ever met; 
 because I recognise in you a spirit that would have made 
 even a common person famous in the land." 
 
 "And yet here I die in a mousetrap — with no more 
 noise about it than my own squeaking," answered he. 
 
 A look of pain crossed her face, and she was silent for 
 a little whUe. Then a light came into her eyes, and with 
 a smile she spoke again. 
 
 "I cannot have my champion think meanly of him- 
 self. Anyone who gives his life for another will be met 
 in Paradise by all the heralds and angels of the Lord 
 God. And you have no such cause to hang your head. 
 For . . . pray, do you think me beautiful?" she asked, 
 with a deep flush. 
 
 " Indeed, madam, I do," he said. 
 
 " I am glad of that," she answered heartily. " Do you 
 think there are many men in France who have been 
 asked in marriage by a beautiful maiden — with her own 
 lips — and who have refused her to her face? I know 
 you men would half despise such a triumph; but believe 
 me, we women know more of what is precious in love. 
 There is nothing that should set a person higher in his 
 own esteem; and we women would prize nothing more 
 dearly." 
 
THE SIRE DE MALi^TROITS DOOR 295 
 
 "You are very good," he said; "but you caniiot make 
 me forget that I was asked in pity and not for love." 
 
 "I am not so sure of that," she replied, holding down 
 her head. " Hear me to an end, Monsieur de Beaulieu. 
 I know how you must despise me; I feel you are right to 
 do so; I am too poor a creature to occupy one thought of 
 your mind, although, alas! you must die for me this 
 morning. But when I asked you to marry me, indeed, 
 and indeed, it was because I respected and admired you, 
 and loved you with my whole soul, from the very mo- 
 ment that you took my part against my uncle. If you 
 had seen yourself, and how noble you looked, you would 
 pity rather than despise me. And now," she went on, 
 hurriedly checking him with her hand, " although I have 
 laid aside all reserve and told you so much, remember 
 that I know your sentiments towards me already. I 
 would not, believe me, being nobly born, weary you with 
 importunities into consent. I too have a pride of my 
 own: and I declare before the holy mother of God, if 
 you should now go back from your word already given] 
 I would no more marry you than I would marry my 
 uncle's groom." 
 
 Denis smiled a little bitterly. 
 
 " Jt is a small love." h e said,_ ^that shies at a little 
 pride."<,y 
 
 She niade no answer, although she probably had her 
 own thoughts. 
 
 "Come hither to the window," he said with a sigh. 
 " Here is the dawn." 
 
 And indeed the dawn was already beginning. The 
 hollow of the sky was full of essential daylight, colour- 
 less and clean; and the valley underneath was flooded 
 with a grey reflection. A few thin vapours clung in the 
 eoves of the forest or lay along the winding course of the 
 river. The scene disengaged a surprising effect of still- 
 
296 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 ness, which was hardly interrupted when the cocks began 
 once more to crow among the steadings. Perhaps the 
 same fellow who had made so horrid a clangour in the 
 darkness not half an hour before, now sent up the mer- 
 riest cheer to greet the coming day. A little wind went 
 bustling and eddying among the tree-tops underneath 
 the windows. And still the daylight kept flooding in- 
 sensibly out of the east, which was soon to grow incan- 
 descent and cast up that red-hot cannon-ball, the rising 
 sun. 
 
 Denis looked out over all this with a bit of a shiver. 
 He had taken her hand, and retained it in his almost 
 unconsciously. 
 
 "Has the day begun already?" she said; and then, 
 illogically enough: "the night has been so long! Alas! 
 what shall we say to my uncle when he returns?" 
 
 "What you will," said Denis, and he pressed her 
 fingers in his. ' 
 
 She was silent. 
 
 " Blanche," he said, with a swift, uncertain, passionate 
 utterance, "you have seen whether I fear death. You 
 must know well enough that I would as gladly leap out 
 of that window into the empty air as to lay a finger on 
 you without your free and full consent. But if you care 
 for me at all, do not let me lose my life in a misappre- 
 hension; for I love you better than the whole world; 
 and though I will die for you blithely, it would be like all 
 the joys of Paradise to live on and spend my life in your 
 service.^' 
 
 As he stopped speaking, a bell began to ring loudly in 
 the interior of the house; and a clatter of armour in the 
 corridor showed that the retainers were returning to their 
 post, and the two hours were at an end. 
 
 "After all that you have heard?" she whispered, Wan- 
 ing towards him with her lips and eyes. 
 
THE SIRE DE MAUfiTROITS DOOR 297 
 
 "I have heard nothing," he replied. 
 
 "The captain's name was Florimond de Champdi- 
 vers," she said in his ear. 
 
 "I did not hear it," he answered, taking her supple 
 body in his arms, and covering her wet face with kisses. 
 
 A melodious chirping was audible behind, followed 
 by a beautiful chuckle, and the voice of Messire de 
 Maldtroit wished his new nephew a good morning. 
 
THE MERRY MEN* 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 EILEAN AEOS 
 
 It was a beautiful morning in the late July when I set 
 forth on foot for the last time for Aros. A boat had put 
 me ashore the night before at Grisapol; I had such 
 breakfast as the little inn afforded, and, leaving all my 
 baggage till I had an occasion to come round for it by 
 sea, struck right across the promontory with a cheerful 
 heart. 
 
 I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, 
 as I did, from an unmixed lowland stock. But an uncle 
 of mine, Gordon Darnaway, after a poor, rough youth, 
 and some years at sea, had married a young wife in the 
 
 • Written in 1881, at Pitlochry in the Scottish Highlands, where 
 Stevenson and his wife were staying with his parents in the year 
 after his return from California, and published in The ComhiU 
 Magazine, June, July, 1882. The scene is Earraid (Aros), an island 
 ofi the north-west coast of Scotland, where he had spent some time 
 in 1870 before beginning a tour of the Western Islands in the course 
 of an attempt to follow his father in the profession of civil engineer- 
 ing. Grisapol is Mull, a larger island of the inner Hebrides. Ben 
 Kyaw is Ben More, the highest summit of this island. It was upon 
 Earraid that David Balfour was cast away, and it was upon Earraid 
 that he nearly starved, as is recounted in Chapters XIII and XIV 
 of Stevenson's Kidnapped^ In a letter to W. E. Henley (July, 1881), 
 Stevenson called this tale "my favourite work," saying later, "It's 
 really a story of wrecks as they appear to dwellers on the coast." 
 Graham BaJfour, his biographer, reports another remark about this 
 story: |' You may take a certain atmosphere," said Stevenson, "and 
 get actions and persons to realise it. I'll give you an example — 
 The Merry Men. There I began with the feeling of one of those 
 islands on the west coast of Scotland, and I gradually developed the 
 story to express the sentiment with which that coast affected me." 
 Republished in The Merry Men, and other Tales, 1887. 
 
 298 
 
THE MERRY MEN 299 
 
 islands; Mary Maclean she was called, the last of her 
 family; and when she died in giving birth to a daughter, 
 Aros, the sea-girt farm, had remained in his possession. 
 It brought him in nothing but the means of life, as I was 
 well aware; but he was a man whom ill-fortune had pur- 
 sued; he feared, cumbered as he was with the young 
 child, to make a fresh adventure upon life; and re- 
 mained in Aros, biting his nails at destiny. Years passed 
 over his head in that isolation, and brought neither help 
 nor contentment. Meantime our family was dying out 
 in the lowlands; there is little luck for any of that race; 
 and perhaps my father was the luckiest of all, for not 
 only was he one of the last to die, but he left a son to his 
 name and a little money to support it, I was a student 
 of Edinburgh University, living well enough at my own 
 charges, but without kith or kin; when some news of 
 me found its way to Uncle Gordon on the Ross of Gris- 
 apol; and he, as he was a man who held blood thicker 
 than water, wrote to me the day he heard of my existence, 
 and taught me to count Aros as my home. Thus it was 
 that I came to spend my vacations in that part of the 
 country, so far from all society and comfort, between the 
 codfish and the moorcocks; and thus it was that now, 
 when I had done with my classes, I was returning thither 
 with so light a heart that July day. 
 
 The Ross, as we call it, is a promontory neither wide 
 nor high, but as rough as God made it to this day; the 
 deep sea on either hand of it, full of rugged isles and 
 reefs most perilous to seamen — all overlooked from the 
 eastward by some very high cliffs and the great peak of 
 Ben Kyaw. The Mountain of the Mist, they say the 
 words signify in the Gaelic tongue; and it is well named. 
 For that hill-top, which is more than three thousand 
 feet in height, catches all the clouds that come blowing 
 from the seaward; and, indeed, I used often to think that 
 
300 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 it must make them for itself; since when all heave« was 
 clear to the sea level, there would ever be a streamer on 
 Ben Kyaw. It brought water, too, and was mossy' to 
 the top in consequence. I have seen us sitting in broad 
 sunshine on the Ross, and the rain falling black like crape 
 upon the mountain. But the wetness of it made it often 
 appear more beautiful to my eyes; for when the sun 
 struck upon the hill sides, there were many wet rocks and 
 watercourses that shone like jewels even as far as Aros, 
 fifteen miles away. 
 
 The road that I followed was a cattle-track. It 
 twisted so as nearly to double the length of my journey; 
 it went over rough boulders so that a man had to leap 
 from one to another, and through soft bottoms where 
 the moss came nearly to the knee. There was no culti- 
 vation anywhere, and not one house in the ten miles 
 from Grisapol to Aros. Houses of course there were — 
 three at least; but they lay so far on the one side or the 
 other that no stranger could have found them from the 
 track. A large part of the Ross is covered with big 
 granite rocks, some of them larger than a two-roomed 
 house, one beside another, with fern and deep heather 
 in between them where the vipers breed. Anyway the 
 wind was, it was always sea air, as salt as on a ship; the 
 gulls were as free as moorfowl over all the Ross; and 
 vrhenever the way rose a little, your eye would kindle 
 with the brightness of the sea. From the very midst of 
 the land, on a day of wind and a high spring, I have 
 heard the Roost roaring like a battle where it runs by 
 Aros, and the great and fearful voices of the breakers 
 that we call t he Merry Men. 
 
 Aros itself — ^Aros Jay, I have heard the natives call it, 
 and they say it means the House of God — ^Aros itself was 
 not properly a piece of the Ross, nor was it quite an islet. 
 • Boggy. 
 
THE MERRY MEN 301 
 
 It formed the south-west corner of the land, fitted close 
 to it, and was in one place only separated from the coast 
 by a little gut of the sea, not forty feet across the narrowest. 
 When the tide was full, this was cle^T and still, like a pool 
 on a land river; only there was a difference in the weeds 
 and fishes, and the water itself was green instead of 
 brown; but when the tide went out, in the bottom of the 
 ebb, there was a day or two in every month when you 
 could pass dryshod from Aros to the mainland. There 
 was some good pasture, where my uncle fed the sheep he 
 lived on; perhaps the feed was better because the ground 
 rose higher on the islet than the main level of the Ross, 
 but this I am not skilled enough to settle. The house 
 was a good one for that country, two storeys high. It 
 looked westward over a bay, with a pier hard by for a 
 boat, and from the door you could watch the vapours 
 blowing on Ben Kyaw. 
 
 On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, 
 these great granite rocks that I have spoken of go down 
 together in troops into the sea, like cattle on a summer's 
 day. There they stand, for all the world like their neigh- 
 bours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them 
 instead of the quiet earth, and clots of sea-pink bloom- 
 ing on their sides instead of heather; and the great sea 
 conger to wreathe about the base of them instead of the 
 poisonous viper of the land. On calm days you can go 
 wandering between them in a boat for hours, echoes 
 following you about the labyrinth; but when the sea is up. 
 Heaven help the man that hears that cauldron boiling. 
 
 Off the south-west end of Aros these blocks are very 
 many, and much greater -in size. Indeed, they must 
 grow monstrously bigger out to sea, for there must be 
 ten sea miles of open water sown with them as thick as 
 a country place with houses, some standing thirty feet 
 above the tides, some covered, but all perilous to ships? 
 
302 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 so that on a clear, westerly blowing day, I have counted, 
 from the top of Aros, the great rollers breaking white 
 and heavy over as many as six-and-forty buried reefs. 
 But it is nearer inshore that the danger is worst; for 
 the tide, here running like a mill race, makes a long belt 
 of broken water — a Roost we call it — ^at the tail of the 
 land. I have often been out there in a dead calm at 
 the slack of the tide; and a strange place i£ is, with the 
 sea swirling and combing up and boiling like the caul- 
 drons of a linn, and now and again a little dancing mut- 
 ter of sound as though the Roost were talking to itself. 
 But when the tide begins to run again, and above all in 
 heavy weather, there is no man could take a boat within 
 half a mile of it, nor a ship afloat that could either steer 
 or live in such a place. You can hear the roaring of it 
 six miles away. At the seaward end there comes the 
 strongest of the bubble; and it 's here that these big 
 breakers dance together — the dance of death, it may be 
 called — that have got the name, in these parts, of the 
 Merry Men. I have heard it said that they run fifty 
 feet high; but that must be the green water only, for the 
 spray runs twice as high as that. Whether they got the 
 name from their movements, which are swift and antic, 
 or from the shouting they make about the turn of the tide, 
 so that all Aros shakes with it, is more than I can tell. 
 The truth is, that in a south-westerly wind, that part 
 of our archipelago is no better than a trap. If a ship got 
 through the reefs, and weathered the Merry Men, it 
 would be to come ashore on the south coast of Aros, in 
 Sandag Bay, where so many dismal things befell our 
 family, as I propose to tell. The thought of all these 
 dangers, in the place I knew so long, makes me par- 
 ticularly welcome the works now going forward to set 
 lights upon the headlands and buoys along the channels 
 of our iron-bound, inhospitable islands. 
 
THE MERRY MEN 303 
 
 The country people had many a story about Aros, aa 
 I used to hear from my uncle's man, Rorie, an old ser- 
 vant of the Macleans, who had transferred his services 
 without afterthought on the occasion of the marriage. 
 There was some tale of an unlucky creature, a sea-kelpie, 
 that dwelt and did business in some fearful manner of 
 his own among the boiling breakers of the Roost. A 
 mermaid had once met a piper on Sandag beach, and 
 there sang to him a long, bright midsummer's night, so 
 that in the morning he was found stricken crazy, and 
 from thenceforward, till the day he died, said only one 
 form of words; what they were in the original Gaelic I 
 cannot tell, but they were thus translated : " Ah, the sweet 
 singing out of the sea." Seals that haunted on that coast 
 have been known to speak to man in his own tongue, 
 presaging great disasters. It was here that a certain 
 saint first landed on his voyage out of Ireland to convert 
 the Hebrideans. And, indeed, I think he had some 
 claim to be called saint; for, with the boats of that past 
 age, to make so rough a passage, and land on such a tick- 
 lish coast, was surely not far short of the miraculous. 
 It was to him, or to some of his monkish underlings who 
 had a cell there, that the islet owes its holy and beautiful 
 name, the House of God. 
 
 Among these old wives' stories there was one which 
 I was inclined to hear with more credulity. As I was 
 told, in that tempest which scattered the ships of the 
 Invincible Armada over all the north and west of Scot- 
 land, Piie gjeat vessel came ashore on Aros, and before 
 the eyes of some solitary people on a hill-top, went down 
 in a moment with all hands, her colours flying even as 
 she sank. There was some likelihood in this tale; for 
 another of that fleet lay sunk on the north side, twenty 
 miles from Grisapol. It was told, I thought, with more 
 detail and gravity than its companion stories, and there 
 
304 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 was one particularity which went far to convince me of 
 its truth: the name, that is, of the ship was still remem- 
 bered, and sounded, in my ears Spanishly. The Espirito 
 Santo they called it, a great ship of many decks of guns, 
 laden with treasure and grandees of Spain, and fierce 
 I soldadoes, that now lay fathom deep to all eternity, done 
 I with her wars and voyages, in Sandag Bay, upon the west 
 of Aros. No more salvos of ordnance for that tall ship, 
 the "Holy Spirit," no more fair winds or happy ven- 
 tures; only to rot there deep in the sea-tangle and hear 
 the shoutings of the Merry Men as the tide ran high 
 about the island. It was a strange thought to me first 
 and last, and only grew stranger as I learned the more of 
 the way in which she had set sail with so proud a com- 
 pany, and King Philip, the wealthy king, that sent her 
 on that voyage. 
 
 And now I must tell yotj, as I walked from Grisapol 
 that day, the Espirito Santo was very much in my re- 
 flections. I had been favourably remarked by our then 
 Principal in Edinburgh College, that famous writer. Dr. 
 Robertson, and by him had been set to work on some 
 papers of an ancient date to rearrange and sift of what 
 was worthless; and in one of these, to my great wonder, 
 I found a note of this very ship, the Espirito Santo, widi 
 her captain's name, and how she carried a great part of 
 the Spaniard's treasure, and had been lost upon the Ross 
 of Grisapol; but in what particular spot, the wild tribes 
 of that place and period would give no information to 
 the king's inquiries. Putting one thing with another, 
 and taking our island tradition together with this note 
 of old "King Jamie's perquisitions after wealth, it had 
 come strongly on my mind that the spot for which he 
 sought in vain could be no other than the small bay of 
 Sandag on my uncle's land; and being a fellow of a 
 mechanical turn, I had ever since been plotting how to 
 
THE MERRY MEN 305 
 
 weigh that good ship up again with all her ingots, ounces, 
 and doubloons, and bring back our house of Darnaway 
 to its long-forgotten dignity and wealth. 
 
 This was a design of which I soon had reason to re- 
 pent. My mind was sharply turned on different reflec- 
 tions; and since I became the witness of a strange 
 judgment of Cod's, the thought of dead men's treasures 
 has been intolerable to my conscience. But even at that 
 time I must acquit myself of sordid greed; for if I de- 
 sired riches, it was not for their own sake, but for the 
 sake of a person who was dear to my heart — my uncle's 
 daughter, Mary Ellen. She had been educated well, 
 and had been a time to school upon the mainland; which, 
 poor girl, she would have been happier without. For 
 Aros was no place for her, with old Rorie the servant, 
 and her father, who was one of the unhappiest men in 
 Scotland, plainly bred up in a country place among 
 Cameronians, long a skipper sailing out of the Clyde 
 about the islands, and now, with infinite discontent, 
 managing his sheep and a little 'longshore fishing for the 
 necessary bread. If it was sometimes weariful to me, 
 who was there but a month or two, you may fancy what 
 it was to her who dwelt in that same desert all the year 
 round, with the sheep and flying seagulls, and t he Merr y 
 Men singing and dancing in the RoostI 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 WHAT THE WRECK HAD BROUGHT TO AROS 
 
 It was half-flood when I got the length of Aros; and 
 there was nothing for it but to stand on the far shore 
 and whistle for Rorie with the boat. I had no need to 
 repeat the signal. At the first sound, Mary was at the 
 door flying a handkerchief by way of answer, and the 
 
306 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 old long-legged serving-man was shambling down the 
 gravel to the pier. For all his hurry, it took him a long 
 while to pull across the bay; and I observed him several 
 times to pause, go into the stern, and look over curiously 
 into the wake. As he came nearer, he seemed to me 
 aged and haggard, and I thought he avoided my eye. 
 The coble had been repaired, with two new thwarts and 
 several patches of some rare and beautiful foreign wood, 
 the name of it unknown to me. 
 
 " Why, Rorie," said I, as we began the return voyage, 
 "this is fine wood. How came you by that?" 
 
 " It will be hard to cheesel," Rorie opined reluctantly; 
 and just then, dropping the oars, he made another of 
 those dives into the stern which I had remarked as he 
 came across to fetch me, and, leaning his hand on my 
 shoulder, stared with an awful look into the waters of 
 the bay. 
 
 " What is wrong ? " I asked, a good deal startled. 
 
 " It will be a great feesh," said the old man, returning 
 to his oars; and nothing more could I get out of him, 
 but strange glances and an ominous nodding of the head. 
 In spite of myself, I was infected with a measure of 
 uneasiness; I turned also, and studied the wake. The 
 water was still and transparent, but, out here in the 
 middle of the bay, exceeding dgep. For some time I 
 could see naught; but at last it did seem to me as if 
 something dark — a great fish, or perhaps only a shadow 
 —followed studiously in the track of the moving coble. 
 And then I remembered one of Rorie's superstitions: 
 how in a ferry in Morven, in some great, exterminating 
 feud among the clans, a fish, the like of it unknown in 
 all our waters, followed for some years the passage of the 
 ferry-boat, until no man dared to make the crossing. 
 
 " He will be waiting for the right man," said Rorie. 
 
 Mary met me on the beach, and led me up the brae 
 
THE MERRY MEN 307 
 
 and into the house of Aros. Outside and inside there 
 were many changes. The garden was fenced with the 
 same wood that I had noted in the boat; there were 
 chairs in the kitchen covered with strange brocade; cur- 
 tains of brocade hung from the window; a clock stood 
 silent on the dresser; a lamp of brass was swinging from 
 the roof; the table was set for dinner with the finest of 
 linen and silver; and all these new riches were displayed 
 in the plain old kitchen that I knew so well, with the 
 high-backed settle, and the stools, and the closet-bed 
 for Rorie; with the wide chimney the sun shone into, 
 and the clear-smouldering peats; with the pipes on the 
 mantelshelf and the three-cornered spittoons, filled with 
 sea-shells instead of sand, on the floor; with the bare 
 stone walls and the bare wooden floor, and the three 
 patchwork rugs that were of yore Its sole adornment — 
 poor man's patchwork, the like of it unknown in cities, 
 woven with homespun, and Sunday black, and sea-cloth 
 polished on the bench of rowing. The room, like the 
 house, had been a sort of wonder in that country-side, 
 it was so neat and habitable; and to see it now, shamed 
 by these incongruous additions, filled me with indigna- 
 tion and a kind of anger. In view of the errand I had 
 come upon to Aros, the feeling was baseless and unjust; 
 but it burned high, at the first moment, in my heart." 
 
 "Mary, girl," said I, " this is the place I had learned 
 to call my home, and I do not know it." 
 
 "It is my home by nature, not by the learning," she 
 replied; " the place I was bom and the place I 'm like to 
 die in; and I neither like these changes, nor the way 
 they came, nor that which came with them. I would 
 have liked better, under God's pleasure, they had gone 
 down into the sea, and the Merry Men were dancing on 
 them now." 
 
 Mary was always serious; it was perhaps the only 
 
308 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 trait that she shared with her father; but the tone with 
 which she uttered these words was even graver than ot 
 custom. 
 
 "Ay," said I, "I feared it came by wreck, and that 's 
 by death; yet when my father died, I took his goods 
 without remorse." 
 
 "Your father died a clean strae death,^ as the folk 
 say," said Mary. 
 
 "True," I returned; "and a wreck is like a judgment. 
 What was she called?" 
 
 "They ca'd her the Christ-Anna" said a voice behind 
 me; and, turning round, I saw my uncle standing in the 
 doorway. 
 
 He was a sour, small, bilious man, with a long face 
 and very dark eyes; fifty-six years old, sound and active 
 in body, and with an air somewhat between that of a 
 shepherd and that of a man following the sea. He never 
 laughed, that I heard; read long at the Bible; prayed 
 much, like the Cameronians he had been brought up 
 among; and indeed, in many ways, used to remind me of 
 one of the hill-preachers in the killing times before the 
 Revolution. But he never got much comfort, nor even, 
 as I used to think, much guidance, by his piety. He 
 had his black fits when he was afraid of hell; but he had 
 led a rough life, to which he would look back with envy, 
 and was still a rough, cold, gloomy man. 
 
 As he came in at the door out of the sunlight, with 
 his bonnet on his head and a pipe han^ng in his button- 
 hole, he seemed, like Rorie, to have grown older and 
 paler, the lines were deeplier ploughed upon his face, and 
 the whites of his eyes were yellow, like old stained ivory, 
 or the bones of the dead. 
 
 "Ay," he repeated, dwelling upon the first part of the 
 word, "the Christ-Anna, It's an awfu' name." 
 ' That is, he died in his bed. 
 
THE MERRY MEN 309 
 
 I made .him my salutations, and complimented him 
 upon his look of health; for I feared he had perhaps 
 been ill. 
 
 "I 'm in the body," he replied, ungraciously enough; 
 "aye in the body and the sins of the body, like yoursel'. 
 Denner," he said abruptly to Mary, and then ran on to 
 me: "They're grand braws,' thir that we hae gotten, '• 
 are they no ? Yon 's a bonny knock,* but it '11 no gang; 
 and the napery 's by ordnar. Bonny, bairnly braws; 
 it *s for the like o' them folk sells the peace of God that 
 passeth understanding; it 's for the like o' them, an' 
 maybe no even sae muckle worth, folk daunton God to 
 His face and burn in muckle hell; and it 's for that rea- 
 son the Scripture ca's them, as I read the passage, the 
 accursed thing. Mary, ye girzie," he interrupted him- 
 self to cry with some asperity, " what for hae ye no put 
 out the twa candlesticks?" 
 
 "Why should we need them at high noon?" she 
 asked. 
 
 But my uncle was not to be turned from his idea. 
 "We'll bruik' them while we may," he said; and so 
 two massive candlesticks of wrought silver were added 
 to the tablex^uipage, already so unsuited to that rough 
 sea-side farm. 
 
 "She cam' ashore Februar' 10, about ten at nicht," 
 he went on to me. "Tljere was nae wind, and a sair 
 run o' sea; and §he was in the sook o' the Roost, as I 
 jaloose.* We had seen her a' day, Rorie and me, beat- 
 ing to the wind. She wasnae a handy craft, I 'm think- 
 ing, that Christ-Anna; for she would neither steer nor 
 stey wi' them. A sair day they had of it; their hands 
 was never aff the sheets, and it perishin' cauld — ower 
 cauld to snaw; and aye they would get a bit nip o' wind, 
 and awa' again, to pit the emp'y hope into them. Eh, 
 
 •Fineries. 'Clock. » Enjoy. * Suspect. 
 
310 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 man! but they had a sair day for the last o't! He would 
 have had a prood, prood heart that won ashore upon the 
 back o' that." 
 
 "And were all lost?" I cried. "God help them!" 
 
 "Wheesht!" he said sternly. "Nane shall pray for 
 the deid on my hearth-stane." 
 
 I disclaimed a Popish sense for my ejaculation; and 
 he seemed to accept my disclaimer with unusual facility, 
 and ran on once more upon what had evidently become 
 a favourite subject. 
 
 "We fand her in Sandag Bay, Rorie an* me, and a* 
 thae braws in the inside of her. There 's a kittle bit, ye 
 see, about Sandag; whiles the sook rins strong for the 
 Merry Men; an' whiles again, when the tide 's makin' 
 hard an' ye can hear the Roost blawin' at the far-end of 
 Aros, there comes a back-spang of current straucht into 
 Sandag Bay. Weel, there 's the thing that got the grip 
 on the Christ-Anna. She but^ to have come in ram- 
 stam^ an' stern forrit; for the bows of her are aften 
 under, and the back-side of her is clear at hie-water o* 
 neaps.' But, man! the dunt that she cam' doon wi' when 
 she struck! Lord save us a'! but it 's an unco life to be 
 a sailor — a cauld, wanchancy* life. Mony 's the gliff * I 
 got mysel' in the great deep; and why the Lord should 
 hae made yon unco water is mair than ever I could win 
 to understand. He made the vales and the pastures, 
 the bonny green yaird,' the halesome, canjy' land — 
 
 And now they shout and smg to Thee, 
 For Thou hast made them glad, 
 
 as the Psalms say in the metrical version. No that I 
 would preen* my faith to that clink' neither; but it 's 
 
 • Must. 
 
 * Unlucky. 
 ' Cheerful. 
 
 » Eapidly. 
 
 ' At the lowest tides. 
 
 ' Fright. 
 
 « Earth. 
 
 »Pin. 
 
 • Rhyme. 
 
THE MERRY MEN 311 
 
 bonny, and easier to mind. ' Who go to sea in ships,' 
 they hae 't again — 
 
 And in 
 Great waters trading be, 
 Within the deep these men God's works 
 And His great wonders see. 
 
 Weel, it *s easy sayin' sae. Maybe Dauvit wasnae very 
 weel acquant wi' the sea. But troth, if it wasnae pren- 
 tit in the Bible, I wad whiles be temp'it to think it wasnae 
 the Lord, but the muckle, black deil that made the sea. 
 There 's naething good comes oot o't but the fish; an', 
 the spentacle o' God riding on the tempest, to be shure, 
 whilk would be what Dauvit was hkely ettling at.' But, 
 man, they were sair wonders that God showed to the 
 Christ-Anna — wonders, do I ca' them? Judgments, 
 rather: judgments in the mirk nicht among the draygons 
 o' the deep. And their souls — to think o' that — their 
 souls, man, maybe no prepared! The sea — a muckle 
 yett'' to helll" 
 
 I observed, as my uncle spoke, that his voice was un- 
 naturally moved and his manner unwontedly demon- 
 strative. He leaned forward at these last words, for 
 example, and touched me on the knee with his spread 
 fingers, looking up into my face with a certain pallor, 
 and I could see that his eyes shone with a deep-seated 
 fire, and that the lines about his mouth were drawn and 
 tremulous. 
 
 Even the entrance of Rorie, and the beginning of our 
 meal, did not detach him from his train of thought be- 
 yond a moment. He condescended, indeed, to ask me 
 some questions as to my success at college, but I thought 
 it was with half his mind; and even in his extempore 
 grace, which was, as usual, long and wandering, I could 
 • Trying for. ' Gate. 
 
312 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 find the trace of his preoccupation, praying, as he did, 
 that God would " remember in mercy fower puir, feck- 
 less,' fiddling, sinful creatures here by their lee-lane be- 
 side the great and dowie^ waters." 
 
 Soon there came an interchange of speeches between 
 , him and Rorie. 
 
 "Was it there?" asked my uncle. 
 
 "Ou, ayl" said Rorie. 
 
 I observed that they both spoke in a manner of aside, 
 and with some show of embarrassment, and that Mary 
 herself appeared to colour, and looked down on her plate. 
 Partly to show my knowledge, and so relieve the party 
 from an awkward strain, partly because I was curious, 
 I pursued the subject. 
 
 "You mean the fish?" I asked. 
 
 "Whatten fish?" cried my uncle. "Fish, quo' he! 
 Fish! Your een are fu' o' fatness, man; your held 
 dozened wi' carnal leir.' Fish! it 's a bogle!" 
 
 He spoke with great vehemence, as though angry; 
 and perhaps I was not very willing to be put down so 
 shortly, for young men are disputatious. At least I 
 remember I retorted hotly, crying out upon childish 
 superstitions. 
 
 "And ye come frae the College!" sneered Uncle Gor- 
 don. "Gude kens what they learn folk there; it 's no 
 muckle service onyway. Do ye think, man, that there *s 
 naething in a' yon saut wilderness o' a world oot wast* 
 there, wi' the sea grasses growin', an' the sea beasts 
 fechtin', an' the sun glintin' down into it, day by day? 
 Na; the sea *s like the land, but fearsomer. If there 's 
 folk ashore, there 's folk in the sea — deid they may be, 
 but they 're folk whatever; and as for deils, there 's nana 
 that 's like the sea deils. There 's no sae muckle harm 
 
 'Feeble. "Mad. 
 
 ' Made stupid by worldly learning. ! West 
 
THE MERRY MEN 313 
 
 in the land deils, when a's said and done. Lang syne, 
 when I was a callant^ in the south country, I mind there 
 was an auld, bald bogle in the Peewie Moss.* I got a 
 glisk o' him mysel', sittin' on his hunkers in a hag, as 
 gray *s a tombstane. An', troth, he was a fearsome-like 
 taed. But he steered' naebody. Nae doobt, if ane 
 that was a reprobate, ane the Lord hated, had gane by 
 there wi' his sin still upon his stamach, nae doobt the 
 creature would hae lowped upo' the likes o' him. But 
 there 's deils in the deep sea would yoke on^ a communi- 
 cant! Eh, sirs, if ye had gane doon wi' the puir lads in 
 the Christ-Anna, ye would ken by now the mercy o' the 
 seas. If ye had sailed it for as lang as me, ye would hate 
 the thocht of it as I do. If ye had but used the een God 
 gave ye, ye would hae learned the wickedness o' that 
 fause, saut, cauld, buUering* creature, and of a' that 's in 
 it by the Lord's permission: labsters an' partans," an' 
 sic like, howking^ in the deid; muckle, gutsy,* blawing 
 whales; an' fish — the hale clan o' them — cauld-wamed, 
 blind-eed uncanny ferlies." O, sirs," he cried, "the 
 horror — the horror o' the sea!" 
 
 We were all somewhat staggered by this outburst; 
 and the speaker himself, after that last hoarse apostrophe, 
 appeared to sink gloomily into his own thoughts. But 
 Rorie, who was greedy of superstitious lore, recalled him 
 to the subject by a question. 
 
 "You will not ever have seen a teevil of the sea?" he 
 asked. 
 
 "No clearly," replied the other, "I misdoobt if a mere 
 man could see ane clearly and conteenue in the body. 
 I hae sailed wi' a lad — they ca'd him Sandy Gabart; he 
 saw ane, shiire eneuch, an' shiire eneuch it was the end 
 
 • Young fellow. 
 
 * Grip hold of. 
 ' Digging. 
 
 = Bog. 
 
 » Meddled with. 
 
 ' Gurgling. 
 
 • Crabs. 
 
 ' Voracious. 
 
 •Wonders. 
 
314 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 of him. We were seeven days oot frae the Clyde — a 
 sair wark we had had — ^gaun north wi' seeds an' braws 
 an' things for the Macleod. We had got in ower near 
 under the Cutchull'ns, an' had just gane about by Soa, 
 an' were off on a lang tack, we thocht would maybe 
 hauld as far 's Copnahow. I mind the nicht weel; a 
 mune smoored* wi' mist; a fine gaun'' breeze upon the 
 water, but no steedy; an' — what nane o' us likit to hear 
 — anither wund gurlin'* owerheid, amang thae fearsome, 
 auld stane craigs o' the Cutchull'ns. Weel, Sandy was 
 forrit wi' the jib sheet; we couldnae see him for the 
 mains'l, that had just begude to draw, when a' at ance 
 he gied a skirl.* I luffed for my life, for I thocht we were 
 ower near Soa; but na, it wasnae that, it was puir Sandy 
 Gabart's deid skreigh,^ or near hand, for he was deid in 
 half an hour. A't he could tell was that a sea deil, or sea 
 bogle, or sea spenster, or sic-like, had clum up by the 
 bowsprit, an' gi'en him ae cauld, uncanny look. An', 
 or the life was pot o' Sandy's body, we kent weel what the 
 thing betokened, and why the wund gurled in the taps 
 o' the Cutchull'ns; for doon it cam' — a wund do I ca' 
 it! it was the wund o' the Lord's anger — an' a' that nicht 
 we foucht like men dementit, and the niest that we 
 kenned we were ashore in Loch Uskevagh, an' the cocks 
 were crawing in Benbecula." 
 
 "It will have been a merman," Rorie said. 
 
 "A merman!" screamed my uncle, with immeasurable 
 scorn. "Auld wives' clavers! ' There's nae sic things 
 as mermen." 
 
 "But what was the creature like?" I asked. 
 
 "What like was it? Gude forbid that we suld ken 
 what like it was! It had a kind of a heid upon it — ^man 
 could say nae mair." 
 
 ' Smothered. => Moving. » Growling. 
 
 * Shriek. t Death scream. • Idle tales. 
 
THE MERRY MEN 315 
 
 Then Rorie, smarting under the affront, told several 
 tales of mermen, mermaids, and sea-horses that had 
 come ashore upon the islands^ and attacked the crews of 
 boats upon the sea; and my uncle, in spite of his in- 
 credulity, listened with uneasy interest. 
 
 "Aweel, aweel," he said, "it may be sae; I may be 
 wrang; but I find nae word o' mermen in the Scriptures." 
 
 "And you will find nae word of Aros Roost, maybe," ob- 
 jected Rorie, and his argument appeared to carry weight. 
 
 When dinner was over, my uncle carried me forth 
 with him to a bank behind the house. It was a very 
 hot and quiet afternoon; scarce a ripple anywhere upon 
 the sea, nor any voice but the familiar voice of sheep 
 and gulls; and perhaps in consequence of this repose in 
 nature, my kinsman showed himself more rational and 
 tranquil than before. He spoke evenly and almost cheer- 
 fully of my career, with every now and then a reference 
 to the lost ship or the treasures it had brought to Aros. 
 For my part, I listened to him in a sort of trance, gazing 
 with all my heart on that remembered scene, and drink- 
 ing gladly the sea-air and the smoke of peats that had 
 been lit by Mary. 
 
 Perhaps an hour had passed when my uncle, who had 
 all the while been covertly gazing on the surface of the 
 little bay, rose to his feet, and bade me follow his ex- 
 ample. Now I should say that the great run of tide at 
 the south-west end of Aros exercises a perturbing influ- 
 ence round all the coast. In Sandag Bay, to the south, 
 a strong current runs at certain periods of the flood and 
 ebb respectively; but in this northern bay — ^Aros Bay, 
 as it is called — where the house stands and on which my 
 uncle was now gazing, the only sign of disturbance is 
 towards the end of the ebb, and even then it is too slight 
 to be remarkable. When there is any swell, nothing can 
 be seen at all; but when it is calm, as it often is, there 
 
316 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 appear certain strange, undecipherable marks — sea-runes, 
 as we may name them — on the glassy surface of the bay. 
 The like is common in a thousand places on the coast; 
 and many a boy must have amused himself as I did, 
 seeking to read in them some reference to himself or 
 those he loved. It was to these marks that my uncle 
 now directed my attention, struggling as he did so, with 
 an evident reluctance. 
 
 "Do ye see yon scart' upo' the water?*" he inquired; 
 "yon ane wast the gray stane? Ay? Weel, it '11 no be 
 like a letter, wuU it?" 
 
 " Certainly it is," I replied. " I have often remarked 
 it. It is like a C." 
 
 He heaved a sigh as if heavily disappointed with my 
 answer, and then added below his breath: "Ay, for the 
 Christ-Anna." 
 
 " I used to suppose, sir, it was for myself," said I; "for 
 my name is Charles." 
 
 "And so ye saw 't afore?" he ran on, not heeding my 
 remark. " Weel, weel, but that 's unco strange. Maybe, 
 it 's been there waitin', as a man wad say, through a' the 
 weary ages. Man, but that 's awfu'." And then, break- 
 ing o£P: "Ye '11 no see anither, will ye?" he asked. 
 
 "Yes," said I. "I see another very plainly, near the 
 Ross side, where the road comes down — an M." 
 
 "An M," he repeated very low; and then, again after 
 another pause: "An' i^hat wad ye make o' that?" he 
 inquired. , 
 
 "I had always thought it to mean Mary, sir," I an- 
 swered, growing somewhat red, convinced as I was in 
 my own mind that I was on the threshold of a decisive 
 explanation. 
 
 But we were each following his own train qf thought 
 to the exclusion of the other's. My uncle once more 
 'Scratch. 
 
THE MERRY MEN 317 
 
 paid no attentron to my words; only hung his head and 
 held his peace; and I might have been led to fancy that 
 he had not heard me, if his next speech had not con- 
 tained a kind of echo from my own. 
 
 "I would say naething o' thae clavers to Mary," he 
 observed, and began to walk forward. 
 
 There is a belt of turf along the side of Aros Bay 
 where walking is easy; and it was along this that I 
 silently followed my silent kinsman. I was perhaps a 
 little disappointed at having lost so good an opportunity 
 to declare my love; but I was at the same time far more 
 deeply exercised at the change that had befallen my 
 uncle. He was never an ordinary, never, in the strict 
 sense, an amiable, man; but there was nothing in even 
 the worst that I had known of him before, to prepare 
 me for so strange a transformation. It was impossible 
 to close the eyes against one fact; that he had, as the 
 saying goes, something on his mind; and as I mentally 
 ran over the different words which might be represented 
 by the letter M — misery, mercy, marriage, money, and 
 the like — I was arrested with a sort of start by the word 
 murder. I was still considering the ugly sound and fatal 
 meaning of the word, when the direction of our walk 
 brought us to a point from which a view was to be had 
 to either side, back towards Aros Bay and homestead, 
 and forward on the ocean, dotted to the north with isles, 
 and lying to the southward blue and open to the sky. 
 There my guide came to a halt, and stood staring for a 
 while on that expanse. Then he turned to me and laid 
 a hand on my arm. 
 
 "Ye think there 's naething there?" he said, pointing 
 with his pipe; and then cried out aloud, with a kind of 
 exultation: "I'll tell ye, man! The deid are down 
 there— thick like rattons!'" 
 
 'Rats. 
 
318 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 He turned at once, and, without another word, we 
 retraced our steps to the house of Aros. 
 
 I was eager to be alone with Mary; yet it was not tilV 
 after supper, and then but for a short while, that I could 
 have a word with her. I lost no time beating about ihe 
 bush, but spoke out plainly what was on my mind. 
 
 " Mary," I said, " I have not come to Aros without a 
 hope. If that should prove well founded, we may all 
 leave and go somewhere else, secure of daily bread and 
 comfort; secure, perhaps, of something far beyond that, 
 which it would seem extravagant in me to promise. But 
 there 's a hope that lies nearer to my heart than money." 
 And at that I paused. "You can guess fine what that is, 
 Mary," I said. She looked away from me in silence, 
 and that was small encouragement, but I was not to be 
 put off. "All my days I have thought the world of you," 
 I continued; " the time goes on and I think always the 
 more of you; I could not think to be happy or hearty in 
 my life without you : you are the apple of my eye." Still 
 she looked away, and said never a word; but I thought I 
 saw that her hands shook. "Mary," I cried in fear, 
 "do ye no like me?" 
 
 "O, Charlie man," she said, "is this a time to speak 
 of it? Let me be, a while; let me be the way I am; 
 it '11 not be you that loses by the waiting 1" 
 
 I made out by her voice that she was nearly weeping, 
 and this put me out of any thought but to compose her. 
 "Mary Ellen," I said, "say no more; I did not come to 
 trouble you: your way shall be mine, and your time too; 
 and you have told me all I wanted. Only just this one 
 thing more: what ails you?" 
 
 She owned it was her father, but would enter into no 
 particulars, only shook her head, and said he was not 
 well and not like himself, and it was a great pity. She 
 knew nothing of the wreck. " I havenae been near it," 
 
THE MERRY MEN 319 
 
 said she. "What for would I go near it, Charlie lad? 
 The poor souls are gone to their account long syne; and 
 I would just have wished they had ta'en their gear with 
 them — poor souls I" 
 
 This was scarcely any great encouragement for me to 
 tell her of the Espirito Santo; yet I did so, and at the 
 very first word she cried out in surprise. "There was 
 a man at Grisapol," she said, "in the month of May — 
 a little, yellow, black-avised* body, they tell me, with 
 gold rings upoh his fingers, and a beard; and he was 
 speiring high and low for that same ship." 
 
 It was towards the end of April that I had been given 
 these papers to sort out by Dr. Robertson: and it came 
 suddenly back upon my mind that they were thus pre- 
 pared for a Spanish historian, or a man calling himself 
 such, who had come with high recommendations to the 
 Principal, on a mission of inquiry as to the dispersion of 
 the great Armada. Putting one thing with another, I 
 fancied that the visitor "with the gold rings upon his 
 fingers" might be the same with Dr. Robertson's his- 
 torian from Madrid. If that were so, he would be more 
 likely after treasure for himself than information for a 
 learned society. I made up my mind, I should lose no 
 time over my undertaking; and if the ship lay sunk in 
 Sandag Bay, as perhaps both he and I supposed, it 
 should not be for the advantage of this ringed adven- 
 turer, but for Mary and myself, and for the good, old, 
 honest, kindly family of the Darnaways. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 LAND AND SEA IN SANDAG BAT 
 
 I WAS early afoot next morning; and as soon as I had 
 a bite to eat, set forth upon a tour of exploration. Some^ 
 ' Dark-comDlexioneA 
 
320 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 tUng in my heart distinctly told me that I should find 
 the ship of the Annada; and although I did not give 
 way entirely to such hopeful thoughts, I was still very 
 light in spirits and walked upon air. Aros is a very 
 rough islet, its surface strewn with great rocks and shaggy 
 with fern and heather; and my way lay almost north 
 and south across the highest knoll; and though the whole 
 distance was inside of two miles, it took more time and 
 exertion than four upon a level road. Upon the summit, 
 I paused. Although not very high — not three hundred 
 feet, as I think — it yet outtops aU the neighbouring low- 
 lands of the Ross, and commands a great view of sea and 
 islands. The sun, which had been up some time, was 
 already hot upon my neck; the air was listless and thun- 
 dery, although purely clear; away over the north-west, 
 where the isles lie thickliest congregated, some half-a- 
 dozen small and ragged clouds hung together in a covey; 
 and the head of Ben Kyaw wore, not merely a few 
 streamers, but a solid hood of vapour. There was a 
 threat in the weather. The sea, it is true, was smooth 
 like glass: even the Roost was but a seam on that wide 
 mirror, and the Merry Men no more than caps of foam; 
 but to my eye and ear, so long familiar with these places, 
 the sea also seemed to lie uneasily; a sound of it, like a 
 long sigh, mounted to me where I stood; and, quiet as it 
 was, the Roost itself appeared to be revolving mischief. 
 For I ought to say that all we dwellers in these parts 
 attributed, if not prescience, at least a quality of warning, 
 to that strange and dangerous creature of <iie tides. 
 
 I hurried on, then, with the greater speed, and had 
 soon descended the slope of Aros to the part that we call 
 Sandag Bay. It is a pretty large piece of water compared 
 with the size of the isle; well sheltered from all but the 
 prevailing wind; sandy and shoal and bounded by low 
 sand-hills to the west, but to the eastward lying several 
 fathoms deep along a ledge of rocks. It is upon that 
 
THE MERRY MEN 321 
 
 side that, at a certain time each flood, the current men- 
 tioned by my uncle sets so strong into the bay; a little 
 later, when the Roost begins to work higher, an undertow 
 runs still more strongly in the reverse direction; and it is 
 the action of this last, as I suppose, that has scoured 
 that part so deep. Nothing is to be seen out of Sandag 
 Bay but one small segment of the horision and, in heavy 
 weather, the breakers flying high over a deep sea reef. 
 
 From half-way down the hill, I had perceived the 
 wreck of February last, a brig of considerable tonnage^ 
 lying, with her back broken, high and dry on the east 
 corner of the sands; and I was making directly towards 
 it, and already almost on the margin of the turf, when 
 my eyes were suddenly arrested by a spot, cleared of 
 fern and heather, and marked by one of those long, low, 
 and almost human-looking mounds that we see so 
 commonly in graveyards, I stopped like a man shot. 
 Nothing had been said to me of any dead man or inter- 
 ment on the island; Rorie, Mary, and my uncle had all 
 equally held their peace; of her at leafet, I was certain 
 that she must be ignorant; and yet here, before my eyes, 
 Was proof indubitable of the fact. Here was a grave; 
 and I had to ask myself, with a chill, what manner of 
 man lay there in his last sleep, awaiting the signal of the 
 Lord in that solitary, sea-beat resting-place ? My mind 
 supplied no answer but what I feared to entertain. 
 Shipwrecked, at least, he must have been; perhaps, like 
 the old Armada mariners, from some far and rich land 
 over-sea; or perhaps one of my own race, perishing 
 within eyesight of the smoke of home. I stood awhile 
 uncovered by his side, and I could have desired that it 
 had lain in our religion to put up some prayer for that 
 unhappy stranger, or, in the old classic way, outwardly 
 to honour his misfortune. I knew, although his bones 
 lay there, a part of Aros, tfll the trumpet sounded, his 
 
322 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 imperishable soul was forth and far away, among th© 
 raptures of the everlasting Sabbath or the pangs of hell; 
 and yet my mind misgave me even with a fear, that per- 
 haps he was near me where I stood, guarding his sepul- 
 chre, and lingering on the scene of his unhappy fate. 
 
 Certainly it was with a spirit somewhat overshadowed 
 that I turned away from the grave to the hardly less 
 melancholy spectacle of the wreck. Her stem was above 
 the first arc of the flood; she was broken in two a little 
 abaft the foremast — though indeed she had none, both 
 masts having broken short in her disaster; and as the 
 pitch of the beach was very sharp and sudden, and the 
 bows lay many feet below the stern, the fracture gaped 
 widely open, and you could see right through her poor 
 hull upon the farther side. Her name was much de- 
 faced, and I could not make out clearly whether she was 
 called Christiania, after the Norwegian city, or Christi- 
 ana, after the good woman. Christian's wife, in that old 
 book the "Pilgrim's Progress." By her build she was 
 a foreign ship, but I was not certain of her nationality. 
 She had been painted green, but the colour was faded 
 and weathered, and the paint peeling off in strips. The 
 wreck of the mainmast lay alongside, half buried in 
 sand. She was a forlorn sight, indeed, and I could not 
 look without emotion at the bits of rope that still hung 
 about her, so often handled of yore by shouting seamen; 
 or the little scuttle where they had passed up and down 
 to their affairs; or that poor noseless angel of a figure- 
 head that had dipped into so many running billows. 
 
 I do not know whether it came most from the ship or 
 from the grave, but I fell into some melancholy scruples, 
 as I stood there, leaning with one hand against the bat- 
 tered timbers. The homelessness of men and even of 
 inanimate vessels, cast away upon strange shores, came 
 strongly in upon my mind. To make a profit of such 
 
THE MERRY MEN 323 
 
 pitiful misadventures seemed an unmanly and a sordid 
 act; and I began to think of my then quest as of some- 
 thing sacrilegious in its nature. But when I remembered 
 Mary, I took heart again. My uncle would never con- 
 sent to an imprudent marriage, nor would she, as I was 
 persuaded, wed without his full approval. It behoved 
 me, then, to be up and doing for my wife; and I thought 
 with a laugh how long it was since that great sea-castle, 
 the Espirito Santo, had left her bones in Sandag Bay, 
 and how weak it would be to consider rights so long 
 extinguished and misfortunes so long forgotten in the 
 process of time. 
 
 I had my theory of where to seek for her remains. 
 The set of the current and the soundings both pointed 
 to the east side of the bay under the ledge of rocks. If 
 she had been lost in Sandag Bay, and if, after these cen- 
 turies, any portion of her held together, it was there that 
 I should find it. The water deepens, as I have said, 
 with great rapidity, and even close alongside the rocks 
 several fathoms may be found. As I walked upon the 
 edge I could see far and wide over the sandy bottom of 
 the bay; the sun shone clear and green and steady in the 
 deeps; the bay seemed rather like a great transparent 
 crystal, as one sees them in a lapidary's shop; there was 
 naught to show that it was water but an internal trem- 
 bling, a hovering within of sun-glints and netted shadows, 
 and now and then a faint lap and a dying bubble round 
 the edge. The shadows of the rocks lay out for some 
 distance at their feet, so that my own shadow, moving, 
 pausing, and stooping on the top of that, reached some- 
 times half across the bay. . It was above all in this belt 
 of shadows that I hunted for the Espirito Santo; since 
 it was there the undertow ran strongest, whether in or 
 out. Cool as the whole water seemed this broiling day, 
 it looked, in that part, yet cooler, and had a mysterious 
 
324 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 invitation for the eyes. Peer as I pleased, however, I 
 could see nothing but a few fishes or a bush of sea-tangle, 
 and here and there a lump of rock that had fallen from 
 above and now lay separate on the sandy floor. Twice 
 did I pass from one end to the other of the rocks, and in 
 the whole distance I could see nothing of the wreck, nor 
 any place but one where it was possible for it to be. 
 This was a'-Jarge terrace in five fathoms of water, raised 
 off the surface of the sand to a considerable height, and 
 looking from above like a mere outgrowth of the rocks on 
 which I walked. It was one mass of great sea-tangles 
 like a grove, which prevented me judging of its nature, 
 but in shape and size it bore some likeness to a vessel's 
 hull. At least it was my best chance. If the Esjnrito 
 Santo lay not there under the tangles, it lay nowhere at 
 all in Sandag Bay; and I prepared to put the question 
 to the proof, once and for all, and either go back to Aros 
 a rich man or cured for ever of my dreams of wealth. 
 
 I stripped to the skin, and stood on the extreme mar- 
 gin with my hands clasped, irresolute. The bay at that 
 time was utterly quiet; there was no sound but from a 
 school of porpoises somewhere out of sight behind the 
 point; yet a certain fear withheld me on the threshold 
 of my venture. Sad sea-feelings, scraps of my uncle's 
 superstitions, thoughts of the dead, of the grave, of the 
 old broken ships, drifted through my mind. But the 
 strong sun upon my shoulders warmed me to the heart, 
 and I stooped forward and plunged into the sea. 
 
 It was all that I could do to catch a trail of the sea- 
 tangle that grew so thickly on the terrace; but once so 
 far anchored I secured myself by grasping a whole arm- 
 ful of these thick and slimy stalks, and, planting my feet 
 against the edge, I looked around me. On all sides the 
 clear sand stretched forth unbroken; it came to the foot 
 of the rocks, scoured into the likeness of an alley in a 
 
THE MERRY MEN 325 
 
 garden by the action of the tides; and before me, for as 
 far as I could see, nothing was visible but the same 
 many-folded sand upon the sun-bright bottom of the 
 bay. Yet the terrace to which I was then holding was 
 as thick with strong sea-growths as a tuft of heather, 
 jand the cliff from which it bulged hung draped below 
 the water-line with brown lianas. In this complexity of 
 forms, all swaying together in the current, things were 
 hard to be distinguished; and I was still uncertain 
 whether my feet were pressed upon the natural rock or 
 upon the timbers of the Armada treasure-ship, when the 
 whole tuft of tangle came away in my hand, and in an 
 instant I was on the surface, and the shores of the bay 
 and the bright water swam before my eyes in a glory of 
 crimson. 
 
 I clambered back upon the rocksj and threw the plant 
 of tangle at my feet. Something at the same moment 
 rang sharply, like a falling coin. I stooped, and there, 
 sure enough, crusted with the red rust, there lay an iron 
 shoe-buckle. The sight of this poor human relic thrilled 
 me to the heart, but not with hope nor fear, only with a 
 desolate melancholy. I held it in my hand, and the 
 thought of its owner appeared before me like the pres- 
 ence of an actual man. His weather-beaten face, his 
 sailor's hand, his sea-voice hoarse with singing at the 
 capstan, the very foot that had once worn that buckle 
 and trod so much along the swerving decks — the whole 
 human fact of him, as a creature like myself, with hair 
 and blood and seeing eyes, haunted me in that sunny, 
 solitary place, not like a spectre, but like some friend 
 whom I had basely injured. Was the great treasure-ship 
 indeed below there, with her guns and chain and treasure, 
 as she had sailed from Spain; her decks a garden for the 
 sea-weed, her cabin a breeding-place for fish, soundless 
 but for the dredging water, motionless but for the waving 
 
326 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 of the tangle upon her battlements — that old, populouSt 
 sea-riding castle, now a reef in Sandag Bag? Or, as i 
 thought it likelier, was this a waif from the disaster of 
 the foreign brig — was this shoe-buckle bought but the 
 other day and worn by a man of my own period in the 
 world's history, hearing the same news from day to day, 
 thinking the same thoughts, praying, perhaps, in the 
 same temple with myself? However it was, I was as- 
 Sailed with dreary thoughts; my uncle's words, "the 
 dead are down there," echoed in my ears; and though I 
 determined to dive once more, it was with a strong re- 
 pugnance that I stepped forward to the margin of the 
 rocks. 
 
 A great change passed at that moment over the ap- 
 pearance of the bay. It was no more that clear, visible 
 interior, like a house roofed with glass, where the green, 
 submarine sunshine slept so stilly. A breeze, I suppose, 
 had flawed the surface, and a sort of trouble and black- 
 ness filled its bosom, where flashes of light and clouds 
 of shadow tossed confusedly together. Even the ter- 
 race below obscurely rocked and quivered. It seemed a 
 graver thing to venture on this place of ambushes; and 
 when I leaped into the sea the second time it was with 
 a quaking in my soul. 
 
 I secured myself as at first, and groped among the 
 waving tangle. All that met my touch was cold and soft 
 and gluey. The thicket was alive with crabs and lob- 
 sters, trundling to and fro lopsidedly, and I had to 
 harden my heart against the horror of their carrion 
 neighbourhood. On all sides I could feel the grain and 
 the clefts of hard, living stone; no planks, no iron, not 
 a sign of any wreck; the Esfiriio Santo was not there. I 
 remember I had almost a sense of relief in my disap- 
 pointment, and I was about ready to leave go, when 
 something happened that sent me to the surface with my 
 
THE MERRY MEN 327 
 
 heart in my mouth. I had already stayed somewhat 
 late over my explorations; the current was freshening 
 with the change of the tide, and Sandag Bay was no 
 longer a safe place for a single swimmer. Well, just at 
 the last moment there came a sudden flush of current, 
 dredging through the tangles like a wave. I lost one 
 hold, was flung sprawling on my side, and, instinctively 
 grasping for a fresh support, my fingers closed on some- 
 thing hard and cold. I think I knew at that moment 
 what it was. At least I instantly left hold of the tangle, 
 leaped for the surface, and clambered out next moment 
 on the friendly rocks with the bone of a man's leg in my 
 grasp. 
 
 Mankind is a material creature, slow to think and dull 
 to perceive connections. The grave, the wreck of the 
 brig, and the rusty shoe-buckle were surely plain adver- 
 tisements. A child might have read their dismal story, 
 and yet it was not until I touched that actual piece of 
 mankind that the full horror of the charnel ocean burst 
 upon my spirit. I laid the bone beside the buckle, 
 picked up my clothes, and ran as I was along the rocks 
 towards the human shore. I could not be far enough 
 from the spot; no fortune was vast enough to tempt me 
 back again. The bones of the drowned dead should 
 henceforth roll undisturbed by me, whether on tangle 
 or minted gold. But as soon as I trod the good earth 
 again and had covered my nakedness against the sun, I 
 knelt down over against the ruins of the brig, and out of 
 the fulness of my heart prayed long and passionately for 
 all poor souls upon the sea. A generous prayer is never 
 presented in vain; the petition may be refused, but the 
 petitioner is always, I believe, rewarded by some gracious 
 visitation. The horror, at least, was lifted from my 
 mind; I could look with calm of spirit on that great 
 bright creature, God's ocean; and as I set off homeward 
 
328 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 up the rough sides of Aros, nothing remained of any 
 concern beyond a deep determination to meddle no more 
 with the spoils of wrecked vessels or the treasures of the 
 dead. 
 
 I was already some way up the hill before I paused to 
 breathe and look behind me. The sight that met my 
 eyes was doubly strange. 
 
 For, first, the storm that I had foreseen was now ad- 
 vancing with almost tropical rapidity. The whole sur- 
 face of the sea had been dulled from its conspicuous 
 brightness to an ugly hue of corrugated lead; already in 
 the distance the white waves, the " skipper's daughters," 
 had begun to flee before a breeze that was still insen- 
 sible on Aros; and already along the curve of Sandag 
 Bay there was a splashing run of sea that I could hear 
 from where I stood. The change upon the sky was even 
 more remarkable. There had begun to arise out of the 
 south-west a huge and solid continent of scowling cloud; 
 here and there, through rents in its contexture, the sun 
 still poured a sheaf of spreading rays; and here and 
 there, from all its edges, vast inky streamers lay forth 
 along the yet unclouded sky. The menace was express 
 and imminent. Even as I gazed, the sun was blotted 
 out. At any moment the tempest might fall upon Aros 
 in its might. 
 
 The suddenness of this change of weather so fixed my 
 eyes on heaven that it was some seconds before they 
 alighted on the bay, mapped out below my feet, and 
 robbed a moment later of the sun. The knoll which I 
 had just surmounted overflanked a little amphitheatre 
 of lower hillocks sloping towards the sea, and beyond 
 that the yellow arc of beach and the whole extent of 
 Sandag Bay. It was a scene on which I had often 
 looked down, but where I had never before beheld a 
 human figure. I had but just turned my back upon il 
 
THE MERRY MEN 329 
 
 and left it empty, and my wonder may be fancied when 
 I saw a boat and several men in that deserted spot. The 
 boat was lying by the rocks. A pair of fellows, bare- 
 headed, with their sleeves roUed up, and one with a boat- 
 hook, kept her with difficulty to her moorings, for the 
 current was growing brisker every moment. A little 
 way off upon the ledge two men in black clothes, whom 
 I judged to be superior in rank, laid their heads together 
 over some task which at first I did not understand, but a 
 second after I had made it out — they were taking bear- 
 ings with the compass; and just then I saw one of them 
 unroll a sheet of paper and lay his finger down, as though 
 identifying features in a map. Meanwhile a third was 
 walking to and fro, poking among the rocks and peering 
 over the edge into the water. While I was still watch- 
 ing them with the stupefaction of surprise, my mind 
 hardly yet able to work on what my eyes reported, this 
 third person suddenly stooped and summoned his com- 
 panions with a cry so loud that it reached my ears upon 
 the hill. The others ran to him, even dropping the com- 
 pass in their hurry, and I could see the bone and the 
 shoe-buckle going from hand to hand, causing the most 
 unusual gesticulations of surprise and interest. Jilst 
 then I could hear the seamen crying from the boat, and 
 saw them point westward to that cloud continent which 
 was ever the more rapidly unfurling its blackness over 
 heaven. The others seemed to consult; but the danger 
 was too pressing to be braved, and they bundled into the 
 boat carrying my relics with them, and set forth out of 
 the bay with all speed of oars. 
 
 I made no more ado about the matter, but turned and 
 ran for the house. Whoever these men were, it was fit 
 my uncle should be instantly informed. It was not then 
 altogether too late in the day for a descent of the Jacob- 
 ites; and maybe Prince Charlie, whom I knew my uncle 
 
330 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 to detest, was one of the three superiors whom I had 
 seen upon the rock. Yet as I ran, leaping from rock to 
 rock, and turned the matter loosely in my mind, this 
 theory grew ever the longer the less welcome to my 
 reason. The compass, the map, the interest awakened 
 by the buckle, and the coiyluct of that one among the 
 strangers who had looked so often below him in the 
 water, all seemed to point to a difPerent explanation of 
 their presence on that outlying, obscure islet of the 
 western sea. The Madrid historian, the search insti- 
 tuted by Dr. Robertson, the bearded stranger with the 
 rings, my own fruitless search that very morning in the 
 deep water of Sandag Bay, ran together, piece by piece, 
 in my memoiy, and I made sure that these strangers 
 must be Spaniards in quest of ancient treasure and the 
 lost ship of the Armada. But the people living in out- 
 lying islands, such as Aros, are answerable for their own 
 security; there is none near by to protect or even to 
 help them; and the presence in such a spot of a crew of 
 foreign adventurers — poor, greedy, and most likely law- 
 less — filled me with apprehensions for my uncle's money, 
 and even for the safety of his daughter. I was still 
 wondering how we were to get rid of them when I came, 
 all breathless, to the top of Aros. The whole world was 
 shadowed over; only in the extreme east, on a hill of the 
 mainland, one last gleam of sunshine lingered like a 
 jewel; rain had begun to fall, not heavily, but in great 
 drops; the sea was rising with each moment, and already 
 a band of white encircled Aros and the nearer coasts of 
 Grisapol. The boat was still pulling seaward, but I now 
 became aware of what had been hidden from me lower 
 down — a large, heavily sparred, handsome schooner, 
 lying to at the south end of Aros. Since I had not seen 
 her in the morning when I had looked around so closely 
 at the signs of the weather, and upon these lone waters 
 
THE MERRY MEN 331 
 
 where a sail was rarely visible, it was clear she must have 
 lain last ni^t behind the uninhabited Eilean Gour, and 
 this proved conclusively that she was manned by strangers 
 to our coast, for that anchorage, though good enough to 
 look at, is little better than a trap for ships. With such 
 ignorant sailors upon so wild a coast, the coming gale 
 was not unlikely to bring death upon its wings. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE GALK 
 
 I FOUND my uncle at the gable end, watching the 
 signs of the weather, with a pipe in his fingers. 
 
 "Uncle," said I, "there were men ashore at Sandag 
 Bay " 
 
 I had no time to go further; indeed, I not only forgot 
 my words, but even my weariness, so strange was the 
 effect on Uncle Gordon. He dropped his pipe and fell 
 back against the end of the house vsith his jaw fallen, 
 his eyes staring, and his long face as white as paper. 
 We must have looked at one another silently for a quar- 
 ter of a minute, before he made answer in this extraor- 
 dinary fashion: "Had he a hair kep on?" 
 
 I knew as well as if I had been there that the man 
 who now lay buried at Sandag had worn a hairy cap, 
 and that he had come ashore alive. For the first and 
 only time I lost toleration for the man who was my 
 benefactor and the father of the woman I hoped to call 
 my wife. 
 
 "These were living men," said I, "perhaps Jacobites, 
 perhaps the French, perhaps pirates, perhaps adven- 
 turers come here to seek the Spanish treasu^e^shIp; but, 
 whatever they may be, dangerous at least to your daugh- 
 
332 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 ter and my cousin. As for your own guilty terrors, 
 man, the dead sleeps well where you have laid him. T 
 stood this morning by his grave; he will not wake before 
 the trump of doom." 
 
 My kinsman looked upon me, blinking, while I spoke; 
 then he fixed his eyes for a little on the ground, and 
 pulled his fingers foolishly; but it was plain that he was 
 past the power of speech. 
 
 " Come," said I. "You must think for others. You 
 must come up the hill with me, and see this ship." 
 
 He obeyed without a word or a look, following slowly 
 after my impatient strides. The spring seemed to have 
 gone out of his body, and he scrambled heavily up and 
 down the rocks, instead of leaping, as he was wont, 
 from one to another. Nor could I, for all my cries, in- 
 duce him to make better haste. Only once he replied to 
 me complainingly, and like one in bodily pain: "Ay, 
 ay, man, I'm coming." Long before we had reached 
 the top, I had no other thought for him but pity. If 
 the crime had been monstrous, the punishment was in 
 proportion. 
 
 At last we emerged above the sky-line of the hill, and 
 could see around us. All was black and stormy to the 
 eye; the last gleam of sun had vanished; a wind had 
 sprung up, not yet high, but gusty and unsteady to the 
 point; the rain, on the other hand, had ceased. Short 
 I as was the interval, the sea already ran vastly higher 
 than when I had stood there last; already it had begun 
 to break over some of the outward reefs, and already it 
 moaned aloud in the sea-caves of Aros. I looked, at first 
 in vain, for the schooner. 
 
 "There she is," I said at last. But her new position, 
 and the course she was now lying, puzzled me. "They 
 cannot mean to beat to sea," I cried. 
 
 " That's what tkey mean," said my uncle, with some- 
 
THE MERRY MEN 333 
 
 thing like joy; and just then the schooner went about 
 and stood upon another tack, which put the question 
 beyond the reach of doubt. These strangers, seeing a 
 gale on hand, had thought first of sea-room. With the 
 wind that threatened, in these reef-sown waters and con- 
 tending against so violent a stream of tide, their course 
 was certain death. 
 
 "Good God!" said I, "they are all lost." 
 
 "Ay," returned my uncle, "a' — a' lost. They hadnae 
 a chance but to rin for Kyle Dona. The gate they 're 
 gaun the noo, they couldnae win through an the muckle 
 deil were there to pilot them. Eh, man," he continued, 
 touching me on the sleeve, " it's a braw nicht for a ship- 
 wreck! Twa in ae twalmonth! Eh, but the Merry 
 Men 'U dance bonny!" 
 
 I looked at him, and it was then that I began to fancy 
 him no longer in his right mind. He was peering up 
 to me, as if for sympathy, a timid joy in his eyes. All 
 that had passed between us was already forgotten in the 
 prospect of this fresh disaster. 
 
 "If it were not too late," I cried with indignation,"! 
 would take the coble and go out to warn them." 
 
 "Na, na," he protested, "ye maunnae interfere; ye 
 maunnae meddle wi' the like o' that. It 's His," — doff- 
 ing hi& bonnet — "His wull. And, eh, man! but it 's a 
 braw nicht for'tl" 
 
 Something like fear began to creep into my soul; and, 
 reminding him that I had not yet dined, I proposed we 
 should return to the house. But no; nothing would 
 tear him from his place of outlook. 
 
 " I maun see the hail thing, man, Cherlie," he explained; 
 and then as the schooner went about a second time, 
 "Eh, but they han'le her bonny!" he cried. "The 
 Christ-Anna was naething to this." 
 
 Already the men on board the schooner must have 
 
334 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 begun to realize some part, but not yet the twentieth, 
 of the dangers that environed their doomed ship. At 
 every lull of the capricious wind they must have seen 
 how fast the current swept them back. Each tack was 
 made shorter, as they saw how little it prevailed. Every 
 moment the rising swell began to boom and foam upon 
 another sunken reef; and ever and again a breaker 
 would fall in sounding ruin under the very bows of her, 
 and the brown reef and streaming tangle appear in the 
 hollow of the wave. I tell you, they had to stand to their 
 tackle: there was no idle man aboard that ship, God 
 knows. It was upon the progress of a scene so horrible 
 to any human-hearted man that my misguided uncle 
 now pored and gloated like a connoisseur. As I turned 
 to go down the hill, he was lying on his belly on the 
 summit, with his hands stretched forth and clutching 
 in the heather. He seemed rejuvenated, mind and 
 body. 
 
 When I got back to the house already dismally af- 
 fected, I was still more sadly downcast at the sight of 
 Mary. She had her sleeves rolled up over her strong 
 arms, and was quietly making bread. I got a bannock' 
 from the dresser and sat down to. eat it in silence. 
 
 "Are ye wearied, lad?" she asked after a while. 
 
 " I am not so much wearied, Mary," I replied, getting 
 on my feet, "as I am weary of delay, and perhaps of 
 Aros too. You know me well enough to judge me fairly, 
 say what I like. Well, Mary, you may be sure of this: 
 you had better be anywhere but here." 
 
 "I'll be sure of one thing," she returned: "I'll be 
 where my duty is." 
 
 "You forget, you have a duty to yourself," I said. 
 
 "Ay, man?" she replied, pounding at the dough: 
 "will you have found that in the Bible, now?" 
 ' A cake made from coaise meaL 
 
THE MERRY MEN 335 
 
 "Mary," I said solemnly, "you must not laugh at me 
 just now. God knows I am in no heart for laughing. 
 If we could get your father with us, it would be best; 
 but with him or without him, I want you far away from 
 here, my girl; for your own sake, and for mine, ay, and 
 for your father's too, I want you far — far away from here. 
 I came with other thoughts; I came here as a man 
 comes home; now it is all changed, and I have no desire 
 nor hope but to flee — for that 's the word — flee, like a bird 
 out of the fowler's snare, from this accursed island." 
 
 She had stopped her work by this time. 
 
 "And do you think, now," said she, "do you think, 
 now, I have neither eyes nor ears ? Do ye think I have- 
 nae broken my heart to have these braws (as he calls 
 them, God forgive him I) thrown into the sea? Do ye 
 think I have lived with him, day in, day out, and not 
 seen what you saw in an hour or two ? No," she said, 
 " I know there 's wrong in it; what wrong, I neither 
 know nor want to know. There was never an ill thing 
 made better by meddling, that I could hear of. But, 
 my lad, you must never ask me to leave my father. 
 "While the breath is in his body, I '11 be with him. And 
 he's not long for here, either: tibat I can tell you, Charlie 
 — he 's not long for here. The mark is on his brow; and 
 better so — maybe better so." 
 
 I was a while silent, not knowing what to say; and 
 when I roused my head at last to speak, she got before 
 me. 
 
 " Charlie," she said, " what 's right for me, neednae be 
 right for you. There *s sin upon this house and trouble; 
 you are a stranger; take your things upon your back and 
 go your ways to better places and to better folk, and if 
 you were ever minded to come back, though it were 
 twenty years syne, you would find me aye waiting." 
 
 " Mary Ellen," I said, " I asked you to be my wife, and 
 
336 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 you said as good as yes. That 's done for good. Where* 
 ever you are, I am; as 1 shall answer to my God." 
 
 As I said the words, the winds suddenly burst out rav- 
 ing, and then seemed to stand still and shudder round 
 the house of Aros. It was the first squall, or prologue, 
 of the coming tempest, and as we started and looked 
 about us, we found that a gloom, like the approach of 
 evening, had settled round the house. 
 
 "God pity all poor folks at seal" she said. "We'll 
 see no more of my father till the morrow's morning." 
 
 And then she told me, as we sat by the fire and 
 hearkened to the rising gusts, of how this change had 
 fallen upon my uncle. All last winter he had been dark 
 and fitful in his mind. Whenever the Roost ran high, 
 or, as Maiy said, whenever t he Merr y Men were dan- 
 cing, he would lie out for hours togethW oiTthe Head, if 
 it were at night, or on the top of Aros by day, watching 
 the tumult of the sea, and sweeping the horizon for a sail. 
 After February the te*th, when the wealth-bringing 
 wreck was cast ashore at Sandag, he had been at first 
 unnaturally gay, and his excitement had never fallen in 
 degree, but only changed in kind from dark to darker. 
 He neglected his work, and kept Rorie idle. They two 
 would speak together by the hour at the gable end, in 
 guarded tones and with an air of secrecy and almost of 
 guilt; and if she questioned either, as. at first she some- 
 times did, her inquiries were put aside with confusion. 
 Since Rorie had first remarked the fish that hung about 
 the ferry, his master had never set foot but once upon 
 the mainland of the Ross. That once — it was in the 
 height of the springs — ^he had passed dryshod while the 
 tide was out; but, having lingered overlong on the far 
 side, found himself cut oflf from Aros by the returning 
 waters. It was with a shriek of agony that he had 
 Jeaped across the gut> and he had reached home there- 
 
THE MERRY MEN 337 
 
 after in a fever-fit of fear. A fear of the sea, a constant 
 haunting thought of the sea, appeared in his talk and 
 devotions, and even in his looks when he was silent. 
 
 Rorie alone came in to supper; but a little later my 
 uncle appeared, took a bottle under his arm, put some 
 bread in his pocket, and set forth again to his outlook, 
 followed this time by Rorie. I heard that the schooner 
 was losing ground, but the crew were still fighting every 
 inch with hopeless ingenuiiy and courage; and the news 
 filled my mind with blackness. 
 
 A little after sundown the full fury of the gale broke 
 forth, such a gale as I have never seen in summer, nor, 
 seeing how swiftly it had come, even in winter. Mary 
 and I sat in silence, the house quaking overhead, the 
 tempest howling without, the fire between us sputter- 
 ing with rain drops. Our thoughts were far away with 
 the poor fellows on the schooner, or my not less unhappy 
 uncle, houseless on the promontory; and yet ever and 
 again we were Startled back to ourselves, when the wind 
 would rise and strike the gable like a solid body, or sud- 
 denly fall and draw away, so that the fire leaped into 
 flame and our hearts bounded in our sides. Now the 
 storm in its might would seize and shake the four corners 
 of the roof, roaring like Leviathan in anger. Anon, in 
 a lull, cold eddies of tempest moved shudderingly in the 
 room, lifting the hair upon our heads and passing between 
 us as we sat. And again the wind would break forth in 
 a chorus of melancholy sounds, hooting low in the chim- 
 ney, wailing with flutelike softness round the house. 
 
 It was perhaps eight o'clock when Rorie came in and 
 pulled me mysteriously to the door. My uncle, it ap- 
 peared, had frightened even his constant comrade; and 
 Rorie, uneasy at his extravagance, prayed me to come 
 out and share the watch. I hastened to do as I was asked; 
 the more readily, as what with fear and horror, and the 
 
338 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 electrical tension of the night, I was myself restless and 
 disposed for action. I told Mary to be under no alarm, 
 for I should be a safeguard on her father; and wrapping 
 myself warmly in a plaid, I followed Rorie into the open 
 air. 
 
 The night, though we were so little past midsummer, 
 was as dark as January. Intervals of a groping twilight 
 alternated with spells of utter blackness; and it was im- 
 possible to trace the reason of these changes in the fly- 
 ing horror of the sky. The wind blew the breath out of 
 a man's nostrils; all heaven seemed to thunder overhead 
 like one huge sail; and when there fell a momentary 
 lull on Aros, we could hear the gusts dismally sweeping 
 in the distance. Over all the lowlands of the Ross, the 
 wind must have blown as fierce as on the open sea; and 
 God only knows the uproar that was raging around the 
 head of Ben Kyaw. Sheets of mingled spray and rain 
 were driven in our faces. All round the isle of Aros the 
 surf, with an incessant, hammering thunder, beat upon 
 the reefs and beaches. Now louder in one place, now 
 lower in another, like the combinations of orchestral 
 music, the constant mass of sound was hardly varied for 
 a moment. And loud above all this hurly-burly I could 
 hear the changeful voices of the Roost and the intermit- 
 tent roaring of the Merry Men . At that hour, there 
 flashed into my mind the reason of the name that they 
 were called. For the noise of them seemed almost mirth- 
 ful, as it out-topped the other noises of the night; or if 
 not mirthful, yet instinct with a portentous joviality. 
 Nay, and it seemed even human. As when savage men 
 have drunk away their reason, and, discarding speech, 
 bawl together in their madness by the hour; so, to my ears 
 these deadly breakers shouted by Aros in the night. 
 
 Arm in arm, and staggering against the wind,- Rorie 
 and I won every yard of ground with conscious effort. 
 
THE MERRY MEN 339 
 
 We slipped on the wet sod, we fell together sprawling on 
 the rocks. Bruised, drenched, beaten, and breathless, 
 it must have taken us near half an hour to get from the 
 house down to the Head that overlooks the Roost. 
 There, it seemed, was my uncle's favourite observatory. 
 Right in the face of it, where the clifif is highest and most 
 sheer, a hump of earth, like a parapet, makes a place of 
 shelter from the common winds, where a man may sit 
 in quiet and see the tide and the mad billows contending 
 at his feet. As he might look down from the window of 
 a house upon some street disturbance, so, from this post, 
 he looks down upon the tumbling of th e. Merry Men . 
 On such a night, of course, he peers upon a world of 
 blackness, where the waters wheel and boil, where the 
 waves joust together with the noise of an explosion, 
 and the foam towers and vanishes in the twinkling of an 
 eye. Never before had I seen the Merry Me n thus 
 violent. The fury, height and transiency of their spout- 
 ings was a thing to be seen and not recounted. High 
 over our heads on the cliff rose their white columns 
 in the darkness; and the same instant, like phantoms, 
 they were gone. Sometimes three at a time would thus 
 aspire and vanish; sometimes a gust took them, and the 
 spray would fall about us, heavy as a wave. And yet 
 the spectacle was rather maddening in its levity than 
 impressive by its force. Thought was beaten down by 
 the confounding uproar; a gleeful vacancy possessed 
 the brains of men, a state akin to madness; and I found 
 myself at times following the dance of the Merry Men as 
 it were a tune upon a jigging instrument; 
 
 I first caught sight of my uncle when we were still 
 some yards away in one of the flying glimpses of twi- 
 light that checkered the pitch darkness of the night. 
 He was standing up behind the parapet, his head thrown 
 back and the bottle to his mouth. As he put it down. 
 
340 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 he saw and recognised us with a toss of one hand fleer* 
 ingly above his head. 
 
 "Has he been drinking?" shouted I to Rorie. 
 
 "He will aye be drunk when the wind blaws," re- 
 turned Rorie in the same high key, and it was all that I 
 could do to hear him. 
 
 "Then — was he so — in February?" I inquired. 
 
 Rorie's "Ay" was a cause of joy to me. The murder, 
 then, had not sprung in cold blood from calculation; it 
 was an act of madness no more to be condemned than to 
 be pardoned. My uncle was a dangerous mad-man, if 
 you will, but he was not cruel and base as I had feared. 
 Yet what a scene for a carouse, what an incredible vice, 
 was this that the poor man had chosen! I have always 
 thought drunkenness a wild and almost fearful pleasure, 
 rather demoniacal than human; but drunkenness, out 
 here in the roaring blackness, on the edge of a cliff above 
 that hell of waters, the man's head spinning like the 
 Roost, his foot tottering on the edge of death, his ear 
 watching for the signs of shipwreck, surely that, if it 
 were credible in any one, was morally impossible in a 
 man like my uncle, whose mind was set upon a damna- 
 tory creed and haunted by the darkest superstitions. 
 Yet so it was; and, as were ached the bight* of shelter 
 and could breathe again, I saw the man's eyes shining 
 in the night with an unholy glimmer. 
 
 "Eh, Charlie, man, it's grand!" he cried. "See to 
 them!" he continued, dragging me to the edge of the 
 abyss from whence arose that deafening clamour and 
 those clouds of spray; "see to them dancin', man! Is 
 that no wicked?" 
 
 He pronounced the word with gusto, and I thought 
 it suited with the scene. 
 
 "■Hiey 're yowlin' for thon schooner," he went on, his 
 ' Bend in the cliff. 
 
THE MERRY MEN 341 
 
 thin, insane voice clearly audible in the shelter of the 
 bank, "an' she's comin' aye nearer, aye nearer, aye 
 nearer an' nearer an' nearer; an' they ken 't, the folk 
 kens it, they ken weel it 's by wi' them. Charlie, lad, 
 they 're a' drunk in yon schooner, a' dozened wi' drink. 
 They were a' drunk in the Christ-Anna, at the hinder 
 end. There's nane could droon at sea wantin' the 
 brandy. Hoot awa, what do you ken?" with a sudden 
 blast of anger. "I tell ye, it cannae be; they daurnae 
 droon withoot it. Ha'e," holding out the bottle, "tak' 
 a sowp." 
 
 I was about to refuse, but Rorie touched me as if in 
 warning; and indeed I had already thought better of the 
 movement. I took the bottle, therefore, and not only 
 drank freely myself, but contrived to spill even more as 
 I was doing so. It was pure spirit, and almost strangled 
 me to swallow. My kinsman did not observe the loss, 
 but, once more throwing back his head, drained the re- 
 mainder to the dregs. Then, with a loud laugh, he cast 
 the bottle forth among th e Merry Men, who seemed to 
 leap up, shouting, to receive it. 
 
 "Ha'e, bairns I" he cried, "there's your han'sel.* 
 Ye '11 get bonnier nor that, or morning." 
 
 Suddenly, out in the black night before us, and not 
 two hundred yards away, we heard, at a moment when 
 the wind was silent, the clear note of a human voice. 
 Instantly the wind swept howling down upon the Head, 
 and the Roost bellowed, and churned, and danced with 
 a new fury. But we had heard the sound, and we knew, 
 with agony, that this was the doomed ship now close on 
 ruin, and that what we had heard was the voice of her 
 master issuing his last command. Crouching together 
 on the edge, we waited, straining every sense, for the in- 
 evitable end. It was long, however, and to us it seemed 
 
342 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 like ages, ere the schooner suddenly appeared for one 
 brief instant, relieved against a tower of glimmering 
 foam. I still see her reefed mainsail flapping loose, as 
 the boom fell heavily across the deck; I still see the 
 black outline of the hull, and still think I can distinguish 
 the figure of a man stretched upon the tiller. Yet the 
 v^hole sight we had of her passed swifter than lightning; 
 the very wave that disclosed her fell burying her for 
 ever; the mingled cry of many voices at the point of 
 death rose and was quenched in the roaring of theM si^ 
 Men. And with that the tragedy was at an end. The 
 strong ship, with all her gear, and the lamp perhaps still 
 burning in the cabin, the lives of so many men, precious 
 surely to others, dear, at least, as heaven to themselves, 
 had all, in that one moment, gone down into the surging 
 waters. They were gone like a dream. And the wind 
 still ran and shouted, and the senseless waters in the 
 Roost still leaped and tumbled as before. 
 
 How long we lay there together, we three, speechless 
 and motionless, is more than I can tell, but it must have 
 been for long. At length, one by one, and almost 
 mechanically, we crawled back into the shelter of the 
 bank. As I lay against the parapet, wholly wretched 
 and not entirely master of my mind, I could hear my 
 kinsman maundering to himself in an altered and 
 melancholy mood. Now he would repeat to himself 
 jwith maudlin iteration, "Sic a fecht as they had — ^sic 
 a sair fecht as they had, puir lads, puir lads!" and anon 
 he would bewail that "a' the gear was as gude 's tint,'" 
 because the ship had gone down among the Merry Men 
 instead of stranding on the shore; and throughput, the 
 name — the Christ-Anna — ^would come and go in his 
 divagations, pronounced with shuddering awe. The 
 storm all this time was rapidly abating. In half an hour 
 
 'Tjjst. 
 
THE MERRY MEN 343 
 
 the wind had fallen to a breeze, and the change was 
 accompanied or caused by a heaVy, cold, and plumping 
 rain. I must then have fallen asleep, and when I came 
 to myself, drenched, stiff, and unrefreshed, day had 
 already broken, grey, wet, discomfortable day; the wind 
 blew in faint and shifting capfuls, the tide was out, the 
 Roost was at its lowest, and only the strong beating surf 
 round all the coasts of Aros remained to witness of the 
 furies of the night. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 A MAN OUT OF THE SEA 
 
 RoRiE set out for the house in search of warmth and 
 breakfast; but my uncle was bent upon examining the 
 shores of Aros, and I felt it a part of duty to accom- 
 pany him throughout. He was now docile and quiet, 
 but tremulous and weak in mind and body; and it was 
 with the eagerness of a child that he pursued his ex- 
 ploration. He climbed far down upon the rocks; on 
 the beaches, he pursued the retreating breakers. The 
 merest broken plank or rag of cordage was a treasure 
 in his eyes to be secured at the peril of his life. To see 
 him, with weak and stumbling footsteps, expose him- 
 self to the pursuit of the surf, or the snares and pitfalls 
 of the weedy rock, kept me in a perpetual terror. My 
 arm was ready to support him, my hand clutched him 
 by the skirt, I helped him to draw his pitiful discoveries 
 beyond the reach of the returning wave; a nurse accom- 
 panying a child of seven would have had no different 
 experience. 
 
 Yet, weakened as he was by the reaction from his 
 madness of the night before, tiie passions that smoul- 
 dered in his nature were those of a strong man. His 
 
.344 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 terror of the sea, although conquered for the moment, 
 was still undiminished; had the sea been a lake of living 
 flames, he could not have shrunk more panically from 
 its touch; and once, when his foot slipped and he 
 plunged to the midleg into a pool of water, the shriek 
 that came up out of his soul was like the cry of death. 
 He sat still for a while, panting like a dog, after that; 
 but his desire for the spoils of shipwreck triumphed once 
 more over his fears; once more he tottered among the 
 curded foam; once more he crawled upon the rocks 
 among the bursting bubbles; once more his whole heart 
 seemed to be set on driftwood; fit, if it was fit for any- 
 thing, to throw upon the fire. Pleased as he was with 
 what he found, he still incessantly grumbled at his ill- 
 fortune. 
 
 "Aros," he said, "is no a place for wrecks ava* — no 
 ava*. A* the years I 've dwalt here, this ane maks the 
 second; and the best o' the gear clean tint!" 
 
 " Uncle," said I, for we were now on a stretch of open 
 sand, where there was nothing to divert his nund, "I 
 saw you last night as I never thought to see you — you 
 were drunk." 
 
 "Na, na," he said, "no as bad as that. I had been 
 drinking, though. And to tell ye the God's truth, it 's 
 a thing I cannae mend. There 's nae soberer man than 
 me in my ordnar; but when I hear the wind blaw in 
 my lug,* it 's my belief that I gang gyte." ' 
 
 "You are a religious man," I replied, "and this is 
 sin." 
 
 "Ou," he returned, "if it wasnae sin, I dinnae ken 
 that I would care for 't. Ye see, man, it *s defiance. 
 There 's a sair spang * o' the auld sin o' the warld in yon 
 sea; it *s an unchristian business at the best o *t; an' 
 whiles when it gets up, an' the wind skreighs — the wind 
 
 ' Ear. » Crazy. » Grip. 
 
THE MERRY MEN 345 
 
 an' her are a kind of sib,* I 'm thinkin' — ^an' thae Merry 
 Men, the daft callants, blawin* and lauchin', and puir 
 souls in the deid thraws* warstlin' * the leelang nicht wi' 
 their bit ships — weel, it comes ower me like a glamour. 
 I 'm a deil, I ken 't. But I think naething o' the puir 
 sailor lads; I 'm wi' the sea, I 'm just like ane o' her ain 
 Meny Men." 
 
 I thought I should touch him in a joint of his har- 
 ness. I turned me towards the sea; the surf was run- 
 ning gaily, wave after wave, with their manes blowing 
 behind them, riding one after another up the beach, 
 towering, curving, falling one upon another on the 
 trampled sand. Without, the salt air, the scared gulls, 
 the widespread army of the sea-chargers, neighing to 
 each other, as they gathered together to the assault of 
 Aros; and close before us, that line on the flat sands 
 that, with all their number and their fuiy, they might 
 never pass. 
 
 "Thus far shalt thou go," said I, "and no farther." 
 And then I quoted as solemnly as I was able a verse that 
 I had often before fitted to the chorus of the breakers: — 
 
 But yet the Lord that is on high. 
 
 Is more of might by far. 
 Than noise of many waters is. 
 
 As great sea billows are. 
 
 "Ay," said my kinsman, "at the hinder end, the Lord 
 will triumph; I dinnae misdoobt that. But here on 
 earth, even silly men-folk daur Him to His face. It is 
 nae wise; I am nae sayin' that it 's wise; but it 's the 
 pride of the eye, and it 's the lust o' life, an' it 's the wale* 
 o' pleesures." 
 
 • Relatives. ' In the throes of death. 
 
 ' Struggling. * Choice. 
 
346 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 I said no more, for we had now begun to cross a neck 
 of land that lay between us and Sandag; and I withheld 
 my last appeal to the man's better reason till we should 
 stand upon the spot associated with his crime. Nor did 
 he pursue the subject; but he walked beside me with a 
 firmer step. The call that I had made upon his mind 
 acted like a stimulant, and I could see that he had for- 
 gotten his search for worthless jetsam, in a profound, 
 gloomy, and yet stirring train of thought. In three or 
 four minutes we had topped the brae and begun to go 
 down upon Sandag. The wreck had been roughly 
 handled by the sea; the stem had been spun round and 
 dragged a little lower down; and perhaps the stem had 
 been forced a little higher, for the two parts now lay 
 entirely separate on the beach. "When we came to the 
 grave I stopped, uncovered my head in the thick rain, 
 and, looking my kinsman in the face, addressed him. 
 
 "A man," said I, "was in God's providence suffered 
 to escape from mortal dangers; he was poor, he was 
 naked, he was wet, he was weary, he was a stranger; he 
 had every claim upon the bowels of your compassion; 
 it may be that he was the salt of the earth, holy, helpful, 
 and kind; it may be he was a man laden with iniquities 
 to whom death was the beginning of torment. I ask 
 you in the sight of heaven: Gordon Darnaway, where is 
 the man for whom Christ died?" 
 
 He started visibly at the last words; but there came 
 no answer, and his face expressed no feeling but a vague 
 alarm. 
 
 "You were my father's brother," I continued; "you 
 have taught me to count your house as if it were my 
 father's house; and we are both sinful men walking be- 
 fore the Lord among the sins and dangers of this life. 
 It is by our evil that God leads us into good ; we sin, I 
 dare not say by His temptation, but I must say vnth 
 
THE MERRY MEN 347 
 
 His consent; and to any but the brutish man his sins 
 are the beginning of wisdom. God has warned you by 
 this crime; He warns you still by the bloody grave be- 
 tween our feet; and if there shall follow no repentance, 
 no improvement, no return to Him, what can we look foi 
 but the following of some memorable judgment ?" 
 
 Even as I spoke the words, the eyes of my uncle wan- 
 dered from my face. A change fell upon his looks that 
 cannot be described; his features seemed to dwindle in 
 size, the colour faded from his cheeks, one hand rose 
 waveringly and pointed over my shoulder into the dis- 
 tance, and the oft-repeated name fell once more from 
 his lips: "The ChrisUAnna!" 
 
 I turned; and if I was not appalled to the same degree, 
 as I return thanks to Heaven that I had not the cause, 
 I was still startled by the sight that met my eyes. The 
 form of a man stood upright on the cabin-hutch of the 
 wrecked ship; his back was towards us; he appeared to 
 be scanning the o£Sng with shaded ^es, and his figure 
 was relieved to its full height, which was plainly veiy 
 great, against the sea and slgr. I have said a thousand 
 times that I am not superstitious; but at that moment, 
 with my mind running upon death and sin, the unex- 
 plained appearance of a stranger on that sea-girt, solitary 
 island filled me with a surprise that bordered close on 
 terror. It seemed scarce possible that any human soul 
 should have come ashore alive in such a sea as had raged 
 last night along the coasts of Aros; and the only vessel 
 within miles had gone down before our eyes among the 
 Merry Men. I was assailed with doubts that made sus- 
 pense unbearable, and, to put the matter to the touch ai 
 once, stepped forward and hailed the figure like a ship. 
 
 He turned about, and I thought he started to behold 
 us. At this my courage instantly revived, and I called 
 and signed to him to draw near, and he, on his part, 
 
348 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 dropped immediately to the sands, and began slowly to 
 approach, with many stops and hesitations. At each 
 repeated mark of the man's uneasiness I grew the more 
 confident myself; and I advanced another step, encour- 
 aging him as I did so with my head and hand. It was 
 plain the castaway had heard indifferent accounts of our 
 island hospitality; and indeed, about this time, the peo- 
 ple farther north had a sorry reputation. 
 
 "Why," I said, "the man is black!" 
 
 And just at that moment, in a voice that I could scarce 
 have recognised, my kinsman began swearing and pray- 
 ing in a mingled stream. I looked at him; he had' 
 fallen on his knees, his face was agonised; at each step 
 of the castaway's the pitch of his voice rose, the volu- 
 bility of his utterance and the fervour of his language re- 
 doubled. I call it prayer, for it was addressed to God; 
 but surely no such ranting incongruities were ever before 
 addressed to the Creator by a creature: surely if prayer 
 can be a sin, this mad harangue was sinful. I ran to 
 my kinsman, I seized him by the shoulders, I dragged 
 him to his feet. 
 
 "Silence, man," said I, "respect your God in words, 
 if not in action. Here, on the very scene of your trans- 
 gressions. He sends you an occasion of atonement. For- 
 ward and embrace it; welcome like a father yon creature 
 who comes trembling to your mercy." 
 
 With that, I tried to force him towards the black; but 
 he felled me to the ground, burst from my grasp, leav- 
 ing the shoulder of his jacket, and fled up the hillside 
 towards the top of Aros like a deer. I staggered to my 
 feet again, bruised and somewhat stunned; the negro 
 had paused in surprise, perhaps in terror, some halfway 
 between me and the wreck; my uncle was already far 
 away, bounding from rock to rock; and I thus found 
 myself torn for a time between two duties. But I judged. 
 
THE MERRY MEN 349 
 
 and I pray Heaven that I judged rightly, in favour of 
 the poor wretch upon the sands; his misfortune was at 
 least not plainly of his own creation; it was one, besides, 
 that I could certainly relieve; and I had begun by that 
 time to regard my uncle as an incurable and dismal 
 lunatic. I advanced accordingly towards the black, 
 who now awaited my approach with folded arms, like 
 one prepared for either destiny. As I came nearer, he 
 reached forth his hand with a great gesture, such as I 
 had seen from the pulpit, and spoke to me in something 
 of a pulpit voice, but not a word was comprehensible. 
 I tried him first in English, then in Gaelic, both in vain; 
 so that it was clear we must rely upon the tongue of looks 
 and gestures. Thereupon I signed to him to follow me, 
 which he did readily and with a grave obeisance like a 
 fallen king; all the while there had come no shade of 
 alteration in his face, neither of anxiety while he was 
 still waiting, nor of relief now that he was reassured; if 
 he were a slave, as I supposed, I could not but judge he 
 must have fallen from some high place in his own coun- 
 try, and fallen as he was, I could not but admire his 
 bearing. As we passed the grave, I paused and raised 
 my hands and eyes to heaven in token of respect and 
 sorrow for the dead; and he, as, if in answer, bowed low 
 and spread his hands abroad; it was a strange motion, 
 but done like a thing of common custom; and I supposed 
 it was ceremonial in the land from which he came. At 
 the same time he pointed to my uncle, whom we could 
 just see perched upon a knoll, and touched his head to 
 indicate that he was mad. 
 
 "Wn took the long way round the shore, for I feared to 
 excite my uncie it we struck across the island; and as 
 we walked, I had time enough to mature the little dra- 
 matic exhibition by which I hoped to satisfy my doubts. 
 Accordingly, pausing on a rock, I proceeded to imitate 
 
850 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 before the negro the action of the man whom I had seen 
 the day before taking bearings with the compass at 
 Sandag. He understood me at once, and, taking the 
 imitation out of my hands, showed me where the boat 
 was, pointed out seaward as if to indicate the position of 
 the schooner, and then down along the edge of the rock 
 with the words " Espirito Santo," strangely pronounced, 
 but clear enough for recognition. I had thus been right 
 in my conjecture; the pretended historical inquiry had 
 been but a cloak for treasure-hunting; the man who had 
 played Dr. Robertson was the same as the foreigner who 
 visited Grisapol in spring, and now, with many others, 
 lay dead under the Roost of Aros: there had their greed 
 brought them, there should their bones be tossed for 
 evermore. In the meantime the black continued his 
 imitation of the scene, now looking up sbprard as though 
 watching the approach of the storm; now, in the char- 
 acter of a seaman, waving the rest to come aboard; now 
 as an officer, running along the rock and entering the 
 boat; and anon bending over imaginary oars with the 
 air of a hurried boatman; but all with the same solemnity 
 of manner, so that I was never even moved to smile. 
 Lastly, he indicated to me, by a pantomime not to be 
 described in words, how he himself had gone up to ex- 
 amine the stranded wreck, and, to his grief and indigna- 
 tion, had been deserted by his comrades; and thereupon 
 folded his arms once more, and stooped his head, like 
 one accepting fate. 
 
 The mystery of his presence being thus solved for me, 
 I explained to him by means of a sketch the fate of the 
 vessel and of all aboard her. He showed no surprise 
 nor sorrow, and, with a sudden lifting of his open hand, 
 seemed to dismiss his former friends or masters (which- 
 ever they had been) into God's pleasure. Respect came 
 upon me and grew stronger, the more I observed him; 
 
THE MERRY MEN 351 
 
 I saw he had a powerful mind and a sober and 
 severe character, such as I loved to commune with; 
 and before we reached the house of Aros I had al- 
 most forgotten, and wholly forgiven him, his uncanny 
 colour. 
 
 To Maiy I told all that had passed without suppres- 
 sion, though I own my heart failed me; but I did wrong 
 to doubt her sense of justice. 
 
 " You did the right," she said.. " God's will be done." 
 And she set out meat for us at once. 
 
 As soon as I was satisfied, I bade Rorie keep an eye 
 upon the castaway, who was still eating, and set forth 
 again myself to find my uncle. I had not gone far before 
 I saw him sitting in the same place, upon the very top- 
 most knoll, and seemingly in the same attitude as when 
 I had last observed him. From that point, as I have 
 said, the most of Aros and the neighbouring Ross would 
 be spread below him like a map; and it was plain that 
 he kept a bright look-out in all directions, for my head 
 had scarcely risen above the summit of the first ascent 
 before he had leaped to his feet and turned as if to face 
 me. I hailed him at once, as well as I was able, in the 
 same tones and words as I had often used before, when 
 I had come to summon him to dinner. He made not 
 so much as a movement in reply. I passed on a little 
 farther, and again tried parley, with the same result. 
 But when I began a second time to advance, his insane 
 fears blazed up again, and still in dead silence, but with 
 incredible speed, he began to flee from before me along 
 the rocty summit of the hill. An hour before, he had 
 been dead weary, and I had been comparatively active. 
 But now his strerfgth was recruited by the fervour of in- 
 sanity, and it would have been vain for me to dream of 
 pursuit. Nay, the very attempt, I thought, might have 
 inflamed his terrors, and thus increased the miseries of 
 
352 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 our position. And I had nothing left but to turn home- 
 ward and make my sad report to Mary, 
 
 She heard it, as she had heard the first, with a con- 
 cerned composure, and, bidding me lie down and take 
 that rest of which I stood so much in need, set forth 
 I herself in quest of her misguided father. At that age it 
 ' would have been a strange thing that put me from either 
 meat or sleep; I slept long and deep; and it was already 
 long past noon before I awoke and came downstairs into 
 the kitchen. Mary, Rcrie, and the black castaway were 
 seated about the fire Jn silence; and I could see that 
 Mary had been weeping. There was cause enough, as 
 I soon learned, for tears. First she, and then Rorie, had 
 been forth to seek my uncle; each in turn had found 
 him perched upon the hill-top, and from each in turn he 
 had silently and swiftly fled. Rorie had tried to chase 
 him, but in vain; madness lent a new vigour to his 
 bounds; he sprang from rock to rock over the widest 
 gullies; he scoured like the wind along the hill-tops; he 
 doubled and twisted like a hare before the dogs; and 
 Rorie at length gave in; and the last that he saw, my 
 uncle was seated as before upon the crest of Aros. Even 
 during the hottest excitement of the chase, even when 
 the fleet-footed servant had come, for a moment, very 
 near to capture him, the poor lunatic had uttered not a 
 sound. He fled, and he was silent, like a beast; and 
 this silence had terrified his pursuer. 
 
 There was something heart-breaking in the situation. 
 How to capture the madman, how to feed him in the 
 meanwhile, and what to do with him when he was 
 captured, were the three difficulties that we had to 
 solve. 
 
 "The black," said I, "is the cause of this attack. It 
 may even be his presence in the house that keeps my 
 uncle on the hill. We have done the fair thing; he has 
 
THE MERRY MEN 353 
 
 been fed and warmed under this roof; now I propose 
 that Rorie put him across the bay in the coble;, and take 
 him through the Ross as far as Grisapol." 
 
 In this proposal Mary heartily concurred; and bidding 
 the black follow us, we all three descended to the pier. 
 Certainly, Heaven's will was declared against Gordon 
 Darnaway; a thing had happened, never paralleled be- 
 fore in Aros; during the storm, the coble had broken 
 loose, and, striking on the rough splinters of the pier, 
 now lay in four feet of water with one side stove in. 
 Three days of work at least would be required to make 
 her float. But I was not to be beaten. I led the whole 
 party round to where the gut was narrowest, swam to 
 the other side, and called to the black to follow me. He 
 signed, with the same clearness and quiet as before, that 
 he knew not the art; and there was truth apparent in 
 his signals, it would have occurred to none of us to doubt 
 his truth; and that hope being over, we must all go back 
 even as we came to the house of Aros, the negro walking 
 in our midst without embarrassment. 
 
 All we could do that day was to make one more at- 
 tempt to communicate with the unhappy madman. 
 Again he was visible on his perch; again he fled in silence. 
 But food and a great cloak were at least left for his com- 
 fort; the rain, besides, had cleared away, and the night 
 promised to be even warm. We might compose our- 
 selves, we thought, until the morrow; rest was the chief 
 requisite, that we might be strengthened for unusual 
 exertions; and as none cared to talk, we separated at 
 an early hour. 
 
 I lay long awake, planning a campaign for, the mor- 
 row. I was to place the black on the side ofSandag, 
 whence he should head my uncle towards the house; 
 Rorie in the west, I on the east, were to complete the 
 cordon, as best we might. It seemed to me, the more I 
 
354 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 recalled the configuration of the island, that it should be 
 possible, though hard, to force him down upon the low 
 ground along Aros Bay; and once there, even with the 
 strength of his madness, ultimate escape was hardly to 
 be feared. It was on his terror of the black that I relied; 
 for I made sure, however he might run, it would not be 
 in the direction of the man whom he supposed to have 
 returned from the dead, and thus one point of the com- 
 pass at least would be secure. 
 
 When at length I fell asleep, it was to be awakened 
 shortly after by a dream of wrecks, black men, and sub- 
 marine adventure; and I found myself so shaken and 
 fevered that I arose, descended the stair, and stepped 
 out before the house. Within, Rorie and the black were 
 asleep together in the kitchen; outside was a wonderful 
 clear night of stars, with here and there a cloud still 
 hanging, last stragglers of the tempest. It was near the 
 top of the fiood, and the Merry Men were roaring in the 
 windless quiet of the nigkt Never, not even in the 
 height of the tempest, had I heard their song with greater 
 awe. Now, when the winds were gathered home, when 
 the deep was dandling itself back into its summer slum- 
 ber, and when the stars rained their gentle light over 
 land and sea, the voice of these tide-breakers was still 
 raised for havoc. They seemed, indeed, to be a part of 
 the world's evil and the tragic side of life. Nor were 
 their meaningless vociferations the only sounds that 
 broke the silence of the ni^t. For I could hear, now 
 shrill and thrilling and now almost drowned, the note of 
 a human voice that accompanied the uproar of the Roost. 
 I knew it for my kinsman's; and a great fear fell upon 
 me of God's judgments, and the evil in the world. I 
 went back again into the darkness of the house as into a 
 place of shelter, and lay long upon my bed, pondering 
 these mysteries. 
 
THE MERRY MEN 355 
 
 It was late when I again woke, and I leaped into my 
 clothes and hurried to the kitchen. No one was there; 
 Rorie and the black had both stealthily departed long 
 before; and my heart stood still at the discovery. I 
 could rely on Bx)rie's heart, but I placed no trust in his 
 discretion. If he had thus set out without a word, he 
 was plainly bent upon some service to my uncle. But 
 what service could he hope to render even alone, far less 
 in the company of the man in whom my uncle found 
 his fears incarnated? Even if I were not already 
 too late to prevent some deadly mischief > it was plain 
 I must delay no longer. With the thought I was 
 out of the house; and often as I have run on the 
 rough sides of Aros, I never ran as I did that fatal 
 morning. I do not believe I put twelve minutes to the 
 whole ascent. 
 
 My uncle was gone from his perch. The basket had 
 indeed been torn op§n and the meat scattered on the 
 turf; but, as we found afterwards, no mouthful had 
 been tasted; and there was not another trace of hu- 
 man existence in that wide field of view. Day had 
 already filled the clear heavens; the sun already lighted 
 in a rosy bloom upon the crest of Ben Kyaw; but all 
 below me the rude knolls of Aros and the shield of 
 the sea lay steeped in the clear darkling twilight of 
 the dawn. 
 
 "Rorie!" I cried; and again "Rorie!" My voice 
 died in the silence, but there came no answer back. If 
 there were indeed an enterprise afoot to catch my uncle, 
 it was plainly not in fleetness of foot, but in dexterity of 
 stalking, that the hunters placed their trust. I ran on 
 farther, keeping the higher spurs, and looking right and 
 left, nor did I pause again till I was on the mount above 
 Sandag. I could see the wreck, the uncovered belt of 
 sand, the waves idly beating, the long ledge of rocks. 
 
356 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 and on either hand the tumbled knolls, boulders, and 
 gullies of the island. But still no human thing. 
 
 At a stride the sunshine feU on Aros, and the shadows 
 and colours leaped into being. Not half a moment later, 
 below me to the west, sheep began to scatter as in a 
 panic. There came a cry. I saw my uncle running. I 
 saw the black jump up in hot pursuit; and before I had 
 time to understand, Rorie also had appeared, calling 
 directions in Gaelic as to a dog herding sheep. 
 
 I took to my heels to interfere, and perhaps I had 
 done better to have waited where I was, for I was the 
 means of cutting off the madman's last escape. There 
 was nothing before him from that moment but the grave, 
 the wreck, and the sea in Sandag Bay. And yet heaven 
 knows that what I did was for the best. 
 
 My uncle Gordon saw in what direction, horrible to 
 him, the chase was driving him. He doubled, darting 
 to the right and left; but high as the fever ran in his 
 veins, the black was still the swifter. Turn where he 
 would, he was still forestalled, still driven towards the 
 scene of his crime. Suddenly he began to shriek aloud, 
 so that the coast re-echoed; and now both I and Borie 
 were calling on the black to stop. But all was vain, for 
 it was written otherwise. The pursuer still ran, the 
 chase still sped before him screaming; they avoided the 
 grave, and skimmed close past the timbers of the wreck; 
 in a breath they had cleared the sand; and still my kins- 
 man did not pause, but dashed straight into the surf; 
 and the black, now almost within reach, still followed 
 swiftly behind him. Rorie and I both stopped, for the 
 thing was now beyond the hands of men, and these were 
 the decrees of God that came to pass before our eyes. 
 There was never a sharper ending. On that steep 
 beach they were beyond their depth at a bound; neither 
 could swim; the black rose once for a moment with a 
 
THE MERRY MEN 357 
 
 throttling cry; but the current had them, racing sea- 
 ward; and if ever they came up again, which God alone 
 can tell, it would be ten mintues after, at the far end of 
 Aros Eoosti where the sea-birds hover fishing. 
 
MARKHEIM* 
 
 "Yes," said the dealer, "our windfalls are of various 
 kinds. Some customers are ignorant, and then I touch 
 a dividend on my superior knowledge. Some are dis- 
 honest," and here he held up the candle, so that the 
 ligh^; fell strongly on his visitor, "and in that case," he 
 continued, "I profit by my virtue." 
 
 Markheim had but just entered from the daylight 
 streets, and his eyes had not yet grown familiar with 
 the mingled shine and darkness in the shop. At these 
 pointed words, and before the near presence of the Same, 
 he blinked painfully and looked aside. 
 
 The dealer chuckled. "You come to me on Christ- 
 mas Day," he resumed, "when you know that I am 
 alone in my house, put up my shutters, and make a 
 point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay 
 for that; you will have to pay for my loss of time, when 
 I should be balancing my books; you will have to pay, 
 besides, for a kind of manner that I remark in you 
 to-day very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, 
 and ask no awkward questions; but when a customer 
 cannot look me in the eye, he has to pay for it." The 
 dealer once more chuckled; and then, changing to his 
 usual business voice, though still with a note of irony, 
 "You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you 
 
 • Written in Boiimemouth, in 1884, when Stevenson's body was 
 enfeebled by illness, but his mind strongly wrestling with the 
 problem of the duality of our moral nature, a problem afterwards 
 worked out with more completeness in The Strange Case of Dr. 
 Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was published in the Christmas number 
 of Unwin's Annual, in 1885; and afterwards in the volume entitled 
 The Merry Men, and Other Tales, 1887. 
 
 358 
 
MARKHEIM 359 
 
 came into the possession of the object?" he continued. 
 "Still your uncle's cabinet? A remarkable collector, 
 sir!" 
 
 And the little pale, round-shouldered dealer stood al- 
 most on tip-toe, looking over the top of his gold spec- 
 tacles, and nodding his head with eveiy mark of disbelief. 
 Markheim returned his gaze with one of infinite pity, 
 and a touch of horror. 
 
 "This time," said he, "you are in error. I have not 
 come to sell, but to buy. I have no curios to dispose of; 
 my uncle's cabinet is bare to the wg.inscot; even were it 
 still intact, I have done well on the Stock Exchange, and 
 should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my 
 errand to-day is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas 
 present for a lady," he continued, waxing more fluent as 
 he struck into the speech he had prepared; "and cer- 
 tainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing you 
 upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected 
 yesterday; I must produce my little compliment at 
 dinner; and, as you very well know, a rich marriage is 
 not a thing to be neglected." 
 
 There followed a pause, during which the dealer 
 seemed to weigh this statement incredulously. The tick- 
 ing of many clocks among the curious Inmber of the shop, 
 and the faint rushing of the cabs in a near thoroughfare, 
 filled up the interval of silence. 
 
 "Well, sir," said the dealer, "be it so. You are an 
 old customer after all; and if, as you say, you have the 
 chance of a good marriage, far be it from me to be 
 an obstacle. Here is a nice thing for a lady now," he 
 went on, " this hand glass — fifteenth century, warranted; 
 comes from a good collection, too; but I reserve the 
 name, in the interests of my customer, who was just like 
 yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole heir of a re- 
 markable collector." 
 
360 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 The dealer, while he thus ran on in his dry and biting 
 voice, had Btooped to take the object from its place; and^ 
 
 as he had done so, a shock had passed through Mark* 
 heim, a start both of hand and foot, a sudden leap of 
 many tumultuous passions to the face. It passed as 
 swiftly as it came, and left no trace beyond a certain 
 trembling of the hand that now received the glass. 
 
 "A glass," he said hoarsely, and then paused, and re- 
 peated it more clearly. "A glass? For Christmas? 
 Surely not?" 
 
 "And why not?" cried the dealer. "Why not a 
 glass?" « 
 
 Markheim was looking upon him with an indefinable 
 expression. "You ask me why not?" he said. "Why, 
 look here — ^look in it — look at yourself 1 Do you like to 
 see it? No! nor I — ^nor any man." 
 
 The little man had jumped back when Markheim 
 had so suddenly confronted him with the mirror; but 
 now, perceiving there was nothing worse on hand, he 
 chuckled. "Your future lady, sir, must be pretty hard 
 favoured," said he. 
 
 "I ask you," said Markheim, "for a Christmas 
 present, and you give me this — this damned reminder of 
 years, and sins and follies — this hand-conscience! Did 
 you mean it ? Had you a thought in your mind ? Tell 
 me. It will be better for you if you do. Come, tell me 
 about yourself. I hazard a guess now, that you are in 
 secret a very charitable man?" 
 
 The dealer looked closely at his companion. It was 
 very odd, Markheim did not appear to be laughing; 
 there was something in his face like an eager sparkle of 
 hope, but nothing of mirth. 
 
 "What are you driving at?" the dealer asked 
 
 "Not charitable?" returned the other, gloomily. 
 "Not charitable; not pious; not scrupulous; unloving. 
 
MARKHEIM 3tt, 
 
 unbeloved; a hand to get money, a safe to keep it. Is 
 that all? Dear God, man, is that all?" 
 
 "I will tell you what it is," began the dealer, with 
 some sharpness, and then broke off again into a chuckle. 
 " But I see this is a love match of yours, and you have 
 been drinking the lady's health." 
 
 "Ah!" cried Markheim, with a strange curiosity. 
 "Ah, have you been in love? Tell me about that." 
 
 "I," cried the dealer. "I in love! I never had the 
 time, nor have I the time to-day for all this nonsense. 
 Will you take the glass?" 
 
 "Where is the hurry?" returned Markheim. "It is 
 very pleasant to stand here talking; and life is so short 
 and insecure that I would not hurry away from any 
 pleasure — no, not even from so mild a one as this. We 
 should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a 
 man at a cliff's edge. Every second is a cliff, if you 
 think upon it— a cliff a mile high — high enough, if we 
 fall, to dash us out of every feature of humanity. Hence 
 it is best to talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each other; 
 why should we wear this mask ? Let us be confidential. 
 Who knows, we might become friends?" 
 
 " I have just one word to say to you," said the dealer. 
 " Either make your purchase, or walk out of my shop." 
 
 "True, true," said Markheim. " Enough fooling. To 
 business. Show me something else." 
 
 The dealer stooped once more, this time to replace 
 the glass upon the shelf, his thin blond hair falling over 
 his eyes as he did so. Markheim moved a little nearer, 
 with one hand in the pocket of his greatcoat; he drew 
 himself up and filled his lungs; at the same time many 
 different emotions were depicted together on his face — 
 terror, horror, and resolve, fascination and a physical 
 repulsion; and through a haggard lift of his upper lip, 
 his teeth looked out. 
 
362 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 "This, perhaps, may suit," observed the dealer; and 
 then, as he began to re-arise, Markheim bounded from 
 behind upon his victim. The long, skewerlike dagger 
 flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen, strik- 
 ing his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the 
 floor in a heap. 
 
 I Time had some score of small voices in that shop, 
 ' some stately and slow as was becoming to their great age; 
 {others garrulous and hurried. All these told out the 
 ^seconds in an indicate chorus of tickings. Then the 
 passage of a lad's feet, heavily running on the pavement, 
 broke in upon these smaller voices and startled Mark- 
 heim into the consciousness of his surroundings. He 
 looked about him awfully. The candle stood on the 
 counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and 
 by that inconsiderable movement, the whole room was 
 filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: 
 the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness 
 swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of 
 the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering 
 like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and 
 peered into that leaguer* of shadows vsith a long slit of 
 daylight like a pointing finger. 
 
 From these fear-stricken rovings, Markheim's eyes 
 returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both 
 humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely 
 meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in 
 that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much saw- 
 dust. Markheim had feared to see it, and lo! it was 
 nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old 
 clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. 
 There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning 
 hinges or direct the miracle of locomotion-!— there it 
 must lie till it was found. Found I ay, and then? Theo 
 * Besieger's camp. 
 
MARKHEIM 36a 
 
 would this dead flesh lift up a cry that would ring over 
 England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit. 
 Ay, dead or not, this was still the enemy. "Time was 
 that when the brains were out," he thought; and ihe 
 first word struck into his mind. Time, now that the 
 deed was accomplished — time, which had closed for the 
 victim, had become instant and momentous for the 
 slayer. 
 
 The thought was yet in his mind, when, first one and 
 then another, with every variety of pace and voice — one 
 deep as the bell from a cathedral tumst, another ringing 
 on its treble notes the prelude of a waltz — the clocks 
 began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon. 
 
 The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that 
 dumb chamber staggered him. He began to bestir him- 
 self, going to and fro with the candle, beleaguered by 
 moving shadows, and startled to the soul by chance re- 
 flections. In many rich mirrors, some of home designs, 
 some from Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face re- 
 peated and repeated, as it were an army of spies; his 
 own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of his 
 own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding 
 quiet. And still as he continued to fill his pockets, his 
 mind accused him, with a sickening iteration, of the 
 thousand faults of his design. He should have chosen 
 a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; 
 he should not have used a knife; he should have been 
 more cautious, and only bound and gagged the dealer, 
 and not killed him; he should have been more bold, 
 and killed the servant also; he should have done all 
 things otherwise; poignant regrets, weary, incessant 
 toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, 
 to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the 
 irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this activ- 
 ity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats in a deserted 
 
364 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain with 
 riot; the hand of the constable would fall heavy on his 
 shoulder, and his nerves would jerk like a hooked fish; 
 or he beheld, in galloping defile, the dock, the prison, 
 the gallows, and the black coffin. 
 
 I Terror of the people in the street sat down before his 
 mind like a besieging army. It was impossible, he 
 thought, but that some rumour of the struggle must have 
 reached their ears and set on edge their curiosity; and 
 now, in all the neighbouring houses, he divined them 
 sitting motionless and with uplifted ear — ^solitary people, 
 condemned to spend Christmas dwelling alone on mem- 
 ories of the past, and now startingly recalled from that 
 tender exercise; happy family parties, struck into silence 
 round the table, the mother still with raised finger: every 
 degree and age and humour, but all, by their own hearts, 
 prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to 
 hang him. Sometimes it seemed to him he could not 
 move too softly; the clink of the tall Bohemian goblets 
 rang out loudly like a bell; and alarmed by the bigness 
 of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. And 
 then, again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the 
 very silence of the place appeared a source of peril, and 
 a thing to strike and freeze the passer-by; and he would 
 step more boldly, and bustle aloud among the contents 
 of the shop, and imitate, with elaborate bravado, the 
 movements of a busy man at ease in his own house. 
 f But he was now so pulled about by different alarms 
 ( that, while one portion of his mind was still alert and 
 cunning, another trembled on the brink of lunacy. One 
 hallucination in particular took a strong hold on his 
 credulity. The neighbour hearkening with white face 
 beside his window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible 
 surmise on the pavement — these could at worst suspect, 
 they could not know; through the brick walls and shut- 
 
MARKHEIM 365 
 
 tered windows only sounds could penetrate. But here, 
 within the house, was he alone? He knew he was; he 
 had watched the servant set forth sweethearting, in her 
 poor best, "out for the day" written in every ribbon and 
 smile. Yes, he was alone, of course; and yet, in the 
 bulk of empty house above him, he could surely hear a 
 stir of delicate footing — ^he was surely conscious, inex- 
 plicably conscious of some presence. Ay, surely; to 
 every room and corner of the house his imagination fol- 
 lowed it; and now it was a faceless thing, and yet had 
 eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of himself; 
 and yet again behold the image of the dead dealer, re- 
 inspired with cunning and hatred. 
 
 At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the 
 open door which still seemed to repel his eyes. The house 
 was tall, the skylight small and dirty, the day blind with 
 fog; and the light that filtered down to the ground story 
 was exceedingly faint, and showed dimly on the threshold 
 of the shop. And yet, in that strip of doubtful bright- 
 ness, did there not hang wavering a shadow? 
 
 Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentle- 
 man began to beat with a staff on the shop-door, accom- 
 panying his blows with shouts and railleries in which 
 the dealer was continually called upon by name. Mark- 
 heim, smitten into ice glanced at the dead man. But 
 no! he lay quite still; he was fled away far beyond ear- 
 shot of these blows and shoutings; he was sunk beneath 
 seas of silence; and his name, which would once have 
 caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had be- 
 come an empty sound. And presently the jovial gentle- 
 man desisted from his knocking and departed. 
 
 Here was a broad hint to hurry what remained to be 
 done, to get forth from this accusing neighbourhood, to 
 plunge into a bath of London multitudes, and to reach, 
 on the other side of day, that haven of safety and appar- 
 
366 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 ent innocence — ^his bed. One visitor had come: at any 
 moment another might follow and be more obstinate. 
 To have done the deed, and yet not to reap the profit, 
 would be too abhorrent a failure. The money, that was 
 now Markheim's concern; and as a means to that, the 
 keys. 
 
 He glanced over hk ,aoulder at the open door, where 
 the shadow was still lingering and shivering; and with 
 no conscious repugnance of the mind, yet with a tremour 
 of the belly, he drew near the body of his victim. The 
 human character had quite departed. Like a suit half- 
 stuffed with bran, the limbs lay scattered, the trunk 
 doubled, on the floor; and yet the thing repelled him. 
 Although so dingy and inconsiderable to the eye, he 
 feared it might have more significance to the touch. He 
 took the body by the shoulders, and turned it on its back. 
 It was strangely light and supple, and the limbs, as if 
 they had been broken, fell into the oddest postures. The 
 face was robbed of all expression; but it was as pale as 
 wax, and shockingly smeared with blood about one 
 temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing 
 circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, to 
 a certain fair day in a fisher's village: a grey day, a 
 piping wind, a crowd upon the street, the blare of brasses, 
 the booming of drums, the nasal voice of a ballad singer; 
 and a boy going to and fro, buried over head in the crowd 
 and divided between interest and fear, until, coming 
 out upon the chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth 
 and a great screen with pictures, dismally designed, gar- 
 ishly coloured: Brownrigg with her apprentice; the 
 Mannings with their murdered guest; Weare in the 
 death-grip of Thurtell; and a score besides of famous 
 crimes. The thing was as clear as an illusion; he was 
 once again that little b6y; he was looking once again, 
 and with the same sense of physical revolt, at these vile 
 
MARKHEIM 367 
 
 pictures; he was still stunned by the thumping of the 
 drums. A bar of that day's musie returned upon his 
 memory; and at that, for the first time, a qualm came 
 over him, a breath of nausea, a sudden weakness of the 
 joints, which he must instantly resist and conquer. 
 
 He judged it more prudent to confront than to flee 
 from these considerations; looking the more hardily in 
 the dead face, bending his mind to realise the nature 
 and greatness of his crime. So little a while ago that 
 face had moved with every change of sentiment, that 
 pale mouth had spoken, that body had been all on fire 
 with governable energies; and now, and by his act, that 
 piece of life had been arrested, as the horologist, with 
 interjected finger, arrests the beating of the clock. So 
 he reasoned in vain; he could rise to no more remorse- 
 ful consciousness; the same heart which had shuddered 
 before the painted efiBgies of crime, looked on its reality 
 unmoved. At best, he felt a gleam of pity for one whe 
 had been endowed in vain with all those faculties that 
 can make the world a garden of enchantment, one who 
 had never lived and who was now dead. But of peni- 
 tence, no, not a tremour. 
 
 With that, shaking himself clear of these considera- 
 tions, he found the keys and advanced towards the open 
 door of the shop. Outside, it had begun to rain smartly; 
 and the sound of the shower upon the roof had banished 
 silence. Like some dripping cavern, the chambers of 
 the house were haunted by an incessant echoing, which 
 filled the ear and mingled with the ticking of the clocks. 
 And, as Markheim approached the door, he seemed to 
 hear, in answer to his own cautious tread,. the steps of 
 anolher foot withdrawing up the stair. The shadow 
 still palpitated loosely on the threshold. He threw a 
 ton's weight of resolve upon his muscles, and drew back 
 the door. 
 
368 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 The faint, foggy daylight glimmered dimly on the 
 bare floor and stairs; on the bright suit of armoui 
 posted, halbert in hand, upon the landing; and on the 
 dark wood-carvings, and framed pictures that hung 
 against the yellow panels of the wainscot. So loud was 
 the beating of the rain through all the house that, in 
 Markheim's ears, it began to be distinguished into many 
 different sounds. Footsteps and sighs, the tread of 
 regiments marching in the distance, the chink of mon^ 
 in the counting, and the creaking of doors held stealthily 
 ajar, appeared to mingle with the patter of the drops 
 upon (iie cupola and the gushing of the water in the 
 pipes. The sense that he was not alone grew upon him 
 to the verge of madness. On every side he was haunted 
 and begirt by presences. He heard them moving in the 
 upper chambers; from the shop, he heard the dead man 
 getting to his legs; and as he began with a great effort 
 to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and fol- 
 lowed stealthily behind. If he were but deaf, he thought, 
 how tranquilly he would possess his soul! And then 
 again, and hearkening with ever fresh attention, he 
 blessed himself for that unresting sense which held the 
 outposts and stood a trusty sentinel upon his life. His 
 head turned continually on his neck; his eyes, which 
 seemed starting from their orbits, scouted on every side, 
 and on every side were half-rewarded as with the tail of 
 something nameless vanishing. The four-and-twenty 
 steps to the first floor were four-and-twenty agonies. 
 
 On that first storey, the doors stood ajar, three of 
 them like three ambushes, shaking his nerves like the 
 tLroats of cannon. He could never again, he felt, be 
 sufficiently immured and fortified from men's observing 
 •syes; he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried 
 amon^ bedclothes, and invisible to all but God. And at 
 tfiat thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of 
 
MARKHEIM 369 
 
 other murderers and the fear they were said to entePv 
 tain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with 
 him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous 
 and immutable procedure, they should preserve some 
 damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold 
 more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission* 
 3n the continuity of man's experience, some wilful ille- 
 gality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending 
 on the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and 
 what if nature, as the defeated tyrant overthrew the 
 chess-board, should break the mould of their succession ? 
 The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said) when 
 the winter changed the time of its appearance. The like 
 might befall Markheim: the solid walls might become 
 transparent and reveal his doings like those of bees in a 
 glass hive; the stout planks might yield under his foot 
 like quicksands and detain him in their clutch; ay, and 
 there were soberer accidents that might destroy him: if, 
 for instance, the house should fall and imprison him 
 beside the body of his victim; or the house next door 
 should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him from all 
 sides. These things he "feared; and, in a sense, these 
 things might be called the hands of God reached forth 
 against sin. But about God himself he was at ease; his 
 act was doubtless exceptional, but so were his excuses, 
 which God knew; it was there, and not among men, 
 that he felt sure of justice. 
 
 When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and 
 shut the door behind him, he was aware of a respite 
 from alarms. The room was quite dismantled, uncar- 
 peted besides, and strewn with packing-cases and incon- 
 gruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he 
 beheld himself at various angles, like an actor on a stage; 
 many pictures, framed and unframed, standing with 
 ■ Literally cutting apart; here in the sense of gap. 
 
370 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 their faces to the wall; a fine Sheraton sideboard, a cab- 
 inet of marquetry, and a great old bed, with tapestry 
 hangings. The windows opened to the floor; but by 
 great good fortune the lower part of the shutters had 
 been closed, and this concealed him from the neighbours. 
 Here, then, Markheim drew in a packing-case before 
 the cabinet, and began to search among the keys. It 
 was a long business, for there were many; and it was 
 irksome, besides; for, after all, there might be nothing 
 in the cabinet, and time was on the wing. But the close- 
 ness of the occupation sobered him. With the tail of his 
 eye he saw the door — even glanced at it from time to 
 time directly, like a besieged commander pleased to 
 verify the good estate of his defences. But in truth he 
 was at peace. The rain falling in the street sounded 
 natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the 
 notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, 
 and the voices of many children took up the air and 
 words. How stately, how comfortable was the m^dy! 
 How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to 
 it smilingly, as he sorted out the keys; and his mind was 
 thronged with answerabJs ideas and images; church- 
 going children and the pealing of the high organ; chil- 
 dren afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on the 
 brambly common, kite-fliers in the windy and cloud- 
 navigated sky; and then, at another cadence of the 
 hymn, back again to church, and the somnolence of 
 summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the par- 
 son (which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted 
 Jacobean tombs, and the dim lettering of the Ten Com- 
 mandments in the chancel. 
 
 And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was 
 startled to his feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a 
 bursting gush of blood, went over him, and theu he 
 stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mounted the 
 
MARKHEIM 371 
 
 stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was laid 
 upon the knob, and the lock clicked, and the door 
 opened. 
 
 Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he 
 knew not, whether the dead man walking, or the official 
 ministers of human justice, or some chance witness 
 blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows. But 
 when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round 
 the room, looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in 
 friendly recognition, and then withdrew again, and the 
 door closed behind it, his fear broke loose from his con- 
 trol in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this the visitant 
 returned. 
 
 "Did you call me?" he asked, pleasantly, and with 
 that he entered the room and closed the door behind him. 
 
 Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his ^yes. 
 Perhaps there was a film upon his sight, but the outlines 
 of the new comer seemed to change and waver like those 
 of the idols in the wavering candle-light of the shop; 
 and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he 
 thought he bore a likeness to himself; and always, like I 
 a lump of living terror, there lay in his bosom the con- 
 viction that this thing was not of the earth and not of j 
 God. 
 
 And yet the creature had a strange air of the com- 
 monplace, as he stood looking on Markheim with a 
 smile; and when he added: "You are looking for the 
 money, I believe?" it was in the tones of everyday 
 politeness. 
 , Markheim made no answer. 
 
 "I should warn you," resumed the other, "that the 
 maid has left her sweetheart earlier than usual and will 
 soon be here. If Mr. Markheim be found in this house, 
 I need not describe to him the consequences." 
 
 "You know me?" cried the murderer. 
 
372 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 The visitor smiled. "You have long been a favour- 
 ite of mine," he said; "and I have long observed and 
 often sought to help you." 
 
 "What are you?" cried Markheim: "the devil?" 
 
 "What I may be," returned the other, "cannot affect 
 the service I propose to render you." 
 
 "It can," cried Markheim; "it does! Be helped by 
 you? No, never; not by you I You do not know me 
 yet; thank God, you do not know me!" 
 
 " I know you," replied the visitant, with a sort of kind 
 severity or rather firmness. "I know you to the soul." 
 
 "Know me!" cried Markheim. "Who can do so? 
 My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have 
 lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are bet- 
 ter than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. 
 You see each dragged away by life, like one whom 
 bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had 
 their own control — if you could see their faces, they 
 would be altogether different, they would shine out for 
 heroes and saints! I am worse than most; my self is 
 more overlaid; my excuse is known to me and God. 
 But, had I the time, I could disclose myself." 
 
 "To me?" inquired the visitant. 
 
 " To you before all," returned the murderer. " I sup- 
 posed you were intelligent. I thought — since you es^st 
 — ^you would prove a reader of the heart. And yet you 
 would propose to judge me by my acts! Think of it; 
 my acts! I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; 
 giants have dragged me by the wrists since I was born 
 out of my mother — the giants of circumstance. And 
 you would judge me by my acts! But can you not look 
 within ? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to 
 me? Can you not see within me the clear writing of 
 conscience, never blurred by any wilful sophistry, al- 
 though too often disregarded? Can you not read me 
 
MARKHEIM 373 
 
 for a thing that surely must be common as humanity — 
 <lie unwilling sinner?" 
 
 "All this is very feelingly expressed," was the reply, 
 " but it regards me not. These points of consistency are 
 beyond my province, and I care not in the least by what 
 compulsion you may have been dragged away, so as you 
 are but carried in the right direction. But time flies; 
 the servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and 
 at the pictures on the hoardings, but still she keeps mov- 
 ing nearer; and remember, it is as if the gallows itself 
 was striding towards you through the Christmas streets! 
 Shall I help you; I, who know all? Shall I tell you 
 where to find the money?" 
 
 "For what price?" asked Markheim. 
 
 " I offer you the service for a Christmas gift," returned 
 the other. 
 
 Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind 
 of bitter triumph. " No," said he, " I will take nothing 
 at your hands; if I were dying of thirst, and it was your 
 hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should find the 
 courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do 
 nothing to commit myself to evil." 
 
 "I have no objection to a death-bed repentance," ob- 
 served the visitant. 
 
 "Because you disbelieve their eflScacyl" Markheim 
 cried. 
 
 "I do not say so," returned the other; "but I look on 
 these things from a different side, and when the life is 
 done my interest falls. The man has lived to serve me, 
 to spread black looks under colour of religion, or to sow 
 tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course of weak 
 compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to 
 his deliverance, he can add but one act of service — to re- 
 pent, to die smiling, and thus to build up in confidence 
 and hope the more timorous of my surviving followers. 
 
374 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 I am not so hard a master. Tiy me. Accept my help. 
 Please yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please 
 yourself more amply, spread your elbows at the board; 
 and when the night begins to fall and the curtains to be 
 drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort, that you will 
 i5nd it even easy to compound your quarrel with your 
 conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God. I 
 came but now from such a death-bed, and the room was 
 full of sincere mourners, listening to the man's last words: 
 and when I looked into that face, which had been set as 
 a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope." 
 
 "And do yoii, then, suppose me such a creature?" 
 asked Markheim. " Do you think I have no more gen- 
 erous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and sin, and, at 
 last, sneak into heaven ? My heart rises at the thought. 
 Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it be- 
 cause you find me with red hands that you presume such 
 baseness ? and is this crime of murder indeed so impious 
 as to dry up the very springs of good?" 
 
 "Murder is to me no special category," replied the 
 other. "All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I 
 behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, 
 plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and feeding 
 on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond the moment 
 of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is 
 death; and to my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts 
 her mother with such taking graces on a question of a 
 ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a 
 murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I 
 follow virtues also; they differ not by the thickness of a 
 nail, they are both scythes for the reaping angel of 
 Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in action 
 but in character. The bad man is dear to me; not the 
 bad act, whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough 
 down the hurtling cataract of the ages, might yet be 
 
MARKHEIM 376 
 
 found more blessed than those of the rarest virtues. 
 And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but be- 
 cause you are Markheim, that I offered to forward your 
 escape." 
 
 "I will lay my heart open to you," answered Mark- 
 heim. "This crime on which you find me is my last. 
 On my way to it I have learned many lessons; itself is a 
 lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have 'been 
 driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave 
 to poverty, driven and scourged. There are robust 
 virtues that can stand in these temptations; mine was 
 not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But to-day, and out 
 of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches — ^both the 
 power and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all 
 things a free actor in the world; I begin to see myself all 
 changed, these hands the agents of good, this heart at 
 peace. Something comes over me out of the past; some- 
 thing of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to 
 the sound of the church organ, of what I forecast when 
 I shed tears over noble books, or talked, an innocent 
 child, with my mother. There lies my life; I have 
 wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city 
 of destination." 
 
 "You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, 
 I think?" remarked the visitor; "and there, if I mistake 
 not, you have already lost some thousands?" 
 
 "Ah," said Markheim, "but this time I have a sure 
 thing." 
 
 "This time, again, you will lose," replied the visitor 
 
 quietly. 
 
 "Ah, but I keep back the half!" cried Markheim. 
 
 "That also you will lose," said the other. 
 
 The sweat started upon Markheim's brow. "Well, 
 then, what matter?" he exclaimed. "Say it be lost, 
 say I am plunged again in poverty, shall one part of me. 
 
376 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 and that the worst, continue until the end to override 
 the better ? Evil and good run strong in me, haling me 
 both ways. I do not love the one thing, I love all. I 
 can conceive great deeds, renunciations, martyrdoms; 
 and though I be fallen to such a crime as murder, pity 
 is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who 
 knows then- trials better than myself? I pify and help 
 them; I prize love, I love honest laughter; there is no 
 good thing nor true thing on earth but I love it from my 
 heart. And are my vices only to direct my life, and my 
 virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of 
 the mind ? Not so; good, also, is a spring of acts." 
 
 But the visitant raised his finger. "For six-and- 
 thirty years that you have been in this world," said he, 
 "through many changes of fortune and varieties of 
 humour, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen 
 years ago you would have started at a theft. Three 
 years back you would have blenched at the name of 
 murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty or 
 meanness, from which you still recoil ? — ^five years from 
 now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, down- 
 ward, lies your way; nor can anything but death avail 
 to stop you." 
 
 "It is true," Markheim said huskily, "I have in some 
 degree complied with evil. But it is so with all; the 
 very saints, in the mere exercise of living, grow less 
 dainty, and take on the tone of their surroundings." 
 
 "I will propound to you one simple question," said 
 the other; "and as you answer, I shall read to you your 
 moral horoscope. You have grown in many things 
 more lax; possibly you do right to be so; and at any 
 account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, 
 are you in any one particular, however trifling, more 
 difficult to please with your own conduct, or do you go 
 in all things with a looser rein?" 
 
MARKHEIM 377 
 
 "In any one?" repeated Markheim, with an anguish 
 of consideration. "No," he added, with despair, "in 
 none! I have gone down in all." 
 
 "Then," said the visitor, "content yourself with what 
 you are, for you will never change; and the words of 
 your part on this stage are irrevocably written down." 
 
 Markheim stood for a long while silent, and indeed it 
 was the visitor who first broke the silence. "That 
 being so," he said, "shall I show you the money?" 
 
 "And grace?" cried Markheim. 
 
 "Have you not tried it?" returned the other. "Two 
 or three years ago, did I not see you on the platform of 
 revival meetings, and was not your voice the loudest in 
 the hymn?" 
 
 "It is true," said Markheim; "and I see clearly what 
 remains for me by way of dufy. I thank you for these 
 lessons from my soul; my eyes are opened, and I behold 
 myself at last for what I am." 
 
 At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rang 
 through the house; and the visitant, as though this were 
 some concerted signal for which he had been waiting, 
 changed at once in his demeanour. 
 
 "The maid!" he cried. "She has returned, as I fore- 
 warned you, and there is now before you one more diflS- 
 cult passage. Her master, you must say, is ill; you must 
 let her in, with an assured but rather serious countenance 
 — no smiles, no overacting, and I promise you successi 
 Once the girl within, and the door closed, the same dex- 
 terity that has already rid you of the dealer will relieve 
 you of this last danger in your path. Thenceforward 
 you have the whole evening — the whole night, if need- 
 ful — to ransack the treasures of the house and to make 
 good your safety. This is help that comes to you with 
 the mask of danger. Up!" he cried: "up, friend; your 
 life hangs trembling in the scales: up, and act!" 
 
378 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. " If I be 
 condemned to evil acts," he said, " there is still one door 
 of freedom open — I can cease from action. If my life 
 be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I be, as you 
 say truly, at the beck of eveiy small temptation, I can 
 yet, by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the 
 reach of all. My love of good is damned to barrenness; 
 it may, and let it be! But I have still my hatred of evil; 
 and from that, to your galling disappointment, you 
 shall see that I can draw both energy and courage." 
 
 The features of the visitor began to undergo a won- 
 derful and lovely change: they brightened and softened 
 with a tender triumph; and, even as they brightened, 
 faded and dislimned. But Markheim did not pause to 
 watch or understand the transformation. He opened 
 the door and went downstairs very slowly, thinking to 
 himself. His past went soberly before him; he beheld 
 it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as 
 chance-medley — a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus re- 
 viewed it, tempted him no longer; but on the further side 
 he perceived a quiet haven for his bark. He paused in 
 the passage, and looked into the shop, where the candle 
 still burned by the dead body. It was strangely silent. 
 Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind, as he 
 stood gazing. And then the bell once more broke out 
 into impatient clamour. 
 
 He confronted the maid upon the threshold with some- 
 thing like a smile. 
 
 "You had better go for the poljce," said he: "I have 
 killed your master." 
 
60 
 
 ?' 
 
 STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND 
 ^-^e;;,,^.^^^^^^^^ MR. HYDE' 
 
 KATHARINE DE MATTOS" 
 
 It's ill to loose the bands that God decreed to bind; 
 Still will we 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 coimtrie. 
 
 STORY OF THE BOOK 
 
 Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged 
 countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, 
 scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in senti- 
 ment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. 
 At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his 
 taste, something eminently human beaconed from his 
 eye; something indeed which never found its way into 
 his talk; but which spoke not only in these silent sym- 
 bols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly 
 in the acts of his life. He was austere with himself; 
 drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for 
 vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not 
 
 * Written at Bournemouth at the close of 1885, while Stevenson 
 was struggling with ill-health, and published in January, 1886, in 
 book form. The problem of the duality of the moral nature, 
 which had already worked itself into story form in his Markheim, 
 here is given more complete expression. A dream gave him the 
 plot. Mfs. Stevenson was awakened one night by cries of horror 
 from Stevenson, fle said angrily, "Why did you wake me? I 
 was dreaming a fine bogey tale." She had aroused him at the first 
 transformation scene of what afterward became Dr. JekyU and Mr. 
 Hyde. It was this story which first gave him reputation in America. 
 
 ' A favourite cousin. 
 
 379 
 
380 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had 
 an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wonder- 
 ing, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits in' 
 volved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined 
 to help rather than to reprove. "I incline to Cain's 
 heresy," he used to say quaintly: "I let my brother go 
 to the devil in his own way." In this character, it was 
 frequently hi& fortune to be the last reputable acquaint- 
 ance and the last good influence in the lives of down- 
 going men. And to such as these, so long as they came 
 about his chambers, he never marked a shade of change 
 in his demeanour. 
 
 No doubt the feat was easy to Mr. Utterson; for he 
 -was undemonstrative at the best, and even his friendship 
 seemed to be founded in a similar catholicity of good- 
 nature. It is the mark of a modest man to accept his 
 friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity; 
 and that was the lawyer's way. His friends were those 
 of his own blood or those whom he had known the 
 longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, 
 they implied no aptness in the object. Hence, no doubt, 
 the bond that united him to Mr. Richard Enfield, his 
 distant kinsman, the well-known man about town. It 
 was a nut to crack for many, what these two could 
 see in each other, or what subject they could find in 
 common. It was reported by those who encountered 
 them in their Sunday walks, that they said nothing, 
 looked singularly dull, and would hail with obvious re- 
 lief the appearance of a friend. For all that, the two 
 men put the greatest store by these excursions, counted 
 them the chief jewel of each week, and not only set aside 
 occasions of pleasure, but even resisted the calls of 
 business, that they might enjoy them uninterrupted. 
 
 It chanced on one of these rambles that their way led 
 them down a by-street in a busy quarter of London. 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND ME. HYDE 381 
 
 The street was small and what is called quiet, but it 
 drove a thriving trade on the week-days. The inhabi- 
 tants were all doing well, it seemed, and all emulously 
 hoping to do better still, and laying out the surplus of 
 their gains in coquetry; so that the shop fronts stood 
 along that thoroughfare with an air of invitation, like 
 rows of smiling saleswomen. Even on Sunday, when 
 it veiled its more florid charms and lay comparatively 
 empty of passage, the street shone out in contrast to its 
 dingy neighbourhood, like a fire in a forest; and with 
 its freshly painted shutters, well-polished brasses and 
 general cleanliness and gaiety of note, instantly caught 
 and pleased the eye of the passenger. 
 
 Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going 
 east, the line was broken by the entry of a court; and 
 just at that point, a certain sinister block of building 
 thrust forward its gable on the street. It was two 
 storeys high; showed no window, nothing but a door on 
 the lower storey and a blind forehead of discoloured 
 wall on the upper; and bore in every feature, the marks 
 of prolonged and sordid negligence. The door, which 
 was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blis- 
 tered and distained. Tramps slouched into the recess 
 and struck matches on the panels; children kept shop 
 upon the steps; the schoolboy had tried his knife on 
 the mouldings; and for close on a generation, no one 
 had appeared to drive away these random visitors or to 
 repair their ravages. 
 
 Mr. Enfield and the lawyer were on the other side of 
 the by-street; but when they came abreast of the entry, 
 the former lifted up his cane and pointed. 
 
 "Did you ever remark that door?" he asked; and 
 when his companion had replied in the affirmative, "It 
 js connected in my mind," added he, "with a very odd 
 story." 
 
382 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 "Indeed?" said Mr. Utterson, with a slight change of 
 voice, "and what was that?" 
 
 ^"Well, it was this way," returned Mr. Enfield: "I 
 <V^j^ was coming home from some place at the end of the world, 
 
 ^f^ about three o'clock of a black winter morning, and my 
 *^ \^ ' way lay through a part of town where there was literally 
 
 Tr nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street, and 
 
 all the folks asleep — street after street, all lighted up as 
 if for a procession and all as empty as a church — till at 
 last I got into that state of mind when a man listens and 
 listens and begins to long for the sight of a policeman. 
 All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was 
 stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other 
 a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as 
 she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran 
 into one another naturally enough at the corner; and 
 then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man 
 trampled calmly over the child's body and left her 
 screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, 
 but it was hellish to see. It wasn't like a man; it was 
 like some damned Juggernaut.' I gave a view haUoa, 
 took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought 
 him back to where there was already quite a group about 
 the screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made no 
 resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought 
 out the sweat on me like running. The people who had 
 turned out were the girl's own family; and pretty soon, 
 the doctor, for whom she had been sent, put in his ap- 
 pearance. Well, the child was not much the worse, 
 more frightened, according to the Sawbones; and there 
 you might have supposed would be an end to it. But 
 'there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a 
 
 • When the car containing the idol of Juggernaut, a Hindu god, 
 was drawn in procession, fanatic worshippers threw themselves be- 
 fore it to be crushed. 
 
DE,. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 383 
 
 ioathing to my gentleman at first sight. So had the 
 child's family, which was only natural. But the doctor's 
 case was what struck me. He was the usual cut and 
 dry apothecary, of no particular age and colour, with a 
 strong Edinburgh accent, and about as emotional as a 
 bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every 
 time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn 
 sick and white with the desire to kill him. I knew what 
 was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine; and 
 killing being out of the question, we did the next best. 
 We told the man we could and would make such a 
 scandal out of this, as should makejiis name stink from 
 one end of London to the other, ^f he had any friends 
 or any credit, we undertook that he should lose them. 
 And all the time, as we were pitching it in red hot, we 
 were keeping the women off him as best we could for 
 they were as wild as harpies. I never saw a circle of such 
 hateful faces; and there was the man in the middle, with 
 a kind of black, sneering coolness — frightened too, I 
 could see that-^-but carrying it off, sir, really like Satan. 
 'If you choose to make capital out of this accident,' 
 said he, 'I am naturally helpless. No gentleman but 
 wishes to avoid a scene,' says he. 'Name your figure.' 
 Well, we screwed him up to a hundred pounds for the 
 child's family; he would have clearly liked to stick out; 
 but there was something about the lot of us that meant 
 mischief, and at last he struck. The next thing was to 
 get the money; and where do you think he carried us 
 but to that place with the door? — whipped out a key, 
 went in, and presently came back with the matter of ten 
 pounds in gold and a cheque for the balance on Coutts's, 
 drawn payable to bearer and signed with a name that I 
 can't mention, though it 's one of the points of my story, 
 but it was a name at least very well known and often 
 printed. The figure was stiff; but the signature was 
 
384 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 good for more than that, if it was only genuine. I took 
 the liberty of pointing out to my gentleman that the 
 whole business looked apocryphal, and that a man does 
 not, in real life, walk into a cellar door at four in the 
 morning and come out of it with another man's cheque 
 for close upon a hundred pounds. But he was quite 
 easy and sneering. * Set your mind at rest,' says he, ' I 
 will stay with you till the banks open and cash the cheque 
 myself.' So we all set off, the doctor, and the child's 
 father, and our friend and myself, and passed the rest of 
 the night in my chambers; and next day, when we had 
 breakfasted, went in a body to the bank. I gave in the 
 check myself, and said I had every reason to believe it 
 was a forgery. Not a bit of it. The cheque was 
 genuine." 
 
 "Tut-tut," said Mr. Utterson. 
 
 " I see you feel as I do/' said Mr. Enfield. "Yes, it 's 
 a bad story. For my man was a fellow that nobody 
 could have to do with, a really damnable man; and the 
 person that drew the cheque is the very pink of the pro- 
 prieties, celebrated too, and (what makes it worse) one 
 of your fellows who do what they call good. Black 
 mail, I suppose; an honest man paying through the nose 
 for some of the capers of his youth. Black Mail House 
 is what I call that place with the door, in consequence. 
 Though even that, you know, is far from explaining all," 
 he added, and with the words fell into a vein of musing. 
 
 From this he was recalled by Mr. Utterson asking 
 rather suddenly: "And you don't know if the drawer 
 of the cheque lives there?" 
 
 "A likely place, isn't it?" returned Mr. Enfield. 
 "But I happen to have noticed his address; he lives in 
 some square or other." 
 
 "And you never asked about the — place with the 
 door?" said Mr. Utterson. 
 
ua. JKiLYLh AND MR. HYDE 385 
 
 "No, sir: I had a delicacy," was the reply. "I feel 
 very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too 
 much of the style of the day of judgment. You start a 
 question, and it 's like starting a stone. You sit quietly 
 on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting 
 others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you 
 would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his 
 own back garden and the family have to change their 
 name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it 
 looks like Queer Street, the less I ask." 
 
 "A very good rule, too," said the lawyer. 
 
 "But I have studied the place for myself," continued 
 Mr. Enfield. " It seems scarcely a house. There is no 
 other door, and nobody goes in or out of that one but, 
 once in a great while, the gentleman of my adventure. 
 There are three windows looking on the court on the 
 first floor; none below; the windows are always shut 
 but they 're clean. And then there is a chimney which 
 is generally smoking; so somebody must live there. 
 And yet it 's not so sure; for the buildings are so packed 
 together about that court, that it 's hard to say where 
 one ends and another begins." 
 
 The pair walked on again for a while in silence; and 
 then "Enfield," said Mr. Utterson, "that's a good rule 
 of yours." 
 
 "Yes, I think it is," returned Enfield. 
 
 "But for all that," continued the lawyer, "there's 
 one point I want to ask: I want to ask the name of that 
 man who walked over the child." 
 
 "Well," said Mr. Enfield, "I can't see what harm it 
 would do. It was a man of the name of Hyde." 
 
 " H'm," said Mr. Utterson. " What sort of a man is 
 he to see?" 
 
 "He is not easy to describe. There is something 
 wrong with his appearance; something displeasing. 
 
386 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 Sfomething downright detestable. I never saw a man I 
 so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be 
 deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of de- 
 formity, although I couldn't specify the point. He 's an 
 extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name 
 nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand 
 of it; I can't describe him. And it 's not want of mem- 
 ory; for I declare I can see him this moment." 
 
 Mr. Utterson again walked some way in silence and 
 obviously under a weight of consideration. "You are 
 sure he used a key?" he inquired at last. 
 
 "My dear sir . . ." began Enfield, surprised out of 
 himself. 
 
 "Yes, I know," said Utterson; "I know it must seem 
 strange. The fact is, if I do not ask you the name of 
 the other party, it is because I know it already. You see, 
 Richard, your tale has gone home. If you have been 
 inexact in any point, you had better correct it." 
 
 "I think you might have warned me," returned the 
 other with a touch of sullenness. "But I have been 
 pedantically exact, as you call it. The fellow "had a 
 key; and what 's more, he has it still. I saw him use it, 
 not a week ago." 
 
 Mr. Utterson sighed deeply but said never a word; 
 and the young man presently resumed. "Here is an- 
 other lesson to say nothing," said he. "I am ashamed 
 of my long tongue. Let us make a bargain never to refer 
 to this again." 
 
 "With all my heart," said the lawyer. "I shake 
 hands on that, Richard." 
 
 SEAKCH FOR ME. HTDB 
 
 That evening Mr. Utterson came home to hisbacheW 
 house in sombre spirits and sat down to dinner without 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 387 
 
 relish. It was his custom of a Sunday, when this meal 
 was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume of some dry 
 divinity on his reading desk, until the clock of the neigh- 
 bouring church rang out the hour of twelve, when he 
 would go soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night, 
 however, as soon as the cloth was taken away, betook 
 up a candle and went into his business room. There he 
 opened his safe, took from the most private part of it a 
 document endorsed on the envelope as Dr. Jekyll's Will, 
 and sat down with a clouded brow to study its contents. 
 The will was holograph, for Mr. Utterson, though he 
 took charge of it now that it was made, had refused to 
 lend the least assistance in the making of it; it provided 
 not only that, in case of the decease of Henry Jekyll, 
 M.D., D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S., etc., all his possessions 
 were to pass into the hands of his "friend and bene- 
 factor Edward Hyde," but that in case of Dr. Jekyll's 
 "disappearance or unexplained absence for any period 
 exceeding three calendar months," the said Edward 
 Hyde should step into the said Henry Jekyll's shoes 
 without further delay a.nd free from any burthen or 
 obligation, beyond the payment of a few small sums to 
 the members of the doctor's household. This document 
 had long been the lawyer's eyesore. It offended him 
 both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and customary 
 sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest. 
 And hitherto it was his ignorance of Mr. Hyde that had 
 swelled his indignation; now, by a sudden turn, it was 
 his knowledge. It was already bad enough when the 
 name was but a name of which he could learn no more. 
 It was worse when it began to be clothed upon with de- 
 testable attributes; and out of the shifting, insubstantial 
 mists that had so long baffled his eye, there leaped up 
 the sudden, definite presentment of a fiend, 
 
 " I thought it was madness," he, said, as he replaced 
 
388 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 the obnoxious paper in the safe, "and now I be^ to 
 
 fear it is disgrace." 
 
 With that he blew out his candle, put on a greatcoat, 
 and set forth in the direction of Cavendish Square, that 
 citadel of medicine, where his friend, the great Dr. 
 Lanyon, had his house and received his crowding pa- 
 tients. " If anyone knows, it will be Lanyon," he had 
 thought. 
 
 The solemn butler knew and welcomed him; he was 
 subjected to no stage of delay; but ushered direct from 
 the door to the dining-room where Dr. Lanyon sat alone 
 over his wine. This was a hearty, healthy, dapper, red- 
 faced gentleman, with a shock of hair prematurely white, 
 and a boisterous and decided manner. At sight of Mr. 
 Utterson, he sprang up from his chair and welcomed 
 him with both hands. The geniality, as was the way of 
 the man, was somewhat theatrical to the eye; but it re- 
 posed on genuine feeling. For these two were old 
 friends, old mates both at school and college, both thor- 
 ough respecters of themselves and of each other, and, 
 what does not always follow, men who thoroughly en- 
 joyed each other's company. 
 
 After a little rambling talk, the lawyer led up to the 
 subject which so disagreeably preoccupied his mind. 
 
 "I suppose, Lanyon," said he, "you and I must be 
 the two oldest friends that Henry Jekyll has?" 
 
 "I wish the friends were younger," chuckled Dr. 
 Lanyon. "But I suppose we are. And what of that? 
 I see little of him now." 
 
 "Indeed?" said Utterson. "I thought you had a 
 bond of common interest." 
 
 " We had," was the reply. " But it is more than ten 
 years since Henry Jekyll became too fanciful for me. 
 He began to go wrong, wrong in mind; and though of 
 course I continue to take an interest in him for old sake's 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 389 
 
 sake, as they say, I see and I have seen devilish little of 
 the man. Such unscientific balderdash," added the 
 doctor, flushing suddenly purple, "would have estranged 
 Damon and Pythias." 
 
 This little spirit of temper was somewhat of a relief to 
 Mr. Utterson. "They have only differed on some point 
 of science," he thought; and being a man of no scientific 
 passions (except in the matter of conveyancing), he even 
 added: "It is nothing worse than thati" He gave his 
 friend a few seconds to recover his composure, and then 
 approached the question he had come to put. "Did 
 you ever come across a prot^gd of his— one Hyde?" he 
 asked. 
 
 "Hyde?" repeated Lanyon. "No. Never heard of 
 him. Since my time." 
 
 That was the amount of information that the lawyer 
 carried back with him to the great, dark bed on which 
 he tossed to and fro, until the small hours of the morn- 
 ing began to grow large. It was a night of little ease to 
 his toiling mind, toiling in mere darkness and besieged 
 by questions. 
 
 Six o'clock struck on the bells of the church that was 
 so conveniently near to Mr. Utterson's dwelling, and 
 still he was digging at the problem. Hitherto it had 
 touched him on the intellectual side alone; but now his 
 imagination also was engaged, or rather enslaved; and 
 ' as he lay and tossed in the gross darkness of the night and 
 the curtained room, Mr. Enfield's tale went by before his 
 mind in a scroll of lighted pictures. He would be aware 
 of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of 
 the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child run- 
 ning from the doctor's; and then these met, and that 
 human Juggernaut trod the child down and passed on 
 regardless of her screams. Or else he would see a room 
 '-a a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming 
 
390 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that 
 room would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked 
 apart, the sleeper recalled, and lol there would stand by 
 his side a figure to whom power was given, and even at 
 that dead hour, he must rise and do its bidding. The 
 figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night; 
 and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it 
 glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move 
 the more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to dizzi- 
 ness, through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city, and 
 at every street corner crush a child and leave her scream- 
 ing. And still the figure had no face by which he might 
 know it; even in his dreams, it had no face, or one that 
 baffled him and melted before his eyes; and thus it was 
 that there sprang up and grew apace in the lawyer's 
 mind a singularly strong, almost an inordinate, curiosity 
 to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde. If he could 
 but once set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would 
 lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as was the 
 habit of mysterious things when well examined. He 
 might see a reason for his friend's strange preference or 
 bondage (call it which you please) and even for the 
 startling clause of the will. At least it would be a face 
 worth seeing: the face of a man who was without bowels 
 of mercy: a face which had but to show itself to raise up, 
 in the mind of the unimpressionable Enfield, a spirit of 
 enduring hatred. 
 
 From that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt 
 the door in the by-street of shops. In the morning be- 
 fore office hours, at noon when business was plenty, and 
 time scarce, at night under the face of the fogged city 
 moon, by all lights and at all hours of solitude or con- 
 course, (ke lawyer was to be found on his chosen post. 
 
 "If he be Mr. Hyde," he had thought,"! shall be Mr. 
 Seek." 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 39J 
 
 And at last his patience was rewarded. It was a fine 
 dry night; frost in the air; the streets as clean as a ball- 
 room floor; the lamps, unshaken by any wind, drawing 
 a regular pattern of light and shadow. By ten o'clock, 
 when the shops were closed, the by-street was very soli- 
 tary and, in spite of the low growl of London from all 
 round, very silent. Small sounds carried far; domestic 
 sounds out of the houses were clearly audible on either 
 side of the roadway; and the rumour of the approach of 
 any passenger preceded him by a long time. Mr. Utter- 
 son had been some minutes at his post, when he was aware 
 of an odd, light footstep drawing near. In the course of 
 his nightly patrols, he had long grown accustomed to the 
 quaint effect with which the footfalls of a single person, 
 while he is still a great way off, suddenly spring out dis- 
 tinct from the vast hum and clatter of the city. Yet hi^ 
 attention had never before been so sharply and decisively 
 arrested; and it was with a strong, superstitious prevision 
 of success that he withdrew into the entry of the court. 
 
 The steps drew swiftly nearer, and swelled out sud- 
 denly louder as they turned the end of the street. The 
 lawyer, looking forth from the entry, could soon see what 
 manner of man he had to deal with. He was small and 
 very plainly dressed, and the look of him, even at that 
 distance, went somehow strongly against the watcher's 
 inclination. But he made straight for the door, crossing 
 the roadway to save time; and as he came, he drew a 
 key from his pocket like one approaching home. 
 
 Mr. Utterson stepped out and touched him on the 
 shoulder as he passed. "Mr. Hyde, I think?" 
 
 Mr. Hyde shrank back with a hissing intake of the 
 breath. But his fear was only momentary; and though 
 he did not look the lawyer in the face, he answered 
 coolly enough: "That is my name. What do you want ? " 
 
 "I see you are going in," returned the lawyer. "I 
 
 I 
 
392 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 am an old friend of Dr. Jekyll's — Mr. Utterson of Gaua.. 
 Street — ^you must have heard my name; and meeting 
 you so conveniently, I thought you might admit me." 
 
 "You will not find Dr. Jekyll; he is from home," re- 
 plied Mr. Hyde, blowing in the key. And then sud- 
 denly, but still without looking up, " How did you know 
 me?" he asked. 
 
 " On your side," said Mr. Utterson, " will you do me 
 a favour?" 
 
 "With pleasure," replied the other. "What shall it 
 be?" 
 
 "Will you let me see your face?" asked the lawyer. 
 
 Mr. Hyde appeared to hesitate, and then, as if upon 
 some sudden reflection, fronted about with an air of 
 defiance; and the pair stared at each other pretty fixedly 
 for a few seconds. "Now, I shall know you again," 
 said Mr. Utterson. " It may be useful." 
 
 "Yes," returned Mr. Hyde, "it is as well we have 
 met; and d, propos, you should have my address." And 
 he gave a number of a street in Soho. 
 
 "Gbod God!" thought Mr. Utterson, "can he, too, 
 have been thinking of the will." But he kept his feel- 
 ings to himself and only grunted in acknowledgment of 
 the address. 
 
 "And now," said the other, "how did you know me?" 
 
 "By description," was the reply. 
 
 "Whose description?" 
 
 "We have common friends," said Mr. Utterson. 
 
 "Common friends?" echoed Mr. Hyde, a little 
 hoarsely. "Who are they?" 
 
 " Jekyll, for instance," said the lawyer. 
 
 " He never told you," cried Mr. Hyde, with a flush of 
 anger. " I did not think you would have lied." 
 
 "Come," said Mr. Utterson, "that is not fitting 
 language." 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 393 
 
 The other snarled aloud into a savage laugh; and the 
 oext moment, with extraordinary quickness, he had un- 
 locked the door and disappeared into the house. 
 
 The lawyer stood awhile when Mr. Hyde had left 
 him, the picture of disquietude. Then he began slowly 
 to mount the street, pausing every step or two and put- 
 ting his hand to his brow like a man in mental perplexity. 
 The problem he was thus debating as he walked, was 
 one of a class that is rarely solved. Mr. Hyde was pale 
 and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without 
 any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, 
 he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of mur- 
 derous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke 
 with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; 
 all these were points against him, but not all of these 
 together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, 
 loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded 
 him. "There must be something else," said the per- 
 plexed gentleman. "There is something, more, if I 
 could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems 
 hardly human! Something troglodytic,* shall we say? 
 or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell ? " or is it the mere 
 radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and 
 transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, 
 O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if I ever read Satan's 
 signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend." 
 
 Round the corner from the by-street, there was a 
 square of ancient, handsome houses, now for the most 
 part decayed from their high estate and let in flats and 
 
 ' Characteristic of the cave-dwellers, or other primitive men. 
 ^ Dr. Fell was a seventeenth century divine whose reputation has 
 been preserved in Tom Brown's lines: 
 
 "I do not love thee, Doctor Fell, 
 The reason why I cannot tell; 
 But this alone I know fuU well, 
 I do not love thee, Doctor Fell." 
 
394 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 chambers to all sorts and conditions of men: map-en- 
 gravers, architects, shady lawyers and the agents of 
 obscure enterprises. One house, however, second from 
 the corner, was still occupied entire; and at the door of 
 this, which wore a great air of wealth and comfort, 
 though it was now plunged in darkness except for the 
 fanlight, Mr. Utterson stopped and knocked. A well- 
 dressed, elderly servant opened the door. 
 
 "Is Dr. Jel^U at home, Poole?" asked the lawyer. 
 
 "I will see, Mr. Utterson," said Poole, admitting the 
 visitor, as he spoke, into a large, low-roofed, comfortable 
 hall, paved with flags, warmed (after the fashion of a 
 country house) by a bright, open fire, and furnished 
 with costly cabinets of oak. " Will you wait here by the 
 fire, sir? or shall I give you a light in the dining-room?" 
 
 " Here, thank you," said the lawyer, and he drew near 
 and leaned on the tall fender. This hall, in which he 
 was now left alone, was a pet fancy of his friend the 
 doctor's; and Utterson himself was wont to speak of it 
 as the pleasantest room in London. But to-night there 
 was a shudder in his blood; the face of Hyde sat heavy 
 on his memory; he felt (what was rare with him) a 
 nausea and distaste of life; and in the gloom of his 
 spirits, he seemed to read a menace in the flickering of 
 the firelight on the polished cabinets and the uneasy 
 starting of the shadow on the roof. He was ashamed of 
 his relief, when Poole presently returned to announce 
 that Dr. Jekyll was gone out. 
 
 "I saw Mr. Hyde go in by the old dissecting-room 
 door, Poole," he said. "Is that right, when Dr. Jekyll 
 is from home?" 
 
 " Quite right, Mr. Utterson, sir," replied the servant. 
 "Mr. Hyde has a key." 
 
 "Your master seems to repose a great deal of trust io 
 that young man, Poole," resumed the other musingly. 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 395 
 
 "Yes, sir, he do indeed," said Poole. "We have all 
 oiders to obey him." 
 
 "I do not think I ever met Mr. Hyde?" asked Utter- 
 son. 
 
 " O, dear no, sir. He never dines here," replied the 
 butler. "Indeed we see veiy little of him on this side 
 of the house; he mostly comes and goes by the labora- 
 toiy." 
 
 "Well, good-night, Poole." 
 
 "Good-night, Mr. Utterson." 
 
 And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy 
 heart. "Poor Harry Jekyll," he thought, 'my mind 
 misgives me he is in deep waters 1 He was wild when 
 he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the 
 law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it 
 must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of 
 some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, fede 
 davda^ years after memory has forgotten and self-love 
 condoned the fault." And the lawyer, scared by the 
 thought, brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all 
 the comers of memory, lest by chance some Jack-in-the- 
 Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there. His 
 past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls 
 of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled 
 to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and 
 raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the 
 many that he had come so near to doing, yet avoided. 
 And then by a return on his former subject, he conceived 
 a spark of hope. "This Master Hyde, if he were stud- 
 ied," thought he, "must have secrets of his own; black 
 secrets, by the look of him; secrets compared to which 
 poor Jelgrll's worst would be like sunshine. Things 
 cannot continue as they are. It turns me cold to think 
 of this creature stealing like a thief to Harry's bedside- 
 • With limping foot. 
 
396 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 poor Hany, what a wakening I And the danger of it; 
 for if this Hyde suspects the existence of the will, he 
 may grow impatient to inherit. Ay, I must put my 
 shoulder to the wheel — if Jekyll will but let me," he 
 added, "if Jekyll will only let me." For once more he 
 saw before his mind's eye, as clear as a transparency, 
 the strange clauses of the will. 
 
 DR. JEKYLL WAS QUITE AT EASE 
 
 A fortnight later, by excellent good fortune, the docto* 
 gave one of his pleasant dinners to some five or six old 
 cronies, all intelligent, reputable men and all judges of 
 good wine; and Mr. Utterson so contrived that he re- 
 mained behind after the others had departed. This was 
 no new arrangement, but a thing that had befallen 
 many scores of times. Where Utterson was liked, he 
 was liked well. Hosts loved to detain the dry lawyer, 
 when the light-hearted and the loose-tongued had al- 
 ready their foot on the threshold; they liked to sit awhile 
 in his unobtrusive company, practising for solitude, 
 sobering their minds in the man's rich silence after 
 the expense and strain of gaiety. To this rule. Dr. 
 Jekyll was no exception; and as he now sat on the op- 
 posite side of the fire — a large, well-made, smooth-faced 
 man of fifty, with something of a slyish cast perhaps, but 
 every mark of capacity and kindness — ^you could see by 
 his looks that he cherished for Mr. Utterson a sincere 
 and warm affection. 
 
 " I have been wanting to speak to you, Jekyll," began 
 the latter. "You know that will of yours?" 
 
 A close observer might have gathered that the topic 
 was distasteful; but the doctor carried it off gaily. " My 
 poor Utterson," said "he, "you are unfortunate in such 
 a client. I never saw a man so distressed as you were 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 397 
 
 by my will; unless it were that hide-bound pedant, 
 Lanyon, at what he called my scientific heresies. O, 1 
 know he 's a good fellow — ^you needn't frown — an ex- 
 cellent fellow, and I always mean to see more of him; 
 but a hide-bound pedant for all that; an ignorant, 
 blatant pedant. I was never more disappointed in any 
 man than Lanyon." 
 
 "You know I never approved of it," pursued Utter- 
 son, ruthlessly disregarding the fresh topic. 
 
 "My will? Yes, certainly, I know that," said the 
 doctor, a trifle sharply. "You have told me so." 
 
 "Well, I tell you so again," continued the lawyer. 
 "I have been learning something of young Hyde." 
 
 The large handsome face of Dr. Jekyll grew pale to 
 the very lips, and there came a blackness about his eyes. 
 "I do not care to hear more," said he. "This is a 
 matter I thought we had agreed to drop." 
 
 " What I heard was abominable," said Utterson. 
 
 "It can make no change. You do not understand 
 my position," returned the doctor, with a certain inco- 
 herency of manner. "I am painfully situated, Utter- 
 son; my position is a very strange — a very strange one. 
 It is one of those affairs that cannot be mended by 
 talking." 
 
 "Jekyll," said Utterson, "you know me: I am a man 
 to be trusted. Make a clean breast of this in confidence; 
 and I make no doubt I can get you out of it." 
 
 "My good Utterson," said the doctor, "this is very 
 good of you, this is downright good of you, and I cannot 
 find words to thank you in. I believe you fully; I 
 would trust you before any man alive, ay, before myself, 
 if I could make the choice; but indeed it isn't what you 
 fancy; it is not so bad as that; and just to put your 
 good heart at rest, I will tell you one thing: the moment 
 I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde. I give you my 
 
398 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 hand upon that; and I thank you again and again; and 
 I will just add one little word, Utterson, that I 'm sure 
 you '11 take in good part: this is a private matter, and I 
 beg of you to let it sleep." 
 
 Utterson reflected a little, looking in the fire. 
 
 " I have no doubt you are perfectly right," he said at 
 last, getting to his feet. 
 
 " Well, btit since we have touched upon this business, 
 and for the last time I hope," continued the doctor, 
 " there is one point I should like you to understand. I 
 have really a very great interest in poor Hyde. I know 
 you have seen him; he told me so; and I fear he was 
 rude. But I do sincerely take a great, a very great in- 
 terest in that young man; and if I am taken away, Ut- 
 terson, I wish you to promise me that you will bear with 
 him and get his rights for him. I think you would, if 
 you knew all; and it would be a weight off my mind if 
 you would promise." 
 
 " I can't pretend that I shall ever like him," said the 
 lawyer. 
 
 "I don't ask that," pleaded Jekyll, laying his hand 
 upon the other's arm; "I only ask for justice; I only 
 ask you to help him for my sake, when I am no longer 
 here." 
 
 Utterson heaved an irrepressible sigh. "Well," said 
 he, " I promise." 
 
 THE CAREW MURDER CASE 
 
 Nearly a year later, in the month of October, 18 — , 
 London was startled by a crime of singular ferodty and 
 rendered all the more notable by the high position of the 
 victim. The details were few and startling. A maid 
 servant living alone in a house not far from the river, 
 had gone upstairs to bed about eleven. Although a fog 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 399 
 
 rolled over the city in the small hours, the early part of 
 the night was cloudless, and the lane, which the maid's 
 window overlooked, was brilliantly lit by the full moon. 
 It seems she was romantically given, for she sat down 
 upon her box, which stood immediately under the 
 window, and fell into a dream of musing. Never (she 
 used to say, with streaming tears, when she narrated 
 that experience), never had she felt more at peace with 
 all men or thought more kindly of the world. And as 
 she so sat she became aware of an aged and beautiful 
 gentleman with white hair, drawing near along the lane; 
 and advancing to meet him, another and very small 
 gentleman, to whom at first slje paid less attention. 
 When they had come within speech (which was just 
 under the maid's eyes) the older man bowed and accosted 
 the other with a very pretty manner of politeness. It 
 did not seem as if the subject of his address were of great 
 importance; indeed, from his pointing, it sometimes ap- 
 peared as if he were only inquiring his way; but the 
 moon shone on his face as he spoke, and the girl was 
 pleased to watch it, it seemed to breathe such an inno- 
 cent and old-world kindness of disposition, yet with 
 something high too, as of a well-founded self-content. 
 Presently her eye wandered to the other, and she was 
 surprised to recognize in him a certain Mr. Hyde, who 
 had once visited her master and for whom she had con- 
 ceived a dislike. He had in his hand a heavy cane, with 
 which he was trifling; but he answered never a word, 
 and seemed to listen with an ill-contained impatience. 
 And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of 
 anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane, 
 and carrying on (as the maid described it) like a madman. 
 The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one 
 very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr. 
 Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the 
 
400 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was 
 trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm 
 of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered 
 and the body jumped upon the roadway. At the horror 
 of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted. 
 I It was two o'clock when she came to herself and 
 called for the police. The murderer was gone long ago; 
 but there lay his victim in the middle of the lane, in- 
 credibly mangled. The stick with which the deed had 
 been done, although it was of some rare and very tough 
 and heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the 
 stress of this insensate cruelty; and one splintered half 
 had rolled in the neighbouring gutter — ^^the other, with- 
 out doubt, had been carried away by the murderer. A 
 purse and a gold watch were found upon the victim: 
 but no cards or papers, except a sealed and stamped 
 envelope which he had been probably carrying to the post, 
 and which bore the name and address of Mr. Utterson. 
 
 This was brought to the lawyer flie next morning, 
 before he was out of bed; and he had no sooner seen it, 
 and been told the circumstances, than he shot out a 
 solemn lip. "I shall say nothing till I have seen the 
 body," said he; "this may be very serious. Have the 
 kindness to wait while I dress." And with the same 
 grave countenance he hurried through his breakfast and 
 drove to the police station, whither the body had been 
 carried. As soon as he came into the cell, he nodded. 
 
 "Yes," said he, "I recognise him. I am sorry to say 
 that this is Sir Danvers Carew." 
 
 "Good God, sir," exclaimed the officer, "is it pos- 
 sible?" And the next moment his eye lighted up with 
 professional ambition. " This will make a deal of noise," 
 he said. "And perhaps you can help us to the man." 
 And he briefly narrated what the maid had seen, and 
 showed the broken stick. 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR, HYDE 401 
 
 Mr, Utterson had already quailed at the name of 
 Hyde; but when the stick was laid before him, he could 
 doubt no longer; broken and battered as it was, he recog- 
 nised it for one that he had himself presented many 
 years before to Henry Jekyll. 
 
 "Is this Mr. Hyde a person of small stature?" he 
 inquired. 
 
 "Particularly small and particularly wicked-looldng, 
 is what the maid calls him," said the oflScer. 
 
 Mr. Utterson reflected; and then, raising his head, 
 "If .you will come with me in my cab," he said, "I think 
 I can take you to his house." 
 
 It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the 
 first fog of the season. A great chocolate-coloured pall 
 lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually 
 charging and routing these embattled vapours; so that 
 as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson 
 beheld a marvellous number of degrees and hues of twi- 
 light; for here it would be dark like the back-end of 
 evening; and there would be a glow of rich, lurid brown, 
 like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, 
 for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a 
 haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the 
 swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen 
 under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, 
 and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had 
 never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to 
 combat this mournful remvasion of darkness, seemed, in 
 the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a night- 
 mare. The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the 
 gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion 
 of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that 
 terror of the law and the law's officers, which may at 
 times assail the most honest. 
 
 As the cab drew up before the address indicated, the 
 
402 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a ^n 
 palace, a low French eating house, a shop for the retail 
 of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged 
 children huddled in the doorways, and many women of 
 many different nationalities passing out, k^ in hand, to 
 have a morning glass; and the next moment the fog 
 settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, 
 and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings. 
 This was the home of Henry Jekyll's favourite; of a 
 man who was heir to quarter of a million sterling. 
 
 An ivoiy-faced and silveiy-haired old woman opened 
 the door. She had ah evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; 
 but her manners were excellent. Yes, she said, this was 
 Mr. Hyde's, but he was not at home; he Lad been in 
 that night very late, but had gone away again in less 
 than an hour; there was nothing strange in that; his 
 habits were veiy irregular, and he was often absent; for 
 instance, it was nearly two months since she had seen 
 him till yesterday. 
 
 "Very well, then, we wish to see his rooms," said the 
 lawyer; and when the woman began to declare it was 
 impossible, " I had better tell you who this person is," he 
 added. " This is Inspector Newcomen of Scotland Yard." 
 
 A flash of odious joy appeared upon the woman's face. 
 "Ah!" said she, "he is in troublel What has he done?" 
 
 Mr. Utterson and the inspector exchanged glances. 
 " He don't seem a very popular character," observed the 
 latter. "And now, my good woman, just let me and 
 this gentleman have a look about us." 
 
 In the whole extent of the house, which but for the 
 old woman remained otherwise empty, Mr. Hyde had 
 only used a couple of rooms; but these were furnished 
 with luxury and good taste. A closet was filled with 
 wine; the plate was of silver, the napery elegant; a 
 good picture hung upon the walls, a gift (as Utterson 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE ^b^ 
 
 supposed) from Henry Jekyll, who was much of a con- 
 noisseur; and the carpets were of many plies and agree- 
 able in colour. At this moment, however, the rooms 
 bore every mark of having been recently and hurriedly 
 ransacked; clothes lay about the floor, with their pockets 
 inside out; lock-fast drawers stood open; and on the 
 hearth there lay a pile of gray ashes, as though many 
 papers had been burned. From these embers the in- 
 spector disinterred the butt end of a green cheque book, 
 which had resisted the action of the fire; the other half 
 of the stick was found behind the door; and as this 
 clinched his suspicions, the officer declared himself de- 
 lighted. A visit to the bank, where several thousand 
 pounds were found to be lying to the murderer's credit, 
 completed his gratification. 
 
 "You may depend upon it, sir," he told Mr. Utterson: 
 " I have him in my hand. He must have lost his head, 
 or he never would have left the stick or, above all, 
 burned the cheque book. Why, money's life to the man. 
 We have nothing to do but wait for him at the bank, 
 and get out the handbills." 
 
 This last, however, was not so easy of accomplish- 
 ment; for Mr. Hyde had numbered few familiars — even 
 the mastCT of Ihe servant maid had only seen him twice; 
 his family could nowhere be traced; he had never been 
 photographed; and the few who could describe him 
 differed widely, as common observers will. Only on 
 one point, were they agreed; and that was the haunting 
 sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive 
 impressed his beholders. 
 
 INCIDENT OP THE LETTEK 
 
 It was late in the afternoon, when Mr. Utterson found 
 his way to Dr. Jekyll's door, where he was at once ad- 
 
404 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 mitted by Poole, and carried down by the kitchen offices 
 and, across a yard which had once been a garden, to the 
 building which was indifferently known as the laboratory 
 or the dissecting rooms. The doctor had bought the 
 house from the heirs of a celebrated surgeon; and his 
 own tastes being rather chemical than anatomical, had 
 changed the destination of the block at the bottom of 
 the garden. It was the first time that the lawyer had 
 been received in that part of his friend's quarters; and 
 he eyed the dingy, windowless structure with curiosify, 
 and gazed round with a distasteful sense of strangeness 
 as he crossed the theatre, once crowded with eager stu- 
 dents and now lying gaunt and silent, the tables laden 
 with chemical apparatus, the floor strewn with crates 
 and littered with packing straw, and the light falling 
 dimly through the foggy cupola. At the further end, a 
 flight of stairs mounted to a door covered with red baize; 
 and through this, Mr. Utterson was at last received into 
 the doctor's cabinet. It was a large room, fitted round 
 with glass presses, furnished, among other things, with 
 a cheval-glass and a business table, and looking out upon 
 the court by three dusty windows barred with iron. A 
 fire burned in the grate; a lamp was set lighted on the 
 chimney shelf, for even in the houses the fog began to 
 lie thickly; and there, close up to the warmth, sat Dr. 
 Jekyll, looking' deadly sick. He did not rise to meet his 
 visitor, but held out a cold hand and bade him welcome 
 in a changed voice. 
 
 "And now," said Mr. Utterson, as soon as Poole had 
 left them, "you have heard the news?" 
 
 The doctor shuddered. "They were crying it in the 
 square," he said. "I heard them in my dining-room." 
 
 "One word," said the lawyer. "Carew was my cli- 
 ent, but so are you, and I want to know what I am doing. 
 You have not been mad enough to hide this fellow?" 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 405 
 
 "Utterson, I swear to God," cried the doctor, "I 
 swear to God I will never set eyes on him again. I bind 
 my honour to you that I am done with him in this world. 
 It is all at an end. And indeed he does not want my 
 help; you do not know him as I do; he is safe, he ia 
 quite safe; mark my words, he will never more be heard 
 of." 
 
 The lawyer listened gloomily; he did not like his 
 friend's feverish manner, "You seem pretty sure of 
 him," said he; "and for your sake, I hope you may 
 be right. If it came to a trial, your name might 
 appear." 
 
 "I am quite sure of him," replied Jekyll; "I have 
 grounds for certainty that I cannot share with anyone. 
 But there is one thing on which you may advise me. I 
 have — I have received a letter; and I am at a loss 
 whether I should show it to the police. I should like 
 to leave it in your hands, Utterson; you would judge 
 wisely, I am sure; I have so great a trust in you." 
 
 "You fear, I suppose, that it might lead to his detec- 
 tion?" asked the lawyer. 
 
 " No," said the other. " I cannot say that I care what 
 becomes of Hyde; I am quite done with him. I was 
 thinking of my own character, which this hateful busi- 
 ness has rather exposed." 
 
 Utterson ruminated awhile; he was surprised at hia 
 friend's selfishness, and yet relieved by it. "Well," said 
 he, at last, " let me see the letter." 
 
 The letter was written in an odd, upright hand and 
 signed "Edward Hyde": and it signified, briefly enough, 
 that the writer'is benefactor, Dr. Jekyll, whom he had 
 long so unworthily repaid for a thousand generosities, 
 need labour under no alarm for his safety, as he had 
 means of escape on which he placed a sure dependence. 
 The lawyer liked this letter well enough; it put a better 
 
406 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 cdlour on the intimaey than he had looked for; and he 
 blamed himself for some of his past suspicions. , 
 
 "Have you the envelope?" he asked. 
 
 "I burned it," replied Jekyll, "before I thought what 
 I was about. But it bore no postmark. The note was 
 handed in." 
 
 "Shall I keep this and sleep upon it?" asked Utterson. 
 
 " I wish you to judge for me entirely," was the reply. 
 " I have lost confidence in myself." 
 
 "Well, I shall consider," returned the lawyer, "And 
 now one word more: it was Hyde who dictated the 
 terms in your will about that disappearance?" 
 
 The doctor seemed seized with a qualm of faintness; 
 he shut his mouth tight and nodded. 
 
 "I knew it," said Utterson. "He meant to murder 
 you. You have had a fine escape." 
 
 "I have had what is far more to the purpose," re- 
 turned the doctor solemnly: "I have had a lesson — O 
 God, Utterson, what a lessen I have had!" And he 
 covered his face for a moment with his hands. 
 
 On his way out, the lawyer stopped and had a word 
 or two with Poole. " By the bye," said he, " there was 
 a letter handed in to-day: what was the messenger like ? " 
 But Poole was positive nothing had come except by 
 post; " and only circulars by that," he added. 
 
 This news sent off the visitor with his fears renewed. 
 Plainly the letter had come by the laboratory door; pos- 
 sibly, indeed, it had been written in the cabinet; and if 
 that were so, it must be differently judged, and handled 
 with the more caution. The newsboys, as he went, 
 were crying themselves hoarse along the footways: 
 "Special edition. Shocking murder of an M. P." 
 That was the funeral oration of one friend and client; 
 and he could net help a certain apprehension lest the 
 good name of another should be sucked down in the 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 407 
 
 eddy of the scandal. It was, at least, a ticklish decision 
 diat he had to make; and self-reliant as he was by habit, 
 he began to cherish a longing for advice. It was not to 
 be had directly; but perhaps, he thought, it might be 
 fished for. 
 
 Presently after, he sat on one side of his own hearth, 
 with Mr. Guest, his head clerk, upon the other, and mid- 
 way between, at a nicely calculated distance from the fire, 
 a bottle of a particular old wine that had long dwelt un- 
 sunned in the foundations of his house. The fog still 
 slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the 
 lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and through the 
 muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the proces- 
 sion of the town's life was still rolling in tibrough the 
 great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind. But 
 the room was gay with firelight. In the bottle the acids 
 were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened 
 with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows; 
 and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vine- 
 yards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs 
 of London. Insensibly the lawyer melted. There was 
 no man from whom he kept fewer secrets than Mr. 
 Guest; and he was not always sure that he kept as 
 many as he meant. Guest had often been on business 
 to the doctor's; he knew Poole; he could scarce have 
 failed to hear of Mr. Hyde's familiarity about the house; 
 he might draw conclusions: was it not as well, then, 
 that he should see a letter which put that mystery to 
 rights ? and above all since Guest, being a great student 
 and critic of handwriting, would consider the step natural 
 and obliging? The clerk, besides, was a man of coun- 
 sel; he would scarce read so strange a document with- 
 out dropping a remark; and by (hat remark Mr. Utter- 
 son might shape his future course. 
 
 "This is a sad business about Sir Danvers," he said. 
 
408 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 " Yes, sir, indeed. It has elicited a great deal of publie 
 feeling," returned Guest. "The man, of course, was 
 mad." 
 
 "I should like to hear your views on that," replied 
 Utterson. "I have a document here in his handwriting; 
 it is between ourselves, for I scarce know what to do 
 about it; it is an ugly business at the best. But there it 
 is; quite in your way: a murderer's autograph." 
 
 Guest's eyes brightened, and he sat down at once and 
 studied it with passion. "No, sir," he said: "not mad; 
 but it is an odd hand." 
 
 "And by all accounts a vfciy odd writer," added the 
 lawyer. 
 
 Just then the servant entered with a note. 
 
 "Is that from Dr. Jelgrll, sir?" inquired the clerk. 
 "I thought I knew the writing. Anything private, Mr. 
 Utterson?" 
 
 "Only an invitation to dinner. "Why? Do you want 
 to see it?" 
 
 "One moment. I thank you, sir;" and the clerk laid 
 the two sheets of paper alongside and sedulously com- 
 pared their contents. "Thank you, sir," he said at 
 last, returning both; "it 's a very interesting autograph." 
 
 There was a pause, during which Mr. Utterson strug- 
 gled with himself. "Why did you compare them, 
 Guest?" he inquired suddenly. 
 
 " Well, sir," returned the clerk, " there *s a rather 
 lingular resemblance; the two hands are in many points 
 identical: only differently sloped." 
 
 " Rather quaint," said Utterson. 
 
 " It is, as you say, rather quaint," returned Guest. 
 
 "I wouldn't speak of this note, you know," said the 
 master. 
 
 "No, sir," said the clerk. "I understand." 
 
 But no sooner was Mr. Utterson alone that night than 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 409 
 
 he locked the note into his safe, where it reposed from 
 that time forward. "What!" he thought. "Henry 
 Jekyll forge for a murdererl" And his blood ran cold 
 in his veins. — '^r^"t,,jto»-<-<-<-«-«-s ~ ' 
 
 REMARKABLE INCIDENT OF DR. LANTON 
 
 Time ran on; thousands of pounds were offered in 
 reward, for the death of Sir Danvers was resented as a 
 public injury; but Mr. Hyde had disappeared out of the 
 ken of the police as though he had. never existed. Much 
 of his past was unearthed, indeed, and all disreputable: 
 tales came out of the man's cruelty, at once so callous 
 and violent; of his vile life, of his strange associates, of 
 the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career; 
 but of his present whereabouts not a whisper. From 
 the time he had left the house in Soho on the morning 
 of the murder, he was simply blotted out; and grad- 
 ually, as time drew on, Mr. Utterson began to recover 
 from the hotness of his alarm, and to grow more at quiet 
 with himself. The death of Sir Danvers was, to his 
 way of thinking, more than paid for by the disappear- 
 ance of Mr. Hyde. Now that that evil influence had 
 been withdrawn, a new life began for Dr. Jekyll. He 
 came out of his seclusion, renewed relations with his 
 friends, became once more their familiar guest and en- 
 tertainer; and whilst he had always been known for 
 charities, he was now no less distinguished for religion. 
 He was busy, he was much in the open air, he did good; 
 his face seemed to open and brighten, as if with an in- 
 ward consciousness of service; and for more than two 
 months, the doctor was at peace. 
 
 On the 8th of January Utterson had dined at the doc- 
 tor's with a small party; Lanyon had been there; and 
 the face of the host had looked from one to the other as 
 
410 SELECTIONS FEOM STEVENSON 
 
 in the old days when the trio were inseparable friends. 
 On the 12th, and again on the 14th, the door was shut 
 against the lawyer', "The doctor was confined to the 
 house," Poole said, "and saw no one." On the 15th, 
 he tried again, and was again refused; and having now 
 been used for the last two months to see his friend almost 
 daily, he found this return of solitude to weigh upon his 
 spirits. The fifth night he had in Guest to dine with 
 him; and the sixth he betook himself to Dr. Lanyon's. 
 
 There at least he was not denied admittance; but 
 when he came in, he was shocked at the change which 
 had taken place in the doctor's appearance. He had his 
 death-warrant written legibly upon his face. The rosy 
 man had grown pale; his flesh had fallen away; he was 
 visibly balder and older; and yet it was not so much 
 these tokens of a swift physical decay that arrested the 
 lawyer's notice, as a look in the eye and quality of man- 
 ner that seemed to testify to some deep-seated terror of 
 the mind. It was unlikely that the doctor should fear 
 death; and yet that was what tJtterson was tempted to 
 suspect. "Yes," he thought; " he is a doctor, he must 
 know his own state and that his days are counted; and 
 the knowledge is more than he can bear." And yet 
 when Utterson remarked on his ill-looks, it was with an 
 air of great firmness that Lanyon declared himself a 
 doomed man. 
 
 "I have had a shock," he said, "and I shall never 
 recover. It is a question of weeks. Well, life has been 
 pleasant; I liked it; yes, sir, I used to like it. I some- 
 times think if we knew all, we should be more glad to 
 get away." 
 
 "Jekyll is ill, too," observed Utterson. "Have you 
 seen him?" 
 
 But Lanyon's face changed, and he held up a trem- 
 bling hand. "I wish to see or hear no more of Dr. 
 
DE, JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 411 
 
 Jekyll," he said in a loud, unsteady voice. "I am quite 
 done with that person; and I beg that you will spare 
 me any allusion to one whom I regard as dead." 
 
 "Tut-tut," said Mr. Utterson; and then after a con- 
 siderable pause, "Can't I do anything?" he inquired. 
 "We are three very old friends, Lanyon; we sbaU '^ot 
 live to-make others." 
 
 "Nothing can be done," returned Lanyon; "ask 
 himself." 
 
 " He will not see me," said the lawyer. 
 
 "I am not surprised at that," was the reply. "Some 
 day, Utterson, after I am dead, you may perhaps come 
 to learn the right and wrong of titis. I cannot tell you. 
 And in the meantime, if you can sit and talk with me of 
 other things, for God's sake, stay and do so; but if 
 you cannot keep clear of this accursed topic, then, in 
 God's name, go, for I cannot bear it." 
 
 As soon as he got home, Utterson sat down and wrote 
 to Jekyll, complaining of his exclusion from the house, 
 and asking the cause of this unhappy break with Lanyon; 
 and the next day brought him a long answer, often very 
 pathetically worded, and sometimes darkly mysterious 
 in drift. The quarrel with Lanyon was incurable. "I 
 do not blame our old friend," Jekyll wrote, " but I share 
 his view that we must never meet. I mean from hence- 
 forth to lead a life of extreme seclusion; you must not 
 be surprised, nor must you doubt my friendship, if my 
 door is often shut even to you. You must sufPer me to 
 go my own dark way. I have brought on myself a 
 punidbmeat and a danger that I cannot pame. If I am 
 the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. I 
 could not think that this earth contained a place for 
 sufferings and terrors so unmanning; and you can do 
 but one thing, Utterson, to lighten this destiny, and that 
 is to respect my silence." Utterson was amazed; the 
 
412 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 dark influence of Hyde had been withdrawn, the doctor 
 had returned to his old tasks and amities; a week ago, 
 the prospect had smiled with every promise of a cheerful 
 and an honoured age; and now in a moment, friendship, 
 and peace of mind, and the whole tenor of his life were 
 wrecked. So great and unprepared a change pointed 
 to madness; but in view of Lanyon's manner and "words, 
 there must lie for it some deeper ground. 
 
 A week afterwards Dr. LanyoD took to his bed, and 
 in something less than a fortnight he was dead. The 
 night after the funeral, at which he had been sadly 
 affected, Utterson locked the door of his business room, 
 and sitting there by the light of a melancholy candle, 
 drew out and set before him an envelope addressed by 
 the hand and sealed with the seal of his dead friend. 
 "Private: for the hands of G. J. Utterson alone, and 
 in case of his predecease to he destroyed unread," so it 
 was emphatically superscribed; and the lawyer dreaded 
 to behold the contents. "I have buried one friend to- 
 day," he thought: "what if this should cost me an- 
 other?" And then he condemned the fear as a dis- 
 loyalty, and broke the seal. Within there was another 
 enclosure, likewise sealed, and marked upon the cover 
 as "not to be opened till the death or disappearance of 
 Dr. Henry JekyU." Utterson could not trust his eyes. 
 Yes, it was disappearance; here again, as in the mad will 
 which he had long ago restored to its author, here again 
 were the idea of a disappearance and the name of Heniy 
 Jekyll bracketted. But in the will, that idea had sprung 
 from the sinister suggestion of the man Hyde; it was 
 set there with a purpose all too plain and horrible. 
 Written by the hand of Lanyon, what should it mean? 
 A greal; curiosity came on the trustee, to disregard the 
 prohibition and dive at once to the bottom of these 
 mysteries; but professional honour and faith to his dead 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 413 
 
 friend were stringent obligations; and the packet slept 
 in the inmost corner of his private safe. 
 
 It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer 
 it; and it may be doubted if, from that day forth. Utter- 
 son desired the society of his surviving friend with the 
 same eagerness. He thought of him kindly; but his 
 thoughts were disquieted and fearful. He went to call 
 indeed; but he was perhaps relieved to be denied ad- 
 mittance; perhaps, in his heart, he preferred to speak 
 with Poole upon the doorstep and surrounded by the 
 air and sounds of the open city, rather than to be ad- 
 mitted into that house of voluntary bondage, and to sit 
 and speak with its inscrutable recluse. Poole had, 
 indeed,, no very pleasant news to communicate. The 
 doctor, it appeared, now more than ever confined him- 
 self to the cabinet over the laboratory, where he would 
 sometimes even sleep; he was out of spirits, he had 
 grown very silent, he did not read; it seemed as If he 
 had ^omediing on his mind. Utterson became so used 
 to the unvarying character of these reports, that he fell 
 off little by little in the frequency of his visits. 
 
 INCrDENT AT THE WINDOW 
 
 It chanced on Sunday, when Mr. Utterson was on his 
 usual walk with Mr. Enfield, that their way lay once 
 again through the by-street; and that when they came 
 in front of the door, both stopped to gaze on it. 
 
 " Well," said Enfield, " that story's at an end at least. 
 We shall never see more of Mr. Hyde." 
 
 "I hope not," said Utterson. "Did I ever tell you 
 that I once saw him, and shared your feeling of repul- 
 sion?" 
 
 "It was impossible to do the one without the other," 
 returned Enfield. "And by the way, what an ass you 
 
414 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 must have thought me, not to know that this was a back 
 way to Dr. Jekyll'sl It was partly your own fault that 
 I found it out, even when I did." 
 
 " So you found it out, did you ? " said Utterson. " But 
 if that be so, we may step into the court and take a look 
 at the windows. To tell you the truth, I am uneasy 
 about poor Jekyll; and even outside, I feel as if the 
 presence of a friend might do him good," 
 
 The court was very cool and a little damp, and full of 
 premature twilight, although the sky, high up overhead, 
 was still bright with sunset. The middle one of the 
 three windows was half way open; and sitting close be- 
 side it, taking the air with an infinite sadness of mien, 
 like some disconsolate prisoner, Utterson saw Dr. Jekyll. 
 
 "What! Jekyll!" he cried. "I trust you are better." 
 
 " I am very low, Utterson," replied the doekit, drearily, 
 "very low. It will not last long, thank God." 
 
 "You stay too much indoors," said iiie lawyer. "You 
 should be out, whipping up the circulatioii like Mr. En- 
 field and me. (This is my cousin — Mr. Enfield — Dr. 
 Jekyll.) Come now; get your hat and take a quick turn 
 with us." 
 
 "You are very good," sighed the o&er. "I should 
 like to very much; but no, no, no, it is quite impossible; 
 I dare not. But indeed, Utterson, I am very glad to see 
 you; this is really a great pleasure; I would ask you and 
 Mr. Enfield up, but the place is really not fit." 
 
 "Why then," said the lawyer, good-aaturedly, "the 
 best thing we can do is to Stay down here and speak 
 with you from where we are." 
 
 "That is just what I was about to venture to pro- 
 pose," returned the doctor with a smile. But the words 
 were hardly uttered, before the smile was struck out of 
 his face and succeeded by an expression of such abject 
 terror and despair, as froze the very blood of the two 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 415 
 
 gentlemen below. They saw it but for a glimpse, for 
 the window was instantly thrust down; but that glimpse 
 had been suflBcient, and they turned and left the court 
 without a word. In silence, too, they traversed the by- 
 street; and it was not until they had come into a neigh- 
 bouring thoroughfare, where even upon a Sunday there 
 were still some stirrings of life, that Mr. Utterson at last 
 turned and looked at his companion. They were both 
 pale; and there was an answering horror in their eyes. 
 
 " God forgive us, God forgive us," said Mr. Utterson. 
 
 Bi|t Mr. Enfield only nodded his head very seriously, 
 and walked on onee more in silence. 
 
 THE LAST NIGHT 
 
 Mr. Utterson was sitting by his fireside one evening 
 after dinner, when he was surprised to receive a visit 
 from Poole. 
 
 "Bless me, Poole, what brings you here?" he cried; 
 and then taking a second look at him, " What ails you ?" 
 he added; "is the doctor ill?" 
 
 "Mr. Utterson," said the man, "there is something 
 wrong." 
 
 "Take a seat, and here is a glass of wine for you," 
 said the lawyer. "Now, take your time, and tell me 
 plainly what you want." 
 
 "You know the doctor's ways, sir," repJied Poole, 
 "and how he shuts himself up. Well, he's shut up 
 again in the cabinet; and I don't like it, sir — I wish I 
 may die if I like it. Mr. Utterson, sir, I 'm afraid." 
 
 "Now, my good man," said the lawyer, "be explicit. 
 What are you afraid of?" 
 
 "I 've been afraid for about a week," returned Poole, 
 doggedly disregarding the question, " and I can bear it 
 no more." 
 
416 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 The man's appearance amply bore out his words; his 
 manner was altered for the worse; and except for the 
 moment when he had first announced his terror, he had 
 not once looked the lawyer in the face. Even now, he 
 sat with the glass of wine untasted on his knee, and his 
 eyes directed to a corner of the floor. " I can bear it no 
 more," he repeated. i 
 
 " Come," said the lawyer, " I see you have some good 
 reason, Poole; I see there is something seriously amiss. 
 Try to tell me what it is." 
 
 " I think there 's been foul play," said Poole, hoarsely. 
 
 "Foul play!" cried the lawyer, a good deal frightened 
 and rather inclined to be irritated in consequence. 
 "What foul play? What does the man mean?" 
 
 "I daren't say, sir,** was the answer; "but will you 
 come along with me and see for yourself?" 
 
 Mr. Ulterson's only answer was to rise and get his hat 
 and great coat; but he observed with wonder the great- 
 ness of the relief that appeared upon the butler's face, 
 and perhaps with no less, that the wine was still un- 
 tasted when he set it down to follow. 
 
 It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with 
 a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind hH 
 tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanoua 
 and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, 
 and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed to have 
 swept the streets unusually bare of passengers, besides; 
 fbr Mr. Utterson thought he had never seen that part of 
 London so deserted. He could have wished it otherwise; 
 never in his life had he been conscious of so sharp a wish 
 to see and touch his fellow-creatures; for struggle as he 
 might, there was borne in upon his mind a crushing an- 
 ticipation of calamity. The square, when they got fliere, 
 was all full of wind and dust, and the thin trees in the 
 garden were lashing themselves along the railing. Pooler 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 417 
 
 who had kept all the way a pace or two ahead, now 
 pulled up in the middle of the pavement, and in spite of 
 the biting weather, took off his hat and mopped his 
 brow with a red pocket-handkerchief. But for all the 
 hurry of his coming, these were not the dews of exertion 
 that he wiped away, but the moisture of some strangling 
 anguish; for his face was white and his voice, when he 
 spoke, harsh and broken. 
 
 "Well, sir," he said, "here we are, and God grant 
 there be nothing wrong." 
 
 "Amen, Poole," said the lawyer. 
 
 Thereupon the servant knocked in a very guarded 
 manner; the door was opened on the chain; and a voice 
 asked from within, "Is that you, Poole?" 
 
 " It 's aU right," said Poole. " Open the door." 
 
 The hall, when they entered it, was brightly lighted 
 up; the fire was built high; and about the hearth the 
 whole of the servants, men and women, stood huddled 
 together like a flock of sheep. At the sight of Mr. 
 Utterson, the housemaid broke into hysterical whimper- 
 ing; and the cook, crying out "Bless God! it's Mr. 
 Utterson," ran forward as if to take him in her arms. 
 
 "What, what? Are you all here?" said the lawyer 
 peevishly. "Very irregular, very unseemly; your mas- 
 ter would be far from pleased." 
 
 "They're all afraid," said Poole. 
 
 Blank silence followed, no one protesting; only the 
 maid lifted up her voice and now wept loudly. 
 
 "Hold your tongue!" Poole said to her, with a feroc- 
 ity of accent that testified to his own jangled nerves; 
 and indeed, when the girl had so suddenly raised the note 
 of her lamentation, they had aU started and turned 
 towards the inner door with faces of dreadful expecta- 
 tion. "And now," continued the butler, addressing the 
 knife-boy, "reach me a candle, and we '11 get this through 
 
418 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 hands at once." And then he begged Mr. Utterson tc 
 follow him, and led the way to the back garden. 
 
 "Now, sir," said he, "you come as gently as you can. 
 I want you to hear, and I don't want you to be heard. 
 And see here, sir, if by any chance he was to ask you in, 
 don't go." 
 
 Mr. Uttersbn's nerves, at this unlooked-for termina»» 
 tion, gave a jerk that nearly threw him from his bal- 
 ance; but he recollected his courage and followed the 
 butler into the laboratory building and through the sur- 
 gical theatre, with its lumber of crates and bottles, to 
 the foot of the stair. Here Poole motioned him to stand 
 on one side and listen; while he himself, setting down 
 the candle and making a great and obvious call on his 
 resolution, mounted the steps and knocked with a some- 
 what uncertain hand on ^e red baize of the cabinet 
 door. 
 
 "Mr. Utterson, sir, asking to see you," he called; 
 and even as he did so, once more violently signed to the 
 lawyer to give ear. 
 
 A voice answered from vnthin: "Tell him I cannotsee 
 anyone," it said complainingly. 
 
 "Thank you, sir," said Poole, Mtilh. a note of some- 
 thing like triumph in his voice; and taking up his can- 
 dle, he led Mr. Utterson back across the yard and into 
 the great kitchen, where the fire was out and the beetles 
 were leaping on the floor. 
 
 "Sir," he said, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes, "was 
 that my master's voice?" 
 
 "It seems much changed," replied the lawyer, very 
 pale, but giving look for look. 
 
 ^^ "Changed? Well, yes, I think so," said Ike butler. 
 "Have I been twenty years in this man's house, to be 
 deceived about his voice? No, sir; master's made 
 away with; he was made away with, eight days ago. 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 419 
 
 when we heard him cry out upon the name of God; 
 and who's in there instead of him, and whi/ it stays 
 there, is a thing tha* cries to Heaven, Mr. Utterson!" 
 
 "This is a very ..trxnge tale, Poole; this is rather a 
 wild tale, my mar," said Mr. Utterson, biting his' fin- 
 ger. "Supp'-se it were as you suppose, supposing Dr. 
 Jekyll to have been— well, murdered, what could induce 
 the murderer to stay? That won't hold water; it 
 doesn't commend itself to reason." 
 
 "Well, Mr. Utterson, you are a hard man to satisfy, 
 but I '11 do it yet," said Poole. "All this last week (you 
 must know) him, or it, or whatever it is that lives in that 
 cabinet, has been crying night and day for some sort of 
 medicine aad cannot get it to his mind. It was some- 
 times his way — the master's, that is — to write his orders 
 on a sheet of paper and throw it on the stair. We 've 
 had nothing else this week back; nothing but papiers, 
 and a closed door, and the very meals left there to be 
 smuggled in when nobody was looking. Well, sir, 
 every day, ay, and twice and thrice in the same day, 
 there have been orders and complaints, and I have been 
 sent flying to all the wholesale chemists in town. Every 
 time I brought the stuff back, there would be another 
 paper telling me to return it, because it was not pure, 
 and another order to a different firm. This drug is 
 wanted bitter bad, sir, whatever for." 
 
 " Have you any of these papers ? " asked Mr. Utterson. 
 . Poole felt in his pocket and handed out a crumpled 
 note, which the lawyer, bending nearer to the candle, 
 carefully examined. Its contents ran thus: "Dr. Jekyll 
 presents his complim^ents to Messrs. Maw. He assures 
 them that their last sample is impure and quite useless 
 for his present purpose. In the year 18 — -, Dr. J. pur- 
 chased a somewhat large quantity from Messrs. M. He 
 now begs them to search with the most sedulous care, 
 
420 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 and should any of the same quality be left, to forward 
 it to him at once. Expense is no consideration. The 
 importance of this to Dr. J. can hardly be exaggerated." 
 So far the letter had run composedly enough, but here 
 with a sudden splutter of the pen, the writer's emotion 
 had broken loose. "For God's sake," he had added, 
 "find me some of the old." 
 
 "This is a strange note," said Mr. Utterson; and then 
 sharply, "How do you come to have it open?" 
 
 "The man at Maw's was main angry, sir, and he 
 threw it back to me like so much dirt," returned Poole. 
 
 "This is unquestionably the doctor's hand, do you 
 know?" resumed the lawyer. 
 
 "I thought it looked like it," said the servant rather 
 sulkily; and then, with another voice, " But what mat- 
 ters hand of write?" he said. "I 've seen him!" 
 
 " Seen him ? " repeated Mr. Utterson. " Well ? " 
 
 "That 's it I" said Poole. "It was this way. I came 
 suddenly into the theatre from the garden. It seems he 
 had slipped out to look for this drug or whatever it is; 
 for the cabinet door was open; and there he was at the 
 far end of the room digging among the crates. He 
 looked up when I came in, gave a kind of cry, and 
 whipped upstairs into the cabinet. It was but for one 
 minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head 
 like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a 
 mask upon his face ? If it was my master, why did he 
 cry out like a rat, and run from me ? I have served him 
 long enough. And then . . ." The man paused and 
 passed his hand over his face. 
 
 "These are all very strange circumstances," said Mr. 
 UttersoH, "but I think I begin to see daylight. Your 
 master, Poole, is plainly seized with one of those mala- 
 dies that both torture and deform the sufferer; hence, 
 for aught I know, the alteration of his voice; hence the 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 421 
 
 mask and the avoidance of his friends; hence his eager- 
 ness to find this drug, by means of which the poor soul 
 retains some hope of ultimate recovery — God grant that 
 he be not deceived! There is my explanation; it is sad 
 enough, Poole, ay, and appalling to. consider; but it is 
 plain and natural, hangs well together, and delivers us 
 from all exorbitant alarms." 
 
 "Sir," said the butler, turning to a sort of mottled 
 pallor, " that thing was not my master, and there 's the 
 truth. My master" — ^here he looked round him and 
 began to whisper — "is a tall, fine build of a man, and 
 this was more of a dwarf." Utterson attempted to pro- 
 test. "O, sir," cried Poole, "do you think I do not 
 know my master after twenty years? Do you think I 
 do not know where his head comes to in the cabinet 
 door, where I saw him every morning of my life ? No, 
 sir, that thing in the mask was never Dr. Jekyll — God 
 knows what it was, but it was never Dr. Jekyll; and it 
 is the belief of my heart that there was murder done." 
 
 "Poole," replied the laivyer, "if you say that, it will 
 become my duty to make certain. Much as I desire to 
 spare your master's feelings, much as I am puzzled by 
 this note which seems to prove him to be still alive, I 
 shall consider it my duty to break in that door," 
 
 "Ah, Mr. Utterson, that's talking!" cried the butler. 
 
 "And now comes the second question," resumed 
 Utterson: "Who is going to do it?" 
 
 "Why, you and me," was the undaunted reply. 
 
 "That's very well said," returned the lawyer; "and 
 whatever comes of i;; T shall make it my business to see 
 you are no loser." 
 
 "There is an axe in the theatKt" continued Poole; 
 "and you might take the kitchen poker for yourse?' " 
 
 The lawyer took that rude but weighty instrume**- 
 into his hand, and balanced it. " Do you know, Poole," 
 
422 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 he said, looking up, " that you and I are about to place 
 ourselves in a position of some peril?" 
 
 " You may say so, sir, indeed," returned the butler. 
 
 "It is well, then, that we should be frank," said the 
 other. "We both think more than we have said; let us 
 make a clean breast. This masked figure that you saw, 
 did you recognise it?" 
 
 "Well, sir, it went so quick, and the creature was so 
 doubled up, that I could hardly swear to that," was the 
 answer. "But if you mean, was it Mr. Hyde? — why, 
 yes, I think it was! You see, it was much of the same 
 bigness; and it had the same quick, light way with it; 
 and then who else could have got in by the laboratory 
 door? You have not forgot, sir, that at the time of the 
 murder he had still the key with him ? But that 's not 
 all. I don't know, Mr. TJtterson, if ever you met this 
 Mr. Hyde?" 
 
 " Yes," said the lawyer, " I once spoke with him." 
 
 "Then you must know as well as the rest of us that 
 there was something queer about that gentleman — 
 something that gave a man a turn — I don't know rightly 
 how to say it, sir, beyond this: that you felt it in your 
 marrow kind of cold and thin." 
 
 " I own I felt something of what you describe," said 
 Mr. Utterson. 
 
 "Quite so, sir," returned Poole. "Well, when that 
 masked thing like a monkey jifmped from among the 
 chemicals and whipped into the cabinet, it went down 
 my spine like ice. O, I know it's not evidence, Mr. 
 Utterson; I 'm book-learned enough for that; but a 
 man has his feelings, and I give you my bible-word it 
 was Mr. Hyde!" 
 
 "Ay, ay," said |he lawyer. "My fears incline to the 
 same point. Evil, I fear, founded — evil was sure to 
 come — of that connection. Ay, truly, I believe you; I 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 423 
 
 believe poor Harry is killed; and I believe his murderer 
 (for what purpose, God alone can tell) is still lurking in 
 his victim's room. Well, let our name be vengeance. 
 Call Bradshaw." 
 
 The footman came at the summons, very white and 
 nervous. 
 
 "Pull yourself together, Bradshaw," said the lawyer. 
 "This suspense, I know, is telling upon all of you;, but 
 it is now our intention to make an end of it. Poole, 
 here, and I are going to force our way into the cabinet. 
 If all is well, my shoulders are broad enough to bear the 
 blame. Meanwhile, lest any&itig should really be amiss, 
 or any malefactor seek to escape by the back, you and 
 the boy must go round the corner with a pair of good 
 sticks and take your post at the laboratory door. We 
 give you ten minutes to get to your stations." 
 
 As Bradshaw left, the lawyer looked at his watch. 
 "And now, Poole, let us get to ours," he said; and 
 taking the poker under his arm, led the way into the 
 yard. The scud had banked over the moon, and it was 
 now quite dark. The wind, which only broke in puflFs 
 and draughts into that deep well of building, tossed the 
 light of the candle to and fro about their steps, until 
 they came into the shelter of the theatre, where they sat 
 down silently to wait. London hummed solemnly all 
 around; but nearer at hand, the stillness was only broken 
 by the sounds of a footfall moving to and fro along the 
 cabinet floor. 
 
 "So it will walk all day, sir," whispered Poole; "ay, 
 and the better part of flie night. Only when a new 
 sample comes from the chemist, there 's a bit of a break. 
 Ah, it 's an ill-conscience that 's such an enemy to rest! 
 Ah, sir, there 's blood foully shed in every step of it! But 
 hark again, a little closer — put your heart in your ears, 
 Mr. Utterson, and tell me, is that the doctor's foot?" 
 
424 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 The steps fell lightly and oddly, with a certain swing, 
 for all th^ went so slowly; it was different indeed from 
 the heavy creaking tread of Henry Jekyll. Utterson 
 sighed. "Is there never anything else?" he asked. 
 
 Poole nodded. "Once," he said. "Once I heard it 
 weeping I" 
 
 "Weeping? how that?" said the lawyer, conscious «i 
 a sudden chill of horror. 
 
 "Weeping like a woman or a lost soul," said the 
 butler. " I came away with that upon my heart, that I 
 could have wept too." 
 
 But now the ten minutes drew to an end. Poole dis- 
 interred the axe from under a stack of packing straw; 
 the candle was set upon the nearest table to light them 
 to the attack; and they drew near with bated breath to 
 where that patient foot was still going up and down, up 
 and down, in the quiet of the night. 
 
 "Jekyll," cried Utterson, with a loud voice, "I de- 
 mand to see you." He paused a moment, but there 
 came no reply. "I give you fair warning, our sus- 
 picions are aroused, and I must and shall see you," he 
 resumed; "if not by fair means, then by foul — ^if not of 
 your consent, then by brute force!" 
 
 "Utterson," said the voice, "for God's sake, have 
 mercy!" 
 
 "Ah, that's not Jekyll's voice— it's Hyde's!" cried 
 Utterson. "Down with the door, Poole!" 
 
 Poole swung the axe over his shoulder; the blow 
 shook the building, and the red baize door leaped against 
 the lock and hinges. A dismal screech, as of mere 
 animal terror, rang from the cabinet. Up went the axe 
 again, and again the panels crashed and the frame 
 bounded; four times the blow fell; but the wood was 
 tough and the fittings were of excellent workmanship; 
 and it was not until the fifth, that the lock burst in 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 425 
 
 sunder and the wreck of the door fell inwards on, the 
 carpet. 
 
 The besiegers, appalled by their own riot and the 
 stillness that had succeeded, stood back a little and 
 peered in. There lay the cabinet before their eyes in 
 the quiet lamplight, a good fire glowing and chattering 
 on the hearth, the kettle singing its thin strain, a drawer 
 or two open, papers neatly set forth on the business table, 
 and nearer the fire, the things laid out for tea: the 
 quietest room, you Would have said, and, but for the 
 glazed presses full of chemicals, the most commonplace 
 that night in London. 
 
 Bight in the midst there lay the body of a man sorely 
 contorted and still twitching. They drew near on tip- 
 toe, turned it on its back and beheld the face of Edward 
 Hyde. He was dressed in clothes far too large for him, 
 clothes of the doctor's bigness; the cords of his face still 
 moved with a semblance of life, but life was quite gone: 
 and by the crushed phial in the hand and the strong 
 smell of kernels that hung upon the air, Utterson knew 
 that he was looking on the body of a self-destroyer. 
 
 "We have come too late," he said sternly, "whether 
 to save or punish. Hyde is gone to his account; and it 
 only remains for us to find the body of your master." 
 
 The far greater proportion of the building was occupied 
 by the theatre, which filled almost the whole ground 
 story and was lighted from above, and by the cabinet, 
 wbich formed an upper story at one end and looked 
 upon the court. A corridor joined the theatre to the 
 door on the by-street; and with this the cabinet com- 
 municated separately by a second flight of stairs. There 
 were besides a few dark closets and a spacious cellar. 
 All these they now thoroughly examined. Each closet 
 needed but a glance, for all were empty, and all, by the 
 dust that fell from their doors, had stood long unopened. 
 
426 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 The cellar, indeed, was filled with crazy lumber, mostly 
 dating from the times of the surgeon who was Jekyll's 
 predecessor; but even as they opened the door they were 
 advertised of the uselessness of further search, by the 
 fall of a perfect mat of cobweb which had for years sealed 
 up the entrance. Nowhere was there any trace of Henry 
 Jekyll, dead or alive. 
 
 Poole stamped on the flags of the corridor. "He 
 must be buried here," he said, hearkening to the sound. 
 
 " Or he may have fled," said Utterson, and he turned 
 to examine the door in the by-street. It was locked; 
 and lying near by on the flags, they found the key, al- 
 ready stained with rust. 
 
 "This does not look like use," observed the lawyer. 
 
 "Use!" echoed Poole. "Do you not see, sir, it is 
 broken? much as if a man had stamped on it." 
 
 "Ay," continued Utterson, "and the fractures, too, 
 are rusty." The two men looked at each other with a 
 scare. "This is beyond me, Poole," said the lawyer. 
 " Let us go back to the cabinet." 
 
 They mounted the stair in silence, and still with an 
 occasional awestruck, glance at the dead body, proceeded 
 more thoroughly to examine the contents of the cabinet. 
 At one table, there were traces of chemical work, various 
 measured heaps of some white salt being laid on glass 
 saucers, as though for an experiment in which the un- 
 happy man had been prevented. 
 
 "That is the same drug that I was always bringing 
 him," said Poole; and even as he spoke, the kettle with 
 a startling noise boiled over. 
 
 This brought them to the fireside, where the easy-chair 
 was drawn cosily up, and the tea things stood ready to 
 the sitter's elbow, the very sugar in the cup. There 
 were several books on a shelf; one lay beside the tea 
 tilings open, and Utterson was amazed to find it a copy 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 427 
 
 of a pious work, for which Jekyll had several times 
 expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand, 
 with startling blasphemies. 
 
 Next, in the course of their review of the chamber, the 
 searchers came to the cheval glass, into whose depths 
 they looked with an involuntary horror. But it was so 
 turned as to show them nothing but the rosy glow play- 
 ing on the roof, the fire sparkling in a hundredrepetitions 
 along the glazed front of the presses, and their own pale 
 and fearful countenances stooping to look in. 
 
 "This glass have seen some strange things, sir," 
 whispered Poole. 
 
 "And surely none stranger than itself," echoed the 
 lawyer in the same tones. "For what did Jekyll" — ^he 
 caught himself up at the word with a start, and then 
 conquering the weakness — "what could Jekyll want 
 with it?" he said. 
 
 "You may say that!" said Pooie. 
 
 Next they turned to the business table. On the desk, 
 among the neat array of papers, a large envelope was 
 uppermost, and bore, in the doctor's hand, the name of 
 Mr. Utterson. The lawyei unsealed it, and several en- 
 closures fell to the floor. The first was a will, drawn in 
 the same eccentric terms as the one which he had re- 
 turned six months before, to serve as a testament in case 
 of death, and as a deed of gift in case of disappearance; 
 but in place of the name of Edward Hyde, the lawyer, 
 with indescribable amazement, read the name of Gabriel 
 John Utterson. He looked at Poole, and then back at 
 the paper, and last of all at the dead malefftctor stretched 
 upon the carpet. 
 
 "My head goes round," he said. "He has been all 
 these days in possession; he had no cause to like me; 
 he must have raged to see himself displaced; and he 
 has not destroyed this document." 
 
428 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 He caught up the next paper; it was a brief note in 
 the doctor's hand and dated at the top. "O Poole!" 
 the lawyer cried, "he was alive and here this day. He 
 cannot have been disposed of in so short a space; he 
 must be still alive, he must have fled I And then, why 
 fled ? and how ? and in that case, can we venture to declare 
 this suicide ? O, we must be careful. I foresee that we 
 may yet involve your master in some dire catastrophe." 
 
 "Why don't you read it, sir?" asked Poole. 
 
 " Because I fear," replied the lawyer solemnly. " God 
 grant I have no cause for iti " And with that he brought 
 the paper to his eyes and read as follows: 
 
 "Mr Dii&B Utteeson, — When this shall fall into your hands, 1 
 shall have disappeared, under what circumstances I have not the 
 penetration to foresee, but my instinct and all the circumstances of 
 my nameless situation tell me that the end is sure and must be early. 
 Go then, and first read the narrative which Lanyon warned me he 
 was to place in your hands; and if you care to hear more, turn to 
 the confession of 
 
 "Your unworthy and unhappy friend, 
 
 "Henry Jektu,." 
 
 "There was a third enclosure?" asked Utterson. 
 
 "Here, sir," said Poole, and gave into his hands a 
 considerable packet sealed in several places. 
 
 The lawyer put it in his pocket. " I would say noth- 
 ing of this paper. If your master has fled or is dead, we 
 may at least save his credit. It is now ten; I must go 
 home and read these documents in quiet; but I shall 
 be back before midnight, when we shall send for the 
 police." 
 
 They went out, locking the door of the theatre behind 
 them; and Utterson, once more leaving the servants 
 gathered about the fire in the hall, trudged back to his 
 office to read the two narratives in which this inystery 
 was now to be explained. 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 429 
 
 DR. LANTON's NAREATTVE 
 
 On the ninth of January, now four days ago, I re- 
 ceived by the evening delivery a registered envelope, 
 addressed in the hand of my colleague and old school- 
 companion, Henry Jekyll. I was a good deal surprised 
 by this; for we were by no means in the habit of corre- 
 spondence; I had seen the man, dined with him, indeed, 
 the night before; and I could imagine nothing in our 
 intercourse that should justify formality of registration. 
 The contents increased my wonder; for this is how the 
 letter ran: 
 
 "10th December, 18- 
 "Deae Lanton, — You are one of my oldest friends; and although 
 we may have differed at times on scientific questions, I cannot remem- 
 ber, at least on my side, any break in our affection. There was never 
 a day when, if you had said to me, 'Jekyll, my life, my honour, my 
 reason, depend upon you,' I would not have sacrificed my left hand to 
 help you. Lanyon, my life, my honour, my reason, are all at your 
 mercy; if you fail me to-night I am lost. You might suppose, after 
 this preface, that I am going to ask you for somethuig dishonourable 
 to grant. Judge for yourself. 
 
 "I want you to postpone all other engagements for to-night — ay, 
 even if you were summoned to the bedside of an emperor; to take a 
 cao, imless your carriage should be actually at the door; and with this 
 letter in your hand for consultation, to drive straight to my house. 
 Poole, my butler, has his orders; you will find him waiting your arri- 
 val with a locksmith. The door of my cabinet is then to be forced: 
 and you are to go in alone; to open the glazed press (letter E) on the 
 left hand, brea^g the lock if it be shut; and to draw out, vdth aU its 
 contents as they stand, the fourth drawer from the top or (which is the 
 same thing) lie third from the bottom. In my extreme distress of 
 mind, I have a morbid fear of misdirectmg you; but even if I am in 
 error, you may know the right drawer by its contents: some powders, 
 a phial and a paper book. This drawer I beg of you to carry back 
 with you to Cavendish Square exactly as it stands. 
 
 "That is the first part of the service: now for the second. You 
 should be back, if you set out at once on the receipt of this, long be- 
 fore midnight; but I will leave you that amount of margin, »ot only in 
 
430 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 the fear of one of those obstacles that can neither be prevented nt» 
 foreseen, but because an hour when your servants are in bed is to be 
 preferred for what will then remain to do. At midnight, then, I have 
 to ask you to be alone in your consulting room, to admit with your 
 own hand into the house a man who will present himself in my name, 
 and to place in his hands the drawer that you will have brought with 
 you from my cabinet. Then you will have played your part and 
 earned my gratitude completely. Five minutes afterwards, if you 
 insist upon an explanation, you will have understood that these 
 arrangeinents are of capital importance; and that by the neglect of one 
 of them, fantastic as they must appear, you might have charged your 
 conscience with my death or the shipwreck of my reason. 
 
 " Confident as I am that you will not trifle with this appeal, my heart 
 sinks and my hand trembles at the bare thought of such a possibility. 
 Think of me at this hour, in a strange place, labouring under a black- 
 ness of distress that no fancy can exaggerate, and yet well aware that, 
 if you will but punctually serve me, my troubles will roll away like a 
 story that is told. Serve me, my dear Lanyon, and save 
 
 "Your friend, 
 
 "H. J. 
 
 "P. S. — I had already sealed this up when a fresh terror struck up- 
 on my soul. It is possible that the post-office may fail me, and this 
 letter not come into your hands until to-morrow morning. In that 
 case, dear Lanyon, do my errand when it shall be most convenient 
 for you in the course of the day; and once more expect my messenger 
 at midnight. It may then already be too late; and. if that night passes 
 without event, you will know that you have seen the last of Henry 
 Jekyll." 
 
 Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my col- 
 league was insane; but till that was proved beyond the 
 possibility of doubt, I felt bound to do as he requested. 
 The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in 
 a position to judge of its importance; and an appeal so 
 worded could not be set aside without a grave respon- 
 sibility. I rose accordingly from table, got into a han- 
 som, and drove straight to Jekyll's house. The butler 
 was awaiting my arrival; he had received by the same 
 post as mine a registered letter of instruction, and had 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR, HYDE 431 
 
 sent at once for a locksmith and a carpenter. The 
 tradesmen came while we were yet speaking; and we 
 moved in a body to old Dr. Denman's surgical theatre, 
 from which (as you are doubtless aware) Jekyll's private 
 cabinet is most conveniently entered. The door was 
 very strong, the lock excellent; the carpenter avowed he 
 would have great trouble and have to do much damage, 
 if force were to be used; and the locksmith was near 
 despair. But this last was a handy fellow, and after 
 two hours' work, the door stood open. The press 
 marked E was unlocked; and I took out the drawer, 
 had it filled up with straw and tied in a sheet, and re- 
 turned with it to Cavendish Square. 
 
 Here I proceeded to examine its contents. The pow- 
 ders were neatly enough made up, but not with the nicety 
 of the dispensing chemist; so that it was plain they were 
 of Jekyll's private manufacture: and when I opened one 
 of the wrappers I found what seemed to me a simple 
 crystalline salt of a white colour. The phial, to which I 
 next turned my attention, might have been about half 
 full of a blood-red liquor, which was highly pungent to 
 the sense of smell and seemed to me to contain phos- 
 phorus and some volatile ether. At the other ingredi- 
 ents I could make no guess. The book was an ordinary 
 version book and contained little but a series of dates. 
 These covered a period of many years, but I observed that 
 the entries ceased nearly a year ago and quite abruptly. 
 Here and there a brief remark was appended to a 
 date, usually no more than a single word: "double" 
 occurring perhaps six times in a total of several hun- 
 dred entries; and once very early in the list and fol- 
 lowed by several marks of exclamation, " total failure!!! " 
 All this, though it whetted my curiosity, told me little 
 that was definite. Here were a phial of some tincture, 
 a paper of some salt, and the record of a series of expOT- 
 
432 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 ments that had led (like too many of Jekyll's investiga- 
 tions) to no end of practical usefulness. How could the 
 presence of these articles in my house affect either the 
 honour, the sanity, or the life of my flighty colleague? 
 If his messenger could go to one place, why could he not 
 go to another? And even granting some impediment, 
 why was this gentleman to be received by me in secret? 
 The more I reflected the more convinced I grew that I 
 was dealing with a case of cerebral disease; and though 
 I dismissed my servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver, 
 that I might be found in some posture of self-defence. 
 
 Twelve o'clock had scarce rung out over London, ere 
 the knocker sounded very gently on the door. I went 
 myself at the summons, and found a small man crouch- 
 ing against the pillars of the portico. 
 
 "Are you come from Dr. JekyU?" I asked. 
 
 He told me "yes" by a constrained gesture; and when 
 I had bidden him enter, he did not obey me without a 
 searching backward glance into the darkness of the 
 square. There was a policeman not far off, advancing 
 with his bull's eye open; and at the sight, I thought my 
 visitor started and made greater haste. 
 
 These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; 
 and as I followed him into the bright light of the con- 
 sulting room, I kept my hand ready on my weapon. 
 Here, at last, I had a chance of clearly seeing him. I 
 had never set eyes on him before, so much was certain. 
 He was small, as I have said; I was struck besides with 
 the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable 
 combination of great muscular activity and great appar- 
 ent debility of constitution, and — last but not least — 
 with the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his 
 neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to incip- 
 ient rigour,' and was accompanied by a marked sinking 
 > The first stages of a nervous chilL 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 433 
 
 of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idio- 
 syncratic, personal distaste, and merely wondered at 
 the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had 
 reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the 
 nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than 
 the principle of hatred. 
 
 This person (who had thus, from the first moment of 
 his entrance, struck in me what I can only describe as a 
 disgustful curiosity) was dressed in a fashion that would 
 have made an ordinary person laughable; his clothes, 
 that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fab^c, 
 were enormously too large for him in every measure- 
 ment — the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to 
 keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat below 
 his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his 
 shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutre- 
 ment was far from moving me to laughter. Rather, as 
 there was something abnormal and misbegotten in the 
 very essence of the creature that now faced me — some- 
 thing seizing, surprising and revolting — this fresh dis- 
 parity seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so 
 that to my interest in the man's nature and character, 
 there was added a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his 
 fortune and status in the world. 
 
 These observations, though they have taken so great 
 a space to be set down in, were yet the work of a few 
 seconds. My visitor was, indeed, on fire with sombre 
 excitement. 
 
 "Have you got it?" he cried. "Have you got it?" 
 And so lively was his impatience that he even laid his 
 hand upon my arm and sought to shake me. 
 
 I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy 
 pang along my blood. "Come, sir," said I. "You 
 forget that I have not yet the pleasure of your acquaint- 
 ance. Be seated, if you please." And I showed him 
 
434 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 an example, and sat down myself in my customary seat 
 and with as fair an imitation of my ordinary manner to 
 a patient, as the lateness of the hour, the nature of my 
 preoccupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, 
 would suffer me to muster. 
 
 I "I beg your pardon. Dr. Lanyon," he replied civilly 
 enough. " What you say is very well founded; and my 
 impatience has shown its heels to my politeness. I come 
 here at the instance of your colleague. Dr. Henry Jekyll, 
 on a piece of business of some moment, and I under- 
 stood . . ." He paused and put his hand to his throat, 
 and I could see, in spite of his collected manner, that he 
 was wrestling against the approaches of the hysteria — 
 " I understood, a drawer . . ." 
 
 But here I took pity on my visitor's suspense, and 
 some perhaps on my own growing curiosity. 
 
 "There it is, sir," said I, pointing to the drawer, 
 where it lay on the floor behind a table and still covered 
 with the sheet. 
 
 He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand 
 upon his heart: I could hear his teeth grate with the con- 
 vulsive action of his jaws; and his face was so ghastly to 
 see that I grew alarmed both for his life and reason. 
 
 " Compose yourself," said I. 
 
 He turned a dreadful smile to me, and as if with the 
 decision of despair, plucked away the sheet. At sight of 
 the contents, he uttered one loud sob of such immense 
 relief that I sat petrified. And the next moment, in a 
 voice that was already fairly well under control, "Have 
 you a graduated glass?" he asked. 
 
 I rose from my place with something of an effort and 
 gave him what he asked. 
 
 He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a 
 few minims of the red tincture and added one of the 
 tHJwders. The mixture, which was at first of a reddish 
 
DE. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 435 
 
 hue, began, in proportion as the crystals melted, to 
 brighten in colour, to effervesce audibly, and to throw 
 off small fumes of vapour. Suddenly and at the same 
 moment, the ebullition ceased and the compound changed 
 to a dark purple, which faded again more slowly to a 
 watery green. My visitor, who had watched these 
 metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled, set down the 
 glass upon the table, and then turned and looked upon 
 me with an air of scrutiny. 
 
 "And now," said he, "to settle what remains. Will 
 you be wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to 
 take this glass in my hand and to go forth from your 
 house without further parley ? or has the greed of curi- 
 osity too much command of you? Think before you 
 answer, for it shall be done as you decide. As you 
 decide, you shall be left as you were before, and neither 
 richer nor wiser, unless the sense of service rendered to a 
 man in mortal distress may be counted as a kind of 
 riches of the soul. Or, if you shall so prefer to choose, 
 a new province of knowledge and new avenues to fame 
 and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this room, 
 upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a 
 prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan." 
 
 "Sir," said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from 
 truly possessing, "you speak enigmas, and you will 
 perhaps not wonder that I hear you with no very strong 
 impression of belief. But I have gone too far in the way 
 bf inex|)licable services to pause before I see the end." 
 
 "It is well," replied my visitor. "Lanyon, you re- 
 member your vows: what follows is under the seal of 
 our profession. And now, you who have so long been 
 bound to the most narrow and material views, you who 
 have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine, you 
 who have derided your superiors — behold!" 
 
 He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A 
 
436 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table 
 and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with 
 open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a 
 change — ^he seemed to swell — his face became suddenly 
 black and the features seemed to melt and alter — and 
 the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped 
 back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from 
 that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror. 
 
 "O God!" I screamed, and "O God!" again and 
 again; for there before my eyes — pale and shaken, and 
 half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like 
 a man restored from death — there stood Henry Jekyll! 
 
 What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my 
 mind to set on paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what 
 I heard, and my soul sickened at it; and yet now when 
 that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I be- 
 lieve it, and I cannot answer. My life is shaken to its 
 roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me 
 at all hours of the day and night; I feel that my days 
 are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die 
 incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man un- 
 veiled to me, even with tears of penitence, I cannot, even 
 in memory, dwell on it without a start of horror. I will 
 say but one thing, Utterson, and that (if you can bring 
 your mind to credit it) will be more than enough. The 
 creature who crept into my house that night was, on 
 Jekyll's own confession, known by the name of Hyde 
 and hunted for in every corner of the land as the mur- 
 derer of Carew. „ t 
 
 Hastie Lanton. 
 
 HENRY jekyll's FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE 
 
 I was born in the year 18 — to a large fortune, en- 
 dowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature 
 to industry, fond of the respect of tlie wise and good 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 437 
 
 among my fellow-men, and thus, as might have been 
 supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and 
 distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my 
 faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such 
 as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found 
 it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry 
 my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave 
 countenance before the public. Hence it came about 
 that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached 
 years of reflection, and began to look round me and take 
 stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood 
 already committed to a profound duplicity of life. 
 Many a man would have even blazoned such irregular- 
 ities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I 
 had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an 
 almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the 
 exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular 
 degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, 
 and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of 
 men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill 
 which divide and compound man's dual nature. In this 
 case, I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on 
 that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion 
 and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress. 
 Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense 
 a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I 
 was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and 
 plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of 
 day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of 
 sorrow and suffering. And it chanced that the direction 
 of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the 
 mystic and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong 
 light on this consciousness of the perennial war among 
 my members. With every day, and from both sides of 
 my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus 
 
438 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial dis- 
 coveiy I have been doomed to such a dreadful ship- 
 wreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say 
 two, because the state of my own knowledge does not 
 pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will 
 outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess 
 that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of 
 multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I 
 for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced in- 
 fallibly in one direction and in one direction only. It 
 was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I 
 learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality 
 of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in 
 the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be 
 said to be either, it was only because I was radically 
 both; and from an early date, even before the course of 
 my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most 
 naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to 
 dwell with pleasure, as a beloved day-dream, on the 
 thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I 
 told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, lifo 
 would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust 
 might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and 
 remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could 
 walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing 
 the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no 
 longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of 
 this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that 
 these incongruous faggots were thus bound together — 
 that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar 
 twins should be continuously struggling. How, then, 
 were they dissociated? 
 
 I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a 
 side light began to shine upon the subject from the lab- 
 oratory table. I began to perceive more deeply than it 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 439 
 
 has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, 
 the mist-like transience, of this seemingly so solid body 
 in which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to 
 have the power to shake and to pluck back that fleshly 
 vestment, even as a wind might toss the curtains of a 
 pavilion. For two good reasons, I will not enter deeply 
 into this scientific branch of my confession. First, be- 
 cause I have been made to learn that the doom and 
 burthen of our life is bound forever on man's shoulders, 
 and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but re- 
 turns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful 
 pressure. Second, because, as my narrative will make, 
 alas I too evident, my discoveries were incomplete. 
 Enough, then, that I not only recognised my natural 
 body for the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the 
 powers that made up my spirit, but managed to com- 
 pound a drug by which these powers should be de- 
 throned from their supremacy, and a second form and 
 countenance substituted, none the less natural to me 
 because they were the expression, and bore the stamp, 
 of lower elements in my soul. 
 
 I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of 
 practice. I knew well that I risked death; for any 
 drug that so potently controlled and shook the very for- 
 tress of identity, might by the least scruple of an over- 
 dose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of 
 exhibition, utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle 
 which I looked to it to change. But the temptation of 
 a discovery so singular and profound, at last overcame 
 the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my 
 tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale 
 chemists, a large quantity of a particular salt which I 
 knew, *fbm my experiments, to be the last ingredient 
 required; and late one accursed night, I compounded 
 the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in 
 
440 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a 
 strong glow of courage, drank off the potion. 
 
 The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the 
 bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that 
 cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then 
 these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to 
 myself as if out of a great sickness. There was some- 
 thing strange in my sensations, something indescribably 
 new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt 
 younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious 
 of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual 
 images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution 
 of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an inno- 
 cent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first 
 breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more 
 wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, 
 in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I 
 stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these 
 sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I 
 had lost in stature. 
 
 There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that 
 which stands beside me as I write, was brought there 
 later on and for the very purpose of these transforma- 
 tions. The night, however, was far gone into the morn- 
 ing — the morning, black at it was, was nearly ripe for 
 the conception of the day — the inmates of my house 
 were locked in the most rigorous hours of slumber; and 
 I determined, flushed as I was with hope and triumph^ 
 to venture in my new shape as far as to my bedroom. I 
 crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down 
 upon me, I could have thought, with wonder, the first 
 creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had 
 yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a 
 stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I 
 saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde. 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDF 441 
 
 I must here speak by theory alone, sajjng not that 
 which I know, but that which I suppose to be most 
 probable. The evil side of my nature, to which I had i 
 now transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust I 
 and less developed than the good which I had just de- I 
 posed. Again, in the course of my life, which had been, 
 after all, nine-tenths a life of effort, virtue and control, 
 it had been much less exercised and much less exhausted. 
 And hence, as I think, it came about that Edward Hyde 
 was so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry 
 Jekyll. Even as good shone upon the countenance of 
 the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face 
 of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to 
 be the lethal * side of man) had left on that body an im- 
 print of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked 
 upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no 
 repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, 
 was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my 
 eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more 
 express and single, than the imperfect and divided 
 countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call 
 mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have ob- 
 served that when I wore the semblance of Edward 
 Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a 
 visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was 
 because all human beings, as we meet them, are com- 
 mingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone 
 in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil. 
 
 I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second 
 and conclusive experiment had yet to be attempted; it 
 yet remained to be seen if I had lost my identity beyond 
 redemption and must flee before daylight from a house 
 that was no longer mine; and hurrying back to my 
 cabinet, I once more prepared and drank the cup, once 
 ' Deadly, causing dea&. 
 
442 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 more suffered the pangs of dissolution, and came to my* 
 self once more with the character, the stature and the 
 face of Heniy Jekyll. 
 
 That night I had come to the fatal cross roads. Had 
 I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I 
 risked the experiment while under the empire of generous 
 or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and 
 from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth 
 an angel instead of a fiend. The drug had no discrimi- 
 nating action; it wa^ neither diabolical nor divine; but it 
 shook the doors of the prison-house of m^y disposition; 
 and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within 
 ran forth. At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, 
 kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the 
 occasion; and the thing that was projected was Edward 
 Hyde. Hence, although I had now two characters as 
 well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the 
 other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous 
 compound of whose reformation and improvement I 
 had , already learned to despair. The movement was 
 thus wholly towards the worse. 
 
 Even at that time, I had not yet conquered my aver- 
 sion to the dryness of a life of study. I would still be 
 merrily disposed at times; and as my pleasures were 
 (to say the least) undignified, and I was not only well 
 known and highly considered, but growing towards the 
 elderly man, this incoherency of my life was daily grow- 
 ing more unwelcome. It was on this side that my new 
 power tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to 
 drink the cup, to doff at once the body of the noted pro- 
 fessor, and to assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward 
 Hyde. I smiled at the notion; it seemed to me at the 
 time to be humourous; and I made my preparations 
 with the most studious care. I took and furnished that 
 house in Soho, to which Hyde was tracked by the police; 
 and engaged as housekeeper a creature whom I well 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 443 
 
 knew to be silent and unscrupulous. On the other side, 
 I announced to my servants that a Mr. Hyde (whom I 
 described) was to have full liberty and power about my 
 house in the square; and to parry mishaps, I even called 
 and made myself a familiar object, in my second char- 
 acter. I next drew up that will to which you so much 
 objected; so that if anything befell me in the person of 
 Dr. Jekyll, I could enter on that of Edward Hyde with- 
 out pecuniary loss. And thus fortified, as I supposed, 
 on every side, I began to profit by the strange imjnunities 
 of my position. 
 
 Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, 
 while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. 
 I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures. , I was 
 the first that could thus plod in the public eye with a 
 load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a 
 schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong 
 into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable 
 mantle, the safety was complete. Think of it — I did 
 not even exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory 
 door, give me but a second or two to mix and swallow 
 the draught that I had always standing ready; and 
 whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away 
 like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his 
 stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in 
 his study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, 
 would be Henry Jekyll. 
 
 The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my dis- 
 guise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce 
 use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, 
 they soon began to turn towards the monstrous. When 
 I would come back from these excursions, I was often 
 plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity. 
 This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent 
 forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently 
 
444 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 malign and villainous; his every act and thought cen- 
 tered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity 
 from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a 
 man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast be- 
 fore the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was 
 apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the 
 grasp of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde 
 alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke 
 again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he 
 would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo 
 the evil done by Hyde, And thus his conscience slum- 
 bered. 
 
 Into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived 
 (for even now I can scarce grant that I committed it) I 
 have no design of entering; I mean but to point out the 
 warnings and the successive steps with which my chas- 
 tisement approached. I met with one accident which, 
 as it brought on no consequence, I shall no more than 
 mention. An act of cruelty to a child aroused against 
 me the anger of a passer-by, whom I recognised the other 
 day in the person of your kinsman; the doctor and the 
 child's family joined him; there were moments when I 
 feared for my life; and at last, in order to pacify their 
 too just resentment, Edward Hyde had to bring them to 
 the door, and pay them in a cheque drawn in the name 
 of Henry Jekyll. But this danger was easily eliminated 
 from the future, by opening an account at another bank 
 in the name of Edward Hyde himself; and when, by 
 sloping my own hand backward, I had supplied my 
 double with a signature, I thought I sat beyond the 
 reach of fate. 
 
 Some two months before the murder of Sir Danvers, 
 I had been out for one of my adventures, had returned 
 at a late hour, and woke the next day in bed with some- 
 what odd sensations. It was in vain I looked about me* 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 445 
 
 in vain I saw the decent furniture and tall proportions 
 of my room in the square, in vain that I recognised that 
 pattern of the bed curtains and the design of the mahogany 
 frame; something still kept insisting that I was not 
 where I was, that I had not wakened where I seemed to 
 be, but in the little room in Soho where I was accustomed 
 to sleep in the body of Edward Hyde. I smiled to my- 
 self, and, in my psychological way began lazily to inquire 
 into the elements of this illusion, occasionally, even as I 
 did so, dropping back into a comfortable morning doze. 
 I was still so engaged when, in one of my more wakeful 
 moments, my eyes fell upon my hand. Now the hand 
 of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was pro- 
 fessional in shape and size: it was large, firm, white and 
 comely. But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough, 
 in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half 
 shut on the bed clothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a 
 dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of 
 hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde. 
 
 I must have stared upon it for near half a minute, 
 sunk as I was in the mere stupidity of wonder, before 
 terror woke up in my breast as sudden and startling as 
 the crash of cymbals; and bounding from my bed, I 
 rushed to the mirror. At the sight that met my eyes, 
 my blood was changed into something exquisitely thin 
 and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had 
 awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to be ex- 
 plained ? I asked myself; and then, with another bound 
 of terror — how was it to be remedied? It was well on 
 in the morning; the servants were up; all my drugs 
 were in the cabinet — a long journey down two pair of 
 stairs, through the back passage, across the open court 
 and through the anatomical theatre, from where I was 
 then standing horror-struck. It might indeed be pos- 
 sible to cover my face; but of what use was that, when 
 
446 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 I was unable to conceal the alteration in my stature? 
 And then with an overpowering sweetness of relief, it 
 came back upon my mind that the servants were already 
 used to the coming and going of my second self. I had 
 soon dressed, as well as I was able, in clothes of my own 
 size: had soon passed through the house, where Brad- 
 shaw stared and drew back at seeing Mr. Hyde at such 
 an hour and in such a strange array; and ten minutes 
 later. Dr. Jekyll had returned to his own shape and was 
 sitting down, with a darkened brow, to make a feint of 
 breakfasting. 
 
 Small indeed was my appetite. This inejcplicable 
 incident, this reversal of my previous experience, seemed, 
 like the Babylonian finger on the wall, to be spelling out 
 the letters of my judgment; and I began to reflect more 
 seriously than ever before on the issues and possibilities 
 of my double existence. That part of me which I had 
 the power of projecting, had lately been much exercised 
 and nourished; |t had seemed to me of late as though 
 v|he body of Edward Hyde had grown in stature, as though 
 \(when I wore that form) I were conscious of a more 
 generous tide of blood; and I began to spy a danger that, 
 if this were much prolonged, the balance of my nature 
 might be permanently overthrown, the power of volun- 
 tary change be forfeited, and the character of Edward 
 Hyde become irrevocably mine. The power of the drug 
 had not been always equally displayed. Once, very 
 early in my career, it had totally failed me; since then I 
 had been obliged on more than one occasion to double, 
 and once, with infinite risk of death, to treble the amount; 
 and these rare uncertainties had cast hitherto the sole 
 shadow on my contentment. Now, however, and in the 
 light of that morning's accident, I was led to remark 
 that whereas, in the beginning, the difficulty had b^en to 
 throw off the body of Jekyll, it had of late gradually but 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 447 
 
 decidedly transferred itself to the other side. All things 
 therefore seemed to point to this: that I was slowly los- 
 ing hold of my original and better self, and becoming 
 slowly incorporated with my second and worse. 
 
 Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. Myi 
 two natures had memory in common, but all other! 
 faculties were most unequally shared between them, j 
 Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensi- 
 tive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected 
 and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; 
 but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered 
 him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in 
 which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had 
 more than a father's iiiteyest; Hyde had more than a 
 son's indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was 
 to die to those sLppetites which I had long secretly in- 
 dulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in 
 with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspira- 
 tions, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised 
 and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; 
 but there was still another consideration in the scales; 
 for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of 
 abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that 
 he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the 
 terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; 
 much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for 
 any tempted and trenibling sinner; and it fell out with 
 me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that 
 I chose the better part and was found wanting in the 
 strength to keep to it. 
 
 Yes, I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor, 
 surrounded by friends and cherishing honest hopes; and 
 bade a resolute farewell to the liberty, the comparative 
 youth, the light step, leaping impulses and secret pleas- 
 ures, that I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde. I 
 
448 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 made this choice perhaps with some unconscious reser- 
 vation, for I neither gave up the house in Soho, noi 
 destroyed the clothes of Edward Hyde, which still lay 
 ready in my cabinet. For two months, however, I was 
 true to my determination; for two months I led a life 
 of such severity as I had never before attained to, and 
 enjoyed the compensations of an approving conscience. 
 But time began at last to obliterate the freshness of my 
 alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow into a 
 thing of course; I began to be tortured with throes and 
 longings, as of Hyde, struggling after freedom; and at 
 last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again com- 
 pounded and swallowed the tranBforming draught. 
 
 I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with 
 himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred 
 times affected by the dangers that he runs through his 
 brutish, physical insensibility; neithe? had I, long as I 
 had considered my position, made enojigh allowance for 
 the complete moral insensibility and inse&sate readiness 
 to evil, which were the leading charactefs of Edward 
 Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My 
 devil had been long caged, he came out roaricg. I wa». 
 conscious, even when I took the draught, of aniore un 
 bridled, a more furious propensity to ill. It must havi 
 been this, I suppose, that stirred in my soul that temfes} 
 of impatience with which I listened to the civilities oi 
 my unhappy victim; I declare, at least before God, no 
 man morally sane could have been guilty of that crime 
 upon so pitiful a provocation; and that I struck in no 
 more reasonable spirit than that in which a sick child 
 may break a plaything. But I had voluntarily stripped 
 myself of all those balancing instincts by which even the 
 worst of us continues to walk with some degree of steadi- 
 ness among temptations; and in my case, to be tempted, 
 however slightly, was to fall. 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 449 
 
 Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and- raged. 
 With a transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, 
 tasting delight from every blow, and it was not till 
 weariness had begun to succeed, that I was suddenly, 
 in the top fit of my delirium, struck through the heart by 
 a cold thrill of terror. A mist dispersed; I saw my life 
 to be forfeit; and fled from the scene of these excesses, 
 at once glorifying and trembling, my lust of evil gratified 
 and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the topmost 
 peg. I ran to the house in Soho, and (to make assurance 
 doubly sure) destroyed my papers; thence I set out 
 through the lamplit streets, in the same divided ecstasy 
 of mind, gloating on my crime, light-headedly devising 
 others in the future, and yet still hastening and still 
 hearkening in my wake for the steps of the avenger. 
 Hyde had a song upon his lips as he compounded the 
 draught, and as he drank it, pledged the dead man. 
 The pangs of transformation had not done tearing him, 
 before Henry Jekyll, with streaming tears of gratitude 
 and remorse, had fallen upon his knees and lifted his 
 clasped hands to God. The veil of self-indulgence was 
 rent from head to foot. I saw my life as a whole: I 
 followed it up from the days of diildhood, when I had 
 walked with my father's hand, and through the self- 
 denying toils of my professional life, to arrive again and 
 again, with the same sense of unreality, at the damned 
 horrors of the evening. I could have screamed aloud; 
 I sought with tears and prayers to smother down the 
 crowd of hideous images and sounds with which my 
 mefiaory swarmed against me; and still, between the 
 petitions, the ugly face of my iniquity stared into my 
 soul. As the acuteness of this remorse began to die 
 away, it was succeeded by a sense of joy. The problem 
 of my conduct was solved. Hyde was thenceforth im- 
 possible; whether I would or not, I was now confined 
 
450 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 to the better part of my existence; and O, how I r©« 
 joiced to think it! with what willing humility, I em- 
 braced anew the restrictions of natural life! with what 
 sincere renunciation, I locke,d the door by which I had 
 so often gone and come, and ground the key under my 
 heel! 
 
 The next day, came the news that the murder had 
 been overlooked, that the guilt of Hyde was patent to 
 the world, and that the victim was a man high in public 
 estimation. It was not only a crime, it had been a tragic 
 folly. I think I was glad to know it; I think I was 
 glad to have my better impulses thus buttressed and 
 guarded by the terrors of the scaffold. Jekyll was now 
 my city of refuge; let but Hyde peep out an instant, and 
 the hands of all men would be raised to take and slay 
 him. 
 
 I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; 
 and I can say with honesty that my resolve was fruitful 
 of some good. You know yourself how earnestly in the 
 last months of last year, I laboured to relieve suffering; 
 you know that much was done for others, and that the 
 days passed quietly, almost happily for myself. Nor 
 can I truly say that I wearied of this beneficent and inno- 
 cent life; I think instead that I daily enjoyed it more 
 completely; but I was still cursed with my duality of 
 purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, 
 the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently 
 chained down, began to growl for license. Not that I 
 dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea of that 
 would startle me to frenzy: no, it was in my own per- 
 son, that I was once more tempted to trifle with my 
 conscience; and it was as an ordinary secret sinner, 
 that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation. 
 
 There comes an end to all things; the most capacious 
 measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 451 
 
 my evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul. And 
 yet I was not alarmed; the fall seemed natural, like a 
 return to the old days before I had made my discovery. 
 ft was a fine, clear, January day, wet under foot where 
 the frost had melted, but cloudless overhead; and the 
 Regent's Park was full of winter chirrupings and sweet 
 with spring odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the 
 animal within me licking the chops of memory ; the 
 spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent 
 penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After all, I re- 
 flected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, 
 comparing myself with other men, comparing my active 
 goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at 
 the very moment of that vain-glorious thought, a qualm 
 came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly 
 shuddering. These passed away, and left me faint; and 
 then as in its turn the faintness subsided, I began to be 
 aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater 
 boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds 
 of obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung form- 
 lessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my 
 knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward 
 Hyde. A moment before I had been safe of all men's 
 respect, wealthy, beloved — the cloth laying for me in the 
 dining-room at home; and now I was the common 
 quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known mur- 
 derer, thrall to the gallows. 
 
 My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I 
 have more than once observed that, in my second char- 
 acter, my faculties seemed sharpened to a point and my 
 spirits more tensely elastic; thus it came about that, 
 where Jekyll perhaps might have succumbed, Hyde rose 
 to the importance of the moment. My drugs were in 
 one of the presses of my cabinet; how was I to reach 
 ^em? That was the problem that (crushing my tern- 
 
452 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 pies in my hands) I set myself to solve. The laboratory 
 door I had closed. If I sought to enter by the house, 
 my own servants would consign me to the gallows. I 
 saw I must employ another hand, and thought of Lan- 
 yon. How was he to be reached? how persuaded? 
 Supposing that I escaped capture in the streets, how was 
 I to make my way into his presence? and how should 
 I, an unknown and displeasing visitor, prevail on the 
 famous physician to rifle the study of his colleague. Dr. 
 Jekyll? Then I remembered that of my original char- 
 acter, one part remained to me: I could write my own 
 hand; and once I had conceived that kindling spark, the 
 way that I must follow became lighted up from end to end. 
 Thereupon, I arranged my clothes as best I could, 
 and summoning a passing hansom, drove to an hotel in 
 Portland Street, the name of which I chanced to remem- 
 ber. At my appearance (which was indeed comical 
 enough, however tragic a fate these garments covered) 
 the driver could not conceal his mirth. I gnashed my 
 teeth upon him with a gust of devilish fury; and the 
 smile withered from his face — happily for him — ^yet more 
 happily for myself, for in another instant I had certainly 
 dragged him from his perch. At the inn, as I entered, 
 I looked about me with so black a countenance as made 
 the attendants tremble; not a look did they exchange in 
 my presence; but obsequiously took my orders, led me 
 to a private room, and brought me wherewithal to write. 
 Hyde in danger of his life was a creature new to me; 
 shaken with inordinate anger, strung to the pitch of 
 murder, lusting to inflict pain. Yet the creature was 
 astute; mastered his fury with a great effort of the will; 
 composed his two important letters, one to Lanyon and 
 one to Poole; and that he might receive actual evidence 
 of their being posted, sent them out with directions that 
 they should be registered. 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 453 
 
 Thenceforward, he sat all day over the fire in the 
 private room, gnawing his nails; there he dined, sitting 
 alone with his fears, the waiter visibly quailing before 
 his eye; and thence, when the night was fully come, he 
 set forth in the corner of a closed cab, and was driven 
 to and fro about the streets of the ci<y. He, I say — I 
 cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human; 
 nothing lived in him but fear and hatred. And when 
 at last, thinking the driver had begun to grow suspicious, 
 he discharged the cab and ventured on foot, attired in 
 his misfitting clothes, an object marked out for observa- 
 tion, into the midst of the nocturnal passengers, these 
 two base passions raged within him like a tempest. He 
 walked fast, hunted by his fears, chattering to himself, 
 skulking through the less frequented thoroughfares, 
 counting the minutes that still divided him from mid- 
 night. Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I think, 
 a box of lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled. 
 
 When I came to myself at Lanyon's, the horror of my 
 old friend perhaps affected me somewhat; I do not 
 know; it was at least but a drop in the sea to the ab- 
 horrence with which I looked back upon these hours. 
 A change had come over me. It was no longer the fear 
 of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that 
 racked me. I received Lanyon's condemnation partly 
 in a dream; it was partly in a dream that I came home 
 to my own house and got into bed. I slept after the 
 prostration of the day, with a stringent and profound 
 slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me 
 could avail to break. I awoke in the morning shaken, 
 weakened, but refreshed. I still hated and feared thg 
 thought of the brute that slept within me, and I had noi 
 of course forgotten the appalling dangers oi the day be- 
 fore; but I was once more at home, in my own house 
 and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape 
 
454 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 shone so strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the 
 brightness of hope. 
 
 I was stepping leisurely across the court after break- 
 fast, drinking the chill of the air with pleasure, when I 
 was seized again with those indescribable sensations that 
 heralded the change; and I had but the time to gain the 
 shelter of my cabinet, before I was once again raging 
 and freezing with the passions of Hyde. It took on thi^ 
 occasion a double dose to recall me to myself; and alas I 
 six hours after, as I sat looking sadly in the fire, the 
 pangs returned, and the drug had to be readministered. 
 In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great 
 effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate 
 stimulation of the drug, that I was able to wear the 
 countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of the day and night, 
 I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above 
 all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, 
 it was always as Hyde that I awakened. Under the 
 strain of this continually impending doom and by the 
 sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, 
 even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I 
 became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and 
 emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, 
 and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my 
 other self. But when I slept, or when the virtue of the 
 medicine wore off, I would leap almost without transition 
 (for the pangs of transformation grew daily less marked) 
 into the possession of a fancy brimming with images of 
 terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body 
 that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging 
 energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have 
 grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the 
 hate that now divided them was equal on each side. 
 With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct. He had now 
 seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 455 
 
 mm some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was 
 co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of 
 communi<y, which in themselves made the most poignant 
 part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy 
 of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. 
 This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit 
 seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous 
 dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and 
 had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this 
 again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer 
 than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, 
 where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; 
 and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of 
 slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of 
 life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll, was of a different 
 order. His terror of the gallows drove him continually 
 to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordi- 
 nate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed 
 the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which 
 Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with 
 which he was himself regarded. Hence the apelike 
 tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand 
 blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the 
 letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and 
 indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would 
 long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in 
 the ruin. But his love of life is wonderful; I go further: 
 I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, 
 when I recall the abjection and passion of this attach- 
 ment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut 
 him off by suipide, I find it in my heart to pity him. 
 
 It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong 
 this description; no one has ever suffered such torments, 
 let that suffice; and yet even to these, habit brought— 
 no, not alleviation — but a certain callousness of soul, a 
 
456 SELECTIONS FROM STEVENSON 
 
 certain acquiescence of despair; and my punishment 
 might have gone on for years, but for the last calamity 
 which has now fallen, and which has finally severed me 
 from my own face and nature. My provision of the 
 salt, which had never been renewed since the date of 
 the first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a 
 fresh supply, and mixed the draught; the ebullition fol- 
 lowed, and the first change of colour, not the second; I 
 drank it and it was without eflSciency. You will learn 
 from Poole how I have had London ransacked; it was 
 in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first supply 
 was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity 
 which lent efficacy to the draught. 
 
 About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this 
 statement under the infiuence of the last of the old 
 powders. This, then, is the last time, short of a miracle, 
 that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his 
 own face (now how sadly altered !) in the glass. Nor must 
 I delay too long to bring my writing to an end; for if my 
 narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has been 
 by a combination of great prudence and great good luck. 
 Should the throes of change take me in the act of writing 
 it, Hyde will tear it in pieces; but if some time shall 
 have elapsed after I have laid it by, his wonderful sel- 
 fishness and circumscription to the moment vnll prob- 
 ably save it once again from the action of his apelike 
 spite. And indeed the doom that is closing on us both, 
 has already changed and crushed him. Half an hour 
 from now, when I shall again and forever reindue that 
 hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering 
 and weeping in my chair, or continue, with the most 
 strained and fearstruck ecstasy of listening, to pace up 
 and down this room (my last earthly refuge) and give 
 ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the 
 scaffold ? or will he find courage to release himself at the 
 
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE 457 
 
 ^ast moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my 
 true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another 
 than myself. Here then, as I lay down the pen and 
 proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that 
 unhappy Heniy Jekyll to an end. 
 

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