ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, the best loved writer of the last years of the nineteenth century, was born in Edinburgh, in 1850. His father's family had been lighthouse and harbor engineers for three generations. His father, who became president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, was a man of vigorous personality, of shrewd judgment, and of great generosity; without his constant help Stevenson's career would have been impossible.

Lewis (as he was generally called in the family) was an only child, dependent for companionship on his mother,

his faithful nurse Alison Cunningham (“Cumm.ie"), and a host of cousins. He was sickly, as a child. He tells of "many a night of childish terror, lying awake and hearing the wind like a horseman, or rather a succession of horsemen, riding furiously past." On such nights the devoted "Cummie" would tell him stories of the persecution of the Scotch Covenanters, or recite hymns in "a grand dramatic way."

Owing to ill-health, Stevenson's schooling was very irregular. One of his teachers describes him as "the most delightful boy I ever knew; full of fun, full of tender feeling; ready for his lessons, ready for a story, ready for fun." He was fond of outdoor exercise - swimming, riding, boating, skating; but not of ball. In Memories and Portraits he describes many of his boyish delights: manuscript magazines, toy theaters, and chief of all, the mysterious sport of "lantern bearing" - walking the streets at night with a crowd of boys, each with an evilsmelling tin bull's-eye lantern concealed under his coat. So he grew up to the age of seventeen, with little regular schooling, living in a world of romance built from books and his own imagination.

He entered Edinburgh University with the intent of taking up the family profession of engineering. Some of his vacations he spent in construction work, which he greatly enjoyed: "It takes a man into the open air; it carries him to wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea." The indoor work, however, the scientific calculations of plan-making, repelled him. At length he won his father's consent to abandon engineer

ing for his favorite pursuit, writing -on the condition that he first study law, so as to have something to fall back on in case his literary career failed.

Meanwhile Stevenson had been giving himself long and systematic training for his chosen work. "I kept always two books, one to read, the other to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene, or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived on words." An old shepherd with whom Stevenson made friends, said of him, "He's an awfu' laddie for speirin' questions. about a thing, an' whenever you turn your back, awa' he gangs an' writes it a' doon." At home, he gave himself still more rigorous training. "Whenever I read a book or passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. . . . That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write."

His legal studies went on, in spite of the interruption of a severe case of diphtheria followed by threatened consumption; and in 1875 he was admitted to the bar. His practice, however, was merely perfunctory, amounting in all to only four cases.

At the age of twenty-five, then, Stevenson, with a monthly allowance of £7 from his father, was free to take up his chosen profession of writing. A considerable part

of the next four years he spent in France. The trip described in An Inland Voyage was taken in September, 1876; the Travels with a Donkey, two years later. His personality and appearance at this age are interestingly described by his friend Edmund Gosse :

"A childlike mirth leaped and danced in him; he seemed to skip upon the hills of life. He was simply bubbling with quips and jests; his inherent earnestness or passion about abstract things was incessantly relieved by jocosity; and when he had built one of his intellectual castles in the sand, a wave of humor was certain to come in and destroy it. . . . Stevenson was not without a good deal of innocent oddity in his dress. When I try to conjure up his figure, I can see only a slight, lean lad, in a suit of black sea-cloth, a black shirt, and a wisp of yellow carpet that did duty for a necktie."

At Grez, Stevenson met the lady who was to become his wife Mrs. Osbourne, who had come there from San Francisco to study art. On her return, Stevenson crossed the Atlantic to visit her. His experiences in the steerage and in an emigrant car, he wrote up the following year in The Amateur Emigrant. In May, 1880, he married Mrs. Osbourne. They went at once up into the mountains, to a deserted mining camp; and after two months (out of which grew The Silverado Squatters), they returned to Scotland.

For the next seven years, Stevenson sought freedom from his lung trouble in one place after another the Scotch Highlands, the Alps, the south of France. They were years of danger and anxiety, yet his friends remember him

as gay, animated, full of fun. He would delight in chalking out battle-fields on the attic floor, with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, and conducting elaborate military campaigns with toy soldiers; he produced, with the boy, illustrated booklets, engraving cuts on wood and printing them with humorous verses, on a toy press.

These were years, too, of great literary activity. Treasure Island, his first romance, ran in Young Folks in the fall of 1881, and when published in book form won a great success. "Statesmen and judges," says Stevenson's biographer, "and all sorts of staid and sober men became boys once more, sitting up long after bedtime to read their new book." In 1885 came A Child's Garden of Verses, the most delightful collection of poems of childhood. The same year he wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (founded on an extraordinary dream), and began Kidnapped, which was destined to be one of his widestread novels.

Stevenson's health, however, became more and more precarious, and after his father's death in 1887 he went once more to the United States. Here his fame as the author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island had preceded him. After a winter in the Adirondacks and a few months near New York, he conceived the plan of cruising in the South Seas.

The following summer, Stevenson chartered in San Francisco the ninety-five-foot racing schooner Casco, and with his wife and stepson started on a voyage which took them in the next three years to almost every important group of islands in the eastern and central Pacific.