had been, there could be, no restoration of her home life; but it appeared that she would be able to obtain a divorce without causing any unnecessary distress to her family, and in this conjuncture Stevenson could not see clearly what his course of action ought to be. He was first at Swanston with Henley, finishing Deacon Brodie; then in London; at Swanston again, this time alone, writing his chapters on Lay Morals; then at the Gareloch with his parents. In May he went to London, and, after staying with George Meredith, crossed over to France. Had he found a companion, he would perhaps have gone to the Pyrenees, but he spent most of his time at Cernay la Ville, and returned to London in the end of June.

The Travels with a Donkey had been published by that time, obtaining the same unsubstantial success as the Inland Voyage, although, contrary to its author's own judgment of the two books, it afterwards had slightly the better sale.

On 14th July he returned to Edinburgh, and by the 30th his mind was made up-to California he must go. From Edinburgh he came back to London, presumably to make arrangements for his start; and wherever he went, he found his friends unanimous in their opinion that he ought to stay at home. Under these circumstances it seemed to him so hopeless to expect any other judgment on the part of his parents, that he did not even go through the form of consulting them on the matter, and with open eyes went away, knowing that he need look for no further countenance from home. Perhaps he hardly

realised the distress which he would inevitably cause his parents by leaving them without a word and in almost total ignorance of the hopes and motives which inspired him.

CHAPTER VI

CALIFORNIA-1879-80

"What a man truly wants, that will he get, or he will be changed in trying."-R. L. S., Aphorism.

F

"To My WIFE.

"Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,

With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,
Steel-true and blade-straight

The great artificer

Made my mate.

Honour, anger, valour, fire;
A love that life could never tire,

Death quench or evil stir,

The mighty master

Gave to her.

Teacher, tender, comrade, wife,
A fellow-farer true through life,
Heart-whole and soul-free

The august father

Gave to me.”

Songs of Travel, No. xxvi.

ROM London he went north, and on August

7th, 1879, sailed from the Clyde in the steam

ship Devonia, bound for New York. She carried a number of emigrants, but Stevenson, though mixing freely with them, had, chiefly to obtain a table for his writing, taken his passage in the second cabin, which was almost indistinguishable from the steer

age. His object in travelling in this fashion was, in the first instance, economy, and next to that, a desire to gain first-hand knowledge for himself of emigrants and emigration, which might be of immediate use for making a book and of ultimate service to him in a thousand ways. He suffered a good deal on the voyage, being already anxious and highly strung before he started, but he stuck manfully to his work and wrote "in a slantindicular cabin, with the table playing bob-cherry with the ink-bottle," the greater part of The Story of a Lie. The rest of his time he devoted to making the acquaintance of his fellow-passengers, learning their histories, studying their characters, and

-as anyone may see between the lines of The Amateur Emigrant-rendering them endless unobtrusive services, and helping and cheering them in every way possible.

The voyage passed without event, and the steamer arrived at New York on the evening of the 18th of August. Stevenson passed the night in a shilling Irish boarding-house, Re-Union House, No. 10 West Street. "A little Irish girl," he writes, "is now reading my book aloud to her sister at my elbow; they chuckle, and I feel flattered. P.S.-Now they yawn, and I am indifferent: such a wisely conceived thing is vanity."

Within four-and-twenty hours of his first arrival he was already on his way as an emigrant to the Far West; a chief part of his baggage being "Bancroft's History of the United States in six fat volumes."

The railway journey began in floods of rain and the maximum of discomfort. The record of it is in the

hands of all to read, and I need say only that it occupied from a Monday evening to the Saturday morning of the following week, and that the tedium and stress of the last few days in the emigrant train proper were almost unbearable.

On the 30th of August Stevenson reached San Francisco, but so much had the long journey shaken him that he looked like a man at death's door. The news so far was good; Mrs. Osbourne was better, but that was all. To recover from the effects of his hardships he forthwith went another hundred and fifty miles to the south, and camped out by himself in the coast range of mountains beyond Monterey. But he had overtaxed his strength, and broke down. Two nights he "lay out under a tree in a sort of stupor," and if two frontiersmen in charge of a goat-ranche had not taken him in and tended him, there would have been an end of his story.

"I am now lying in an upper chamber, with a clinking of goat bells in my ears, which proves to me that the goats are come home and it will soon be time to eat. The old bear-hunter is doubtless now infusing tea; and Tom the Indian will come in with his gun in a few minutes."

Here he spent a couple of weeks, passing the mornings in teaching the children to read, and then went down to Monterey, where he remained until the middle of December. In those days it still was a small Mexican town, altered but slightly by the extraordinarily cosmopolitan character of the few strangers who visited it. In his own words, it was "a place of two or three streets, economically paved with sea