(here he made a gesture with his hand as if he were trying to shape something and give it outline and form)-"you may take a certain atmosphere and get action and persons to express and 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."

It was on this last scheme that Sophia Scarlet had been conceived, the atmosphere being that of a large plantation in Tahiti, such as Mr. Stewart's had been at Atimono twenty years before. It may be that the method did not lend itself readily to an effective sketch of the plot; the draft of the beginning of the story seems to me better than I thought the outline at the time. But in any case there could be no hesitation in the choice. Weir of Hermiston was begun, and for three or four days Stevenson was in such a seventh heaven as he has described: he worked all day and all evening, writing or talking, debating points, devising characters and incidents, ablaze with enthusiasm, and abounding with energy. No finished story was, or ever will be, so good as Weir of Hermiston, shown to us in those days by the light of its author's first ardour of creation.

Besides the works already mentioned, and the letters to The Times, as well as his private correspondence, there were endless other schemes, for the most part projected and perhaps not even begun, never, certainly, brought near to completion. He wrote to Charles Baxter: "My schemes are all in the air,

and vanish and reappear again like shapes in the clouds." So likewise to Miss Boodle: "I have a projected, entirely planned, love-story-everybody will think it dreadfully improper, I'm afraid-called Canonmills. And I've a vague, rosy haze before me-a love-story too, but not improper-called The Rising Sun. It's the name of the wayside inn where the story, or much of the story, runs; but it's a kind of a pun: it means the stirring up of a boy by falling in love, and how he rises in the estimation of a girl who despised him, though she liked him, and had befriended him; I really scarce see beyond their childhood yet, but I want to go beyond, and make each out-top the other by successions: it should be pretty and true if I could do it."

Neither of these was ever written.

There was also

a play for home representation, showing the adventures of an English tourist in Samoa; and I can remember two more serious schemes which were likewise without result. In the August before he died, he drew up with Mr. Osbourne the outline of a history, or of a series of the most striking episodes of the Indian Mutiny, to be written for boys, and he sent home for the books necessary for its execution. Another day he sketched the plan of an English grammar, to be illustrated by examples from the English classics. These are but a few: the many are unremembered; but all alike belong, not to the fleet of masterpieces unlaunched, but the larger and more inglorious squadron whose keels were never even laid down.

T

To do their best for twoscore years!
A ready soldier, here I stand,
Primed for Thy command,

With burnished sword.
If this be faith, O Lord,
Help Thou mine unbelief
And be my battle brief."

Envoy to No. XXV. of Songs of Travel.

HE climate of Samoa had apparently an

swered the main purpose of preserving Steven

son from any disabling attacks of illness, and allowing him to lead a life of strenuous activity. "I do not ask for health," he had said to his stepson at Bournemouth, "but I will go anywhere and live in any place where I can enjoy the ordinary existence of a human being." And this had now been granted to him beyond his utmost hope.

In all the time he was in Samoa he had but two or three slight hemorrhages, that were cured within a very few days. The consumption in his lungs was definitely arrested, but it seems certain that a struc

tural weakening of the arteries was slowly and inevitably going on, although his general health was apparently not affected. He had influenza at least once; occasionally he was ailing, generally with some indefinite lassitude which was attributed to malaria or some other unverifiable cause. In the summer of 1892, he was threatened with writer's cramp, which had attacked him as long ago as 1884. From this time forth, however, his stepdaughter wrote to his dictation nearly all his literary work and correspondence, and, thanks to her quickness and unwearying devotion, he suffered the least possible inconvenience from this restriction of his powers. He had one or two threatenings of tropical diseases, which were promptly averted; and for several periods, to his own intense disgust, he gave up even the very moderate quantity of red wine which seemed to be a necessity of life to him, and-worst deprivation of all-he abandoned at these times the cigarettes which usually he smoked all day long.

But in spite of these occasional lapses, he was able to lead an active life, full of varied interests, and the amount of work which he did during this period would have been satisfactory to less careful writers, even if they had done nothing else but follow their own profession without any interruption or diversion whatever.

It was his friends and his country that he missed. From the day that Sidney Colvin went down the ship's side in the Thames, or the day that Will H. Low parted from him in New York, Stevenson never again saw any one of his old and intimate companions.

Fortune was against him in the matter. They were all busy people, with many engagements and many ties, and when at last Charles Baxter was able to start for Samoa, he had not yet reached Egypt before the blow fell. Nor was this perversity of fortune confined to his old friends alone; it also affected the younger writers with whom, in spite of distance, he had formed ties more numerous, and, in proportion to their number, more intimate than have ever before been established and maintained at any such distance by correspondence alone. And it was the more tantalising, because the paths of several seemed likely to lead them past the very island where he lived. So he had to content himself as best he might with his mailbag, which, especially in the answers to the Vailima Letters, did much to remove for him the drawbacks of his isolation and of absence from the centres of literature to which he always looked for praise and blame.

But, besides the loss of intercourse, he, more than most men, suffered from another pang. The love of country which is in all Scots, and beyond all others lies deepest in the Celtic heart, flowed back upon him again and again with a wave of uncontrollable emotion. When the "smell of the good, wet earth" came to him, it came "with a kind of Highland touch." A tropic shower discovered in him "a frame of mind and body that belonged to Scotland, and particularly to the neighbourhood of Callander." When he turned to his grandfather's life, he was filled with this yearning, and the beautiful sentences in which he has described the old man's farewell to "Sumburgh and the