THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON BY GRAHAM BALFOUR ABRIDGED EDITION NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1923 COPYRIGHT, 1911, 1915, DY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Printed in the United States of America General Library System Madison, WI 53706-1494 THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON CHAPTER I HIS ANCESTORS "The ascendant hand is what I feel most strongly; I am bound in and in with my forbears. . . . We are all nobly born; fortunate those who know it; blessed those who remember."R. L. S., Letters, iii. 316. "The sights and thoughts of my youth pursue me; and I see like a vision the youth of my father, and of his father, and the whole stream of lives flowing down there far in the north, with the sound of laughter and tears, to cast me out in the end, as by a sudden freshet, on these ultimate islands. And I admire and bow my head before the romance of destiny."-R. L. S., Dedica tion of Catriona. T is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees," as Stevenson once wrote, "that we can follow back the careers of our component parts and be reminded of our ante-natal lives." But the threads are many and tangled, and it is hard to distinguish for more than a generation or two the transmission of the characteristics that are combined in any individual of our own day. When a man has been dead for a hundred years, it is seldom that anything is remembered of him but his name and his occupation; |