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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
University of Wisconsin-Madison
728 State Street

Madison, WI 53706-1494
U.S.A.

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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.

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T is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees,"

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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;

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