Jacqueline Overton

“ Tusitala had left them, and his friends in the South Seas had lost a faithful friend and companion, a wise and just master.
His family and friends the world over had lost not only these but far more. His life had been a chivalrous one with all the best that chivalry stands for, "loyalty, honesty, generosity, courage, courtesy, and self-devotion; to impute no unworthy motives and to bear no grudges; to bear misfortune with cheerfulness and without a murmur; to strike hard for the right and to take no mean advantage; to be gentle to women and kind to all that are weak ”

“ The Casco was a fore-and-aft schooner, ninety-five feet in length, of seventy tons' burden. "She had most graceful lines and with her lofty masts, white sails and decks, and glittering brass work, was a lovely craft to the eye as she sat upon the water."
"I must try to describe the vessel that is to be our home for so long," Mrs. Stevenson, senior, wrote to her sister at Colinton. "From the deck you step down into the cockpit, which is our open air drawing room. It has seats all around, nicely cushioned, and we sit or lie there most of the day. ”

“ The entire population of Tautira came to the beach to bid them farewell, and as the Casco swung out of the harbor one of the French officials fired a salute of twenty-one guns with his army rifle and the schooner returned it with a heavy-tongued Winchester.
Tautira had grown to seem like a real home to all of them. To leave it with very little hope of ever returning to see such good friends as Princess Moe and Ori was a real grief, while they in their turn were quite heart-broken. Stevenson's friendship had brought something into their lives they had never had before. ”

“ Over a week of this sort of slow travelling through the heat of the plains was enough to tax the strength and courage of the most robust man, let alone one in as delicate health as Stevenson at that time, and it is a wonder he ever lived through it. Indeed, he was ill but kept cheerful in spite of all, and was interested in the country and the sights along the way. His own discomforts seemed to dwindle when he contrasted them with those the pioneers endured travelling that same direction twenty years before; crawling along in ox-carts with their cattle and family possessions ”

“ Why not turn traders? Often on starry nights, drifting among the low islands, he and Lloyd and the captain of the Equator had lain out on deck and planned what a lark it would be to buy a schooner, cruise among the islands, and trade with the natives. They would write stories, too, about these strange island dwellers with their many weird superstitions and of the white men who drifted from all corners of the globe to make their home there. ”

“ I do not even know if I desire to live there, but let me hear in some far land a kindred voice sing out 'Oh, why left I my hame?' and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my own country. And although I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scotch clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every year; there are no stars so lovely as the Edinburgh street lamps. ”

“ This particularly affected Louis, but he tried to hide his feelings by making all sorts of lively and impossible proposals for their joining him later on.
His parting words to Mr. Low were: "There's England over there—and I've left it—perhaps I may never go back—and there on the other side of this big continent there's another sea rolling in. I loved the Pacific in the days when I was at Monterey, and perhaps now it will love me a little. I am going to meet it; ever since I was a boy the South Seas have laid a spell upon me." ”

“ I wish to speak with sympathy of my education as an engineer. It takes a man into the open air; keeps him hanging about harbor sides, the richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial danger of the sea ... ”

“ Low had been there together. "If Stevenson ever comes to New York," he said to Mr. Low, "I want to meet him," and added that he would consider it a great privilege if Stevenson would permit him to make his portrait.
It was with much pleasure, therefore, that Mr. Low brought them together, and they took to one another immediately. "I like your sculptor. What a splendid straightforward and simple fellow he is," said Stevenson; and St. Gaudens's comment after their first meeting was: "Astonishingly young, not a bit like an invalid and a bully fellow." ”

“ He must toss much in boats; he must often adventure much on horseback by dubious bridle-track through unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouses in the very camp of wreckers.
"The aid of steam was not yet. At first in random coasting sloop, and afterwards in the cutter belonging to the service, the engineer must ply and run amongst these multiplied dangers and sometimes late into the stormy autumn."
All of which failed to daunt Robert Stevenson who loved action and adventure and the scent of things romantic. ”

“ In the Grassmarket, stiff-necked covenanting heroes offered up the often unnecessary, but not less honorable, sacrifice of their lives, and bade eloquent farewell to sun, moon and stars and earthly friendships, or died silent to the roll of the drums. Down by yon outlet rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, with the town beating to arms behind their horses' tails—a sorry handful thus riding for their lives, but with a man at their head who was to return in a different temper, make a bold dash that staggered Scotland, and die happily in the thick of the fight.... ”

“ In Edinburgh to-day there are armed men and cannon in the castle high up on the great rock above you: "You may see the troops marshalled on the high parade, and at night after the early winter evenfall and in the morning before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the sounds of drums and bugles." [3]
Long before Louis could write he made up verses and stories for himself, and Cummie wrote them down for him. ”

“ The canoe trips ended in a visit to the artists' colony at Fontainebleau, where Bob Stevenson and a brother of Sir Walter's were spending their summer. This place always had a particular attraction for Louis and he spent many weeks both there and at Grez near by during the next few years.
The free and easy life led by the artists suited him exactly, although he found it hard to accomplish any work of his own, but dreamed and planned all sorts of essays, verses, and tales which he never wrote, while the others put their pictures on canvas. ”

“ All this charmed and delighted Stevenson, who had dreamed many times of witnessing just such a scene. He wrote to Cummie that he was living all over again many of the stories she had read to him and found them coming true about himself.
For six weeks they cruised about among these islands, frequently dropping anchor and going ashore for several days. When the natives were convinced that they had neither come to trade or to make trouble, but were simply interested in them and their country, they made the visitors most welcome and showered presents of fruit, mats, baskets, and fans upon them. ”

“ A meeting of chiefs was held to apportion the work and divide the men into parties. Forty were sent with knives and axes to cut a path up the steep face of the mountain, and the writer himself led another party to the summit—men chosen from the immediate family—to dig the grave on the spot where it was Robert Louis Stevenson's wish that he should lie.... Nothing more picturesque can be imagined than the ledge that forms the summit to Væa, a place no wider than a room, and flat as a table. On either side the land descends precipitously; in front lies the vast ocean and surf-swept reefs ”

“ Bell Rock was only one of twenty lighthouses Robert Stevenson helped to build, but it was by far the most difficult one ... and even to-day, after it has been lighted for more than a hundred years, it still remains unique—a monument to his skill.
Bell Rock was practically a reef completely submerged at full tide and only a few feet of its crest visible at low water. To raise a tower on it meant placing a foundation under water, a new and perilous experiment. ”

“ Indeed I have worked like a horse and am tired as a donkey. If I should have to push on far by rail, I shall bring nothing but my fine bones to port.
"Goodbye to you all. I suppose it is now late afternoon with you all across the seas. What shall I find over here? I dare not wonder.—Ever yours R.L.S."
As California was the goal he aimed for, in spite of his fatigue after ten days of poor living and the sea, he determined to push on immediately in an emigrant train bound for the Pacific coast. ”

“ Immediately the island began to take life and swarm with people, all sorts of strange scenes began to take place upon it, and as he gazed at his map Stevenson discovered the plot for the "good story."
"It is horrid fun," he wrote, "and begins in the Admiral Benbow public house on the Devon coast; all about a map and a treasure and a mutiny, and a derelict ship ... and a doctor and a sea-cook with one leg with the chorus 'yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,' ... No women in the story, Lloyd orders." ”

“ It had been frequently borne upon Stevenson, however, while cruising among the Marshall and Gilbert Islands during the past months, that a home in either England or Scotland again was a vain dream for him.
"I do not ask for health," he said, "but I will go anywhere and live in any place where I can enjoy the existence of a human being." ”

“ Nothing is so interesting as weeding, clearing, and pathmaking; the oversight of laborers becomes a disease; it is quite an effort not to drop into the farmer; and it does make you feel so well. To come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after some hours in the bush, change, rub down, and take a chair in the verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience."
Before his arrival in Apia, Stevenson's tale of "The Bottle Imp" had been translated into Samoan by the missionaries. When the natives discovered he was its author they immediately named him Tusitala, The Teller-of-Tales. ”

“ Here as elsewhere in the South Seas, Stevenson showed his sympathy and kindliness toward the island people regardless of who they were or their rank. White or half-caste priest, missionary, or trader, all were treated the same. No bribe, he said, would induce him to call the natives savages.
Mr. Johnstone, an English resident in the South Seas at the time of Stevenson's visit, says: "His inborn courtesy more than any of his other good traits, endeared him to his fellows in the Pacific ... in the hearts of our Island people he built a monument more lasting than stone or brass." ”

“ Fanny and I are dressed like natives, in two garments. As we have to wade to and from the boat in landing and coming back, we discard stockings, and on the sands we usually go barefoot entirely. Louis wears only a shirt and trousers with the legs and arms rolled up as far as they will go, and he is always barefooted. You will therefore not be surprised to hear that we are all as red as lobsters. It is a strange irresponsible half savage life, and I sometimes wonder if we shall ever be able to return to civilized habits again. ”

“ You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican housings. In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw not only Mexican saddles, but true Vaquero riding—men always at a hand gallop, up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corners, urging their horses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotary spurs, checking them dead, with a touch, or wheeling them right about face in a square yard. ”

“ Even the eating of porridge at breakfast became a game. Bob ate his with sugar and said it was an island covered with snow with here a mountain and there a valley; while Louis's was an island flooded by milk which gradually disappeared bit by bit.
In the spring and summer his mother took him for short trips to the watering-places near Edinburgh. But the spot unlike all others for a real visit was at Colinton Manse, the home of his grandfather, the Reverend Lewis Balfour, at Colinton, on the Water of Leith, five miles southwest of Edinburgh. Here he spent glorious days. ”

“ The very fact of her being a tramp ship and that the passengers were free to be about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, and enjoy a real sea life, delighted Stevenson, and he wrote back to Sidney Colvin:
"I enjoyed myself more than I could have hoped on board our floating menagerie; stallions and monkeys and matches made our cargo; and the vast continent of the incongruities rolled the while like a haystack; and the stallions stood hypnotized by the motion, looking through the port at our dinner table, and winnied when the crockery was broken ”