ed, Robert Louis told pirate tales to Lloyd.

The Siron Club took on a degree of sanity that it had not known before.
Little entertainments were given now and then, where Mrs. Osbourne read
to the company from an unknown American poet, Joaquin Miller by name,
and Bob expounded Walt Whitman.

The Americans as a people evidently were not wholly bad--at least there
was hope for them. Bob began to tire of Barbizon, and finally went back
to Edinburgh alone. Arriving there he had to explain why Robert Louis
did not come too.

Robert Louis had met an American woman, and they seemed to like each
other. The parents of Robert Louis did not laugh: they were grieved.
Their son, who had always kept himself clear from feminine
entanglements, was madly, insanely, in love with a woman, the mother of
two grown-up children, and a married woman and an American at that--it
was too much!

Just how they expostulated and how much will never be known. They
declined to go over to France to see her, and they declined to have her
come to see them: a thing Mrs. Osbourne probably would not have done--at
that time, anyway.

But there was a comfort in this: their son was in much better health,
and several of his articles had been accepted by the great London
magazines.

So three months went by, when suddenly and without notice Robert Louis
appeared at home, and in good spirits. As for Mrs. Osbourne, she had
sailed for America with her two children. And the elder Stevensons
breathed more freely.

* * * * *

On August Tenth, Eighteen Hundred Seventy-nine, Robert Louis sailed from
Glasgow for New York on the steamship "Devonia." It was a sudden move,
taken without the consent of his parents or kinsmen. The young man wrote
a letter to his father, mailing it at the dock.

When the missive reached the father's hands, that worthy gentleman was
unspeakably shocked and terribly grieved. He made frantic attempts to
reach the ship before it had passed out of the Clyde and rounded into
the North Sea, but it was too late. He then sent two telegrams to the
Port of Londonderry, one to Louis begging him to return at once as his
mother was very sick, and the other message to the captain of the ship
ordering him to put the wilful son ashore bag and baggage.

The things we do when fear and haste are at the helm are usually wrong,
and certainly do not mirror our better selves.

Thomas Stevenson was a Scotchman, and the Scotch