us, then deep in his work
at the Home Office but full of joy in everything that was most joyful in
the Nineties--its fights, its books, its prints, its posters. And I
might name many besides, some forgotten, some dead, some seen no more
by me, life being often more cruel than death in the separations and
divisions it makes. But two voices above the others are almost as
persistent in my ears as Henley's--the voices of Bob Stevenson and Henry
Harland.

IV

I have no fancy for nicknames in any place or at any time. I have
suffered too much from my own. But I dislike the familiarity of them
above all in print. And yet, I could no more call Bob Stevenson anything
save Bob than I could venture to abbreviate the Robert or the Louis of
his cousin. He had been given in baptism a more formal name--in fact, he
had been given three of unquestioned dignity: Robert Alan Mowbray. But I
doubt if anybody had ever known him by them or if he had ever used them
himself. When he wrote he signed his fine array of initials, and when he
was not R.A.M.S., he was Bob.

[Illustration: Painting by Himself
"BOB" STEVENSON]

It seems to me now a curious chance, as well as a piece of good luck,
that the two most eloquent of the company in Louis Stevenson's _Talk and
Talkers_ should have come to us on our Thursday nights, for Bob was the
Spring-Heeled Jack, "the loud, copious, and intolerant talker" of
that essay just as Henley was the Burly.

He was not more spring-heeled in his talk than in evading capture for
it. In his later years he made few visits. If we wanted him we had to
gather him up by the wayside and bring him home with us. The newspaper
work I was doing then took me the rounds of the London galleries on
press days and, as he was the art critic of the _Pall Mall_, I was
continually coming across him busy about the same work in Bond Street or
Piccadilly. Nothing pleased me better than to meet him on these
occasions, for he could make the dull show that I, in my dull way, was
finding dull the most entrancing entertainment in London. His every
visit to a gallery was to him an adventure and every picture a romance,
and the best of it for his friends was that he would willingly share the
inspiration which he, but nobody else, could find in the most
uninspiring canvas, an inspiration to criticism that is, not to
admiration--he never wavered in his allegiance to the "Almighty Swells"
of Art. Once he began to talk I did not care to have