e-legged stool,
he it is who has the wealth and glory.'

In his _Travels with a Donkey_ the author had no companionship but
such as the donkey afforded; and to tell the truth this companionship
was almost human at times. He learned to love the quaint little beast
which shared his food and his trials. 'My lady-friend' he calls her.
Modestine was her name; 'she was patient, elegant in form, the color
of an ideal mouse and inimitably small.' She gave him trouble, and at
times he felt hurt and was distant in manner towards her. Modestine
carried the luggage. She may not have known that R. L. Stevenson wrote
books, but she knew as by instinct that R. L. Stevenson had never
driven a donkey. She wrought her will with him, that is, she took her
own gait. 'What that pace was there is no word mean enough to
describe; it was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is
slower than a run.' He must belabor her incessantly. It was an ignoble
toil, and he felt ashamed of himself besides, for he remembered her
sex. 'The sound of my own blows sickened me. Once when I looked at her
she had a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who had
formerly loaded me with kindness; and this increased my horror of my
cruelty.'

From time to time Modestine's load would topple off. The villagers
were delighted with this exhibition and laughed appreciatively. 'Judge
if I was hot!' says Stevenson. 'I remembered having laughed myself
when I had seen good men struggling with adversity in the person of a
jack-ass, and the recollection filled me with penitence. That was in
my old light days before this trouble came upon me.'

He had a sleeping-bag, waterproof without, blue sheep's wool within,
and in this portable house he passed his nights afield. Not always by
choice, as witness his chapter entitled 'A Camp in the Dark.' There
are two or three pages in that chapter which come pretty near to
perfection,--if there be such a thing as perfection in literature. I
don't know who could wish for anything better than the paragraphs in
which Stevenson describes falling asleep in the tempest, and awaking
next morning to see the 'world flooded with a blue light, the mother
of dawn.' He had been in search of an adventure all his life, 'a pure
dispassionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers,'
and he thinks that he realized a fraction of his daydreams when that
morning found him, an inland castaway, 'as strange to his surroundings
as t