ook which was left
incomplete?

There is a pretty account of the first meeting between St. Ives and
Flora. One naturally compares it with the scene in which David Balfour
describes his sensations and emotions when the spell of Catriona's
beauty came upon him. Says David:--

'There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman
fits in a man's mind and stays there, and he could never tell you why;
it just seems it was the thing he wanted.'

This is quite perfect, and in admirable keeping with the genuine
simplicity of David's character:--

'She had wonderful bright eyes like stars; ... and whatever was the
cause, I stood there staring like a fool.'

This is more concise than St. Ives's description of Flora; but St.
Ives was a man of the world who had read books, and knew how to
compare the young Scotch beauty to Diana:--

'As I saw her standing, her lips parted, a divine trouble in her eyes,
I could have clapped my hands in applause, and was ready to acclaim
her a genuine daughter of the winds.'

The account of the meeting with Walter Scott and his daughter on the
moors does not have the touch of reality in it that one would like.
Here was an opportunity, however, of the author's own making.

There are flashes of humor, as when St. Ives found himself locked in
the poultry-house 'alone with half a dozen sitting hens. In the
twilight of the place all fixed their eyes on me severely, and seemed
to upbraid me with some crying impropriety.'

There are sentences in which, after Stevenson's own manner, real
insight is combined with felicitous expression. St. Ives is commenting
upon the fact that he has done a thing which most men learned in the
wisdom of this world would have pronounced absurd; he has 'made a
confidant of a boy in his teens and positively smelling of the
nursery.' But he has no cause to repent it. 'There is none so apt as a
boy to be the adviser of any man in difficulties like mine. To the
beginnings of virile common sense he adds the last lights of the
child's imagination.'

Men have been known to thank God when certain authors died,--not
because they bore the slightest personal ill-will, but because they
knew that as long as the authors lived nothing could prevent them from
writing. In thinking of Stevenson, however, one cannot tell whether he
experiences the more a feeling of personal or of literary loss,
whether he laments chiefly the man or the author. It is not possible
to separ