the room,
Ah, this is he who trod the darkening ways,
And plucked the flowers upon the edge of doom.

The bright, sweet-scented flowers that star the road
To death's dim dwelling, others heed them not,
With sad eyes fixed upon that drear abode,
Weeping, and wailing their unhappy lot.

But he went laughing down the shadowed way,
The boy's heart leaping still within his breast,
Weaving his garlands when his mood was gay,
Mocking his sorrows with a solemn jest.

The high Gods gave him wine to drink; a cup
Of strong desire, of knowledge, and of pain,
He set it to his lips and drank it up,
Then smiling, turned unto his flowers again.

These are the flowers of that immortal strain,
Which, when the hand that plucked them drops and dies,
Still keep their radiant beauty free from stain,
And breathe their fragrance through the centuries.
B. PAUL NEWMAN.

APROPOS VAILIMA LETTERS.

The account of an interview with Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, published in
a San Francisco paper, is somewhat distressing reading. It raises over
again the old question of the prudence of publishing a dead man's letters,
when his widow is still alive, without her sanction. Mrs. Stevenson says
that her late husband's friends--if such she still holds them to be--have
hastened to make money out of the scraps and scrawls he sent them. The
charge reads as an ugly one. But a moment's reflection supplies its
modifications. Has Mr. Henley rushed into the market-place with his dead
friend's letters? Has Mr. Charles Baxter? That was the old trio renowned
in song and famous in fable. Of the newer friends--friends such as those
he made in Bournemouth, Lady Shelley and the Misses Ashworth Taylor, the
most attached a man ever had--not one has brought out of his or her
treasury the delightful letters of "R. L. S." We have the Vailima
Letters, it is true, but surely these must be published by the consent of
Mrs. Stevenson and at her profit? We had also that letter which Mr. Gosse
sent to the _Times_. And, as for that, it was, obviously given and not
"sold"? In this particular letter, which was written in acknowledgment of
a dedication of Mr. Gosse's poems to him, Stevenson congratulated his
correspondent on the prospect of an old age mitigated by the society of
his descendants. To heighten the picture, the man who had learned his
craft so well, and could hardly elud