son's health, although always a cause of more or less anxiety,
was from time to time somewhat better; else he could hardly have learned
the practical work of a brass foundry, superintended the building of
light towers and harbours, and taken such very active holidays as _An
Inland Voyage_, and the tour _Through the Cevennes with a Donkey_.
Nevertheless the delicacy was there, and it not only increased in 1873
but culminated in the autumn of that year in the first of those serious
attacks of illness which afterwards frequently caused himself so much
suffering and his friends such keen distress all through the life that,
in spite of them, he lived so bravely.

In the October of 1873 the doctors took so grave a view of his
indisposition that they ordered him south for the winter, and on the 5th
of November he started on the first of those pilgrimages in search of
health of which he says, somewhat sadly, in writing of his grandfather,
in his paper on _The Old Manse_:

'He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight; I have sought it
in both hemispheres, but whereas he found it and kept it, I am still on
the quest.'

The anxiety and distress of his parents during that winter were
naturally intense, and there is something tragic in the dates so
carefully preserved:

'Lou started on 5th November 1873.'

'He returned to Heriot Row on 26th April 1874.'

_Ordered South_ appeared in _Macmillan_ for that same April, and in its
very beauty there is a most painful pathos. The polish of its style, its
exquisitely chosen words, give to it something of the sadness of the
brilliant autumn tints on a wood, the red gold and the glory of decay.
It is a brave paper and it is an intensely sad one, the sadness in which
goes straight to the reader's heart, while the courage takes his respect
by storm. No wonder it calls forth universal sympathy; too many homes
have been darkened by the dread sentence 'Ordered South,' too many
sufferers have obeyed it in life's gay noonday, or in its sunny prime,
and few, alas! very few, have even returned to face the long struggle
with fate that Mr Stevenson fought so heroically! This was the first,
for him, of many journeys 'South'; for although the winter in the
Riviera sent him back somewhat stronger, the inherent delicacy was still
there, and time after time, in the twenty years and eleven months that
he lived after the November morning when he set out on that melancholy
journey, the recurrence o