undergone something of an apprenticeship in devotion. Very
pertinent also is his advice to men in the same essay, that kindred
tastes are more likely to ensure lasting happiness than a fair face or
an acceptable dowry.

Beneath the easy brightness of thought and style that make the essay so
amusing and so readable, one sees that its writer knows his world well,
and has given graver thought to matters matrimonial than at a first
reading one is inclined to believe.

Holding firmly the faith that 'all things come to him who knows how to
wait,' Mr Stevenson was in no hurry to realise his ideal, and it was not
until he was between twenty-seven and thirty that he met the woman whom
he chose for his wife. That there was an element of romance in their
acquaintance altogether removed from everyday love stories made it all
the more fitting an ending to that watchful waiting for what fate had to
give him.

When Mr Stevenson arrived in San Francisco in 1879, there was living
with her sister, at Monterey, Mrs Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne of
Indiana. Mrs Osbourne had been married when very young, and her domestic
experience was so unhappy that she had to obtain a divorce from her
husband. She had, with her son and daughter, lived for some time in
that student colony at Fontainbleau which Mr Stevenson knew and loved so
well, and in after years they must have had in common many pleasant
memories of people and places dear to both, so that his ideal of
matrimony described in _Virginibus Puerisque_ was realised, and he and
his wife had 'many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor
custom stale.'

At a party at San Francisco Mr Stevenson much admired Mrs Osbourne and
her daughter Belle, who married a Mr Strong, and who afterwards, in the
Vailima days, became her step-father's secretary. The young girl he
found very fresh and sweet with the gay brightness of youth, but of her
mother his impression was much deeper, and he always spoke and wrote of
her as the most beautiful and the most charming woman whom he had ever
seen. Although she was several years his senior she was then in the very
prime of a womanly beauty which, to judge from the photographs taken at
Vailima more than ten years later, was only at its ripest when other
women are beginning to think of growing old. No one who had even once
looked into her dark eyes could fail to endorse Mr Stevenson's verdict,
to realise her charm of person, or doubt for a moment the