tres, and the writer gives a very graphic
description of the home garden and the cottage and its outhouses,

'Marvellous places though handy to home.'

One imagines the tales of John Todd the shepherd must have helped much
in his splendid description of the escape into England with the drovers
by the solitary drove roads, at one point of which the escaping prisoner
has the honour of meeting and conversing with 'The Shirra,' so well
loved on Tweed side and elsewhere. After many and marvellous adventures,
Mr St Ives returns a free and pardoned man to sue, not in vain, for the
hand of Flora.

Last, but, if one may judge by its powerful beginning, which is, alas!
all that the master-hand had left of it, certainly best of Mr
Stevenson's work is _Weir of Hermiston_. In the few perfectly finished
chapters there is a fulness of power and a perfection of style that
promised great things. As one read the description of the fierce old
judge, his gentle artistic son, the cunning dandified friend, the two
Kirsties, and the four black Elliot brothers, one felt that here indeed
was congenial matter; and that in the tragedy of fierce human passion
about to be played out amid wild moorland surroundings, Mr Stevenson
would rise to a greater perfection and a nobler success than he had yet
attained to.... It was not to be, the busy brain stopped
instantaneously, the pen that had worked so happily all the morning was
laid by for ever; and the world is infinitely the poorer for the sudden
catastrophe of that sad December evening which left the home at Vailima
desolate.

* * * * *

The beautiful _Edinburgh Edition_ of Mr Stevenson's works--which his
friends Mr Colvin and Mr Baxter have been seeing through the press--is
almost completed; one, or at most, two volumes only being now
unpublished. It consists of an edition of 1035 copies, and includes the
plays and everything of interest that he has written, and it will number
twenty-seven or perhaps twenty-eight volumes. While this book has been
passing through the press, volume twenty-seventh has been issued. It
contains _St Ives_, and practically completes the edition; but Mr
Stevenson's widow and Mr Sydney Colvin, who are acting as his executor
and his editor, have gratuitously given to the subscribers to this
_Edinburgh Edition_ a twenty-eighth volume, consisting of various odds
and ends not hitherto made public. Of this, 'A New Form of Intermitten