zine. They had all the quality, all the distinction, of
which I speak. Shortly afterward I met Mr Stevenson, then in his
twenty-ninth year, at a London club, where we chanced to be the only
loungers in an upper room. To my surprise he opened a
conversation--you know there could be nothing more unexpected than
that in London--and thereby I guessed that he was as much, if not as
far, away from home as I was. He asked many questions concerning 'the
States'; in fact, this was but a few months before he took his
steerage passage for our shores. I was drawn to the young Scotsman at
once. He seemed more like a New-Englander of Holmes's Brahmin caste,
who might have come from Harvard or Yale. But as he grew animated I
thought, as others have thought, and as one would suspect from his
name, that he must have Scandinavian blood in his veins--that he was
of the heroic, restless, strong and tender Viking strain, and
certainly from that day his works and wanderings have not belied the
surmise. He told me that he was the author of that charming book of
gipsying in the Cevennes which just then had gained for him some
attentions from the literary set. But if I had known that he had
written those two stories of sixteenth-century Paris--as I learned
afterwards when they reappeared in the _New Arabian Nights_--I would
not have bidden him good-bye as to an 'unfledged comrade,' but would
have wished indeed to 'grapple him to my soul with hooks of steel.'

"Another point is made clear as crystal by his life itself. He had
the instinct, and he had the courage, to make it the servant, and not
the master, of the faculty within him. I say he had the courage, but
so potent was his birth-spell that doubtless he could not otherwise.
Nothing commonplace sufficed him. A regulation stay-at-home life
would have been fatal to his art. The ancient mandate, 'Follow thy
Genius,' was well obeyed. Unshackled freedom of person and habit was
a prerequisite; as an imaginary artist he felt--nature keeps her poets
and story-tellers children to the last--he felt, if he ever reasoned
it out, that he must gang his own gait, whether it seemed promising,
or the reverse, to kith, kin, or alien. So his wanderings were not
only in the most natural but in the wisest consonance with his
creative dreams. Wherever he went, he found something essential for
h