e tells facetiously of his one
brief. He had chosen his own vocation, which was literature, and the
years which followed were, despite the delicacy which showed itself, very
busy years. He produced volume on volume. He had written many stories
which had never seen the light, but, as he says, passed through the
ordeal of the fire by more or less circuitous ways.

By this time some trouble and cause for anxiety had arisen about the
lungs, and trials of various places had been made. _Ordered South_
suggests the Mediterranean, sunny Italy, the Riviera. Then a sea-trip to
America was recommended and undertaken. Unfortunately, he got worse
there, his original cause of trouble was complicated with others, and the
medical treatment given was stupid, and exaggerated some of the symptoms
instead of removing them, All along--up, at all events, to the time of
his settlement in Samoa--Stevenson was more or less of an invalid.

Indeed, were I ever to write an essay on the art of wisely "laying-to,"
as the sailors say, I would point it by a reference to R. L. Stevenson.
For there is a wise way of "laying-to" that does not imply inaction, but
discreet, well-directed effort, against contrary winds and rough seas,
that is, amid obstacles and drawbacks, and even ill-health, where passive
and active may balance and give effect to each other. Stevenson was by
native instinct and temperament a rover--a lover of adventure, of strange
by-ways, errant tracts (as seen in his _Inland Voyage_ and _Travels with
a Donkey through the Cevennes_--seen yet more, perhaps, in a certain
account of a voyage to America as a steerage passenger), lofty mountain-
tops, with stronger air, and strange and novel surroundings. He would
fain, like Ulysses, be at home in foreign lands, making acquaintance with
outlying races, with

"Cities of men,
And manners, climates, councils, governments:
Myself not least, but honoured of them all,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy."

If he could not move about as he would, he would invent, make fancy serve
him instead of experience. We thus owe something to the staying and
restraining forces in him, and a wise "laying-to"--for his works, which
are, in large part, finely-healthy, objective, and in almost everything
unlike the work of an invalid, yet, in some degree, were but the devices
to beguile the burdens of an invalid's days. Instead of remaining in our
climate, it might be, to lie li