owed long
vacations, spring and summer, to journey off to bask in the South.
But this plan, like the barge one, came to naught, for he was not
elected. The tales of tropic islands in the South Seas--"beautiful
places green for ever, perfect climate, perfect shapes of men and
women with red flowers in their hair and nothing to do but study
oratory and etiquette, sit in the sun and pick up the fruits as they
fall,"--remained in his tenacious memory. A guest at his father's in
1874 spoke of them, and the young Stevenson had stored the
description away in his mind, to be unearthed when he willed, as was
his habit. When first he heard of those favored spots, he had two
anchors which kept him bound to Edinburgh--his parents. The good
engineer died in 1887; and the other anchor, his mother, he found
could be lifted, and became the best of ballast. When he elected to
become a world wanderer, she left her Edinburgh home and, without
hesitation, went off with her son and his household when they turned
their backs on Europe in 1887. Her journal to her sister tells of
these travels "From Saranac to Marquesas." She simply but racily
describes their course, which ended in the cruise on the Casco. In
her book we enjoy genuine glimpses of the author, not so much as the
man who has written himself into fame, but her happy-tempered,
hero-hearted, eager-minded boy, who for forty-five years was all the
world to her. The invigorating cold of the Adirondacks had its
drawbacks, as had Davos; and Stevenson, who, a few years before had
felt the sharp pinch of poverty at San Francisco, now chartered from
there a ship of his own, and sailed away out of the Golden Gate, on
his South Sea Odyssey, to those islands he had heard of years
before, little thinking, as he listened "till he was sick with
desire to go there," that talk was to be as a sign-post to him where
to travel to. "For Louis' sake," his mother explains in her racy
journal letters, speaking of having chartered the Casco, "I can't
but be glad, for his heart has so long been set upon it, it must
surely be good for his health to have such a desire granted." Louis
warned his mother years before she had a nomad for a son, but she
had never objected, and sat knitting on deck, well content not to be
"in turret pent," but to go forth with the bright sword she had
forged. "She adapted herself," her brother says, "to her strange
surroundings, went about barefoot, found no heat too great for her,