welcome of the latter being Mr. Henry James, Mr. William
Archer, and Mr. John S. Sargent; while among Bournemouth residents who
attached themselves to him on terms of special intimacy and affection
were Sir Percy and Lady Shelley and Sir Henry and Lady Taylor and their
daughters.

At the same time, seizing and making the most of every week, nay, every
day and hour of respite, he contrived to produce work surprising, under
the circumstances, alike by quantity and quality. During the first two
months of his life at Bournemouth the two plays _Admiral Guinea_ and
_Beau Austin_ were written in collaboration with Mr. Henley, and many
other dramatic schemes were broached which health and leisure failed him
to carry out. In the course of the next few months he finished _Prince
Otto_, _The Child's Garden of Verses_, and _More New Arabian Nights_,
all three of which had been begun, and the two first almost completed,
before he left Hyeres. He at the same time attacked two new tasks--a
highway novel called _The Great North Road_, and a _Life of Wellington_
for a series edited by Mr. Andrew Lang, both of which he had in the
sequel to abandon; and a third, the boys' story of _Kidnapped_, which in
its turn had to be suspended, but on its publication next year turned
out one of the most brilliant of his successes.

About midsummer of this year, 1885, he was distressed by the sudden
death of his old and kind friend Professor Fleeming Jenkin, and after a
while undertook the task of writing a memoir of him to be prefixed to
his collected papers. Towards the close of the same year he was busy
with what proved to be the most popular of all his writings, _The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, and with the Christmas story
of _Olalla_. _Jekyll and Hyde_ was published in January 1886, and after
threatening for the first week or two to fall flat, in no long time
caught the attention of all classes of readers, was quoted from a
hundred pulpits, and made the writer's name familiar to multitudes both
in England and America whom it had never reached before. A success
scarcely inferior, though of another kind, was made a few months
afterwards by _Kidnapped_, which Stevenson had taken up again in the
early spring, and which was published about midsummer. After completing
this task in March, he was able to do little work during the remainder
of the year, except in preparing materials for the _Life of Fleeming
Jenkin_, and in writing occasion