of lively _ballades,
villanelles_, and _rondeaux_. They were brilliant. Stevenson would not
tell me the author's name; he proved to be Mr. Henley, who came to town,
and, on the death of Mr. Brown, edited this unread periodical. There
were "Society" notes, although Mr. Henley's haunts were not those of
that kind of society, and one occasional contributor ventured to
remonstrate about the chatter on the "professional beauties" of that
distant day.

The "New Arabian Nights," with all their humour, and horror, all their
intellectual high spirits, and reckless absurdity, were poured by
Stevenson into this outcast flutterer of a Tory paper, to the great joy
of some of the very irregular contributors. (It was an honest
flutterer--its contributors received their wages.)

Then "London" died, and then seriousness enough came into the life of
our Arabian author. In August, 1879, he disappeared; he went to America
to marry the lady whom he had first met at Fontainebleau, whom he wedded
at San Francisco (1880), and loved with all his heart.

Reconciled to his father, he returned to Scotland. His health had been
anew impaired by troubles and privations, and the rest of his life in
the Old World was occupied by a series of maladies, vain roamings in
search of climate, and hard work constantly interrupted.

From his early childhood onwards, an army of maladies surrounded him,
invested him, cut him off if, in an hour of health, he ventured on any
sally; but they never overcame his invincible resolution. He was, as one
of his favourite old authors says about I forget what emperor, "an
entertainer of fortune by the day," making the most of every sunny hour,
and the best of every hour passed under the shadow of imminent death. I
remember that, soon after his marriage, he was staying in London at the
house of a friend. Going to see him, I noted in him a somewhat anxious
look, and I did not wonder at it! Mr. Henley was seated in a great
chair, the whole of his face, from the eyes downwards, muffled in a huge
crimson silk pocket handkerchief, of which the point covered his aureate
beard.

The room was a large room, and as Louis flitted about it, _more suo_, he
managed to tell me privily that Henley had a very bad cold, and that he
himself caught every cold which came within a limited radius. He _did_
catch that cold, I heard, and when once such an invader entered his
system, nobody knew what the end of it might be. His lungs usually
su