by an old woman, in a hollow tree, and it was _not_ the
gun of James Stewart.

(I have a friend whose great-great-grandfather was standing beside James
of the Glens, watching the digging of potatoes. A horse was heard
approaching at such a pace that James said, "Whoever the rider is, the
horse is not his own." As he galloped past, the rider shouted: "Glenure
is shot!" "Who did it I don't know, but I am the man that will hang for
it," said James, too truly.)

Of "Kidnapped," Stevenson said (as Thackeray said of Henry Esmond and
Lady Castlewood, as Scott says of Dugald Dalgetty) that, in this book
alone of his, "the characters took the bit in their teeth," at a certain
point. "It was they who spoke, it was they who wrote the remainder of
the story."

They are spontaneous, they are living. Balfour, in the _scenario_ of the
tale, was to have been kidnapped and carried to the American
plantations. But he and Alan "went their ain gait." At the end, you can
see the pen drop from the weary fingers; they left half-told the story
of Alan, to be continued in "Catriona."

A love of Jacobite times, and of Alan Breck's country, Lochaber,
Glencoe, Mamore, may bias me; but in "Kidnapped" Stevenson appears to me
to reach the height of his genius in designing character and landscape;
in humour, dialogue, and creative power. As in his preceding stories,
there is hardly the flutter of a petticoat, but the tale, like Prince
Charles at Holyrood, can point to a Highland man of the sword, and say,
"These are my beauties." I remember that Mr. Matthew Arnold admired the
story greatly, and _he_ had no Jacobite or local bias.

In May, 1887, Stevenson lost his father, and paid his last visit to his
native country.

It was during this period, in 1886 probably, that I, for the first time,
saw Stevenson confined to bed in one of his frequent illnesses, and
then, also, I saw him for the last time. So emaciated was he (we need
not dwell on what seemed that "last face of Hippocrates"), that we could
not believe there remained for him some crowded years of life and
comparatively healthy and joy-bestowing energy. If the ocean was
henceforth to roll between us, at least he said that we were always best
friends when furthest apart; though, indeed, we were never so intimate
as to be otherwise than friendly. It was never the man that I knew best;
but the genius that I delighted in, "on this side idolatry." Always, in
verse or in prose, in Scots or in En