glish, he made one reader happy; by
a kind of pre-established harmony of taste which might not have
prevailed in the intercourse of every day's life.

In August, 1887, Stevenson left England for ever, arriving at New York
as a lion, hunted by reporters, whom, no doubt, he received with the
majestic courtesy of his own Prince of Bohemia. Two versions of Jekyll
and Hyde were being acted; all this was very unlike the calm
indifference of his native land. It seems that in Jekyll, as "Terryfled"
(in Scott's phrase), there is a "love interest"; love is alien to Dr.
Jekyll, as to the shepherd before he found that Love was a dweller on
the rocks. The Terryfication was, at least, an advertisement. To
advertise himself, in the modern way, Stevenson was not competent. He
never was interviewed as a Celebrity at Home, as far as I am aware.
Indeed, he loved not society papers, and lit a bonfire and danced a
dance around it in his garden, when some editor of a journal of that
sort was committed to prison. His name is not mentioned, but Stevenson
and I had against him a grudge of very old standing.

Dollars in sufficient profusion were offered for his works, and in the
Adirondack Hills, beside a frozen river in the starlit night, he dreamed
of "a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land,
savagery and civilization." He thought of that old Indian marvel, the
suspended life of the buried fakir, over whose grave the corn is sown
and grown. He thought of an evil genius on whom this method should be
tried in frozen Canadian earth. Thus, what seems like the far-fetched
idea of a wearied fancy in "The Master of Ballantrae" was, from the
first, of the essence of that bitter romance. The new conception fitted
in with a tale, already dreamed of on the Perthshire moors, about the
dark adventurous years of the Jacobite eclipse. The Prince was hidden in
a convent of Paris, or flashing for a moment in the Mall, or cruising, a
dingy bearded wanderer, in Germany or the Netherlands; while his
followers were serving under French colours, under Montcalm or
Lally-Tolendal. Men who had charged side by side at Gledsmuir and
Culloden, might meet as foes in Canada or Hindostan. There is matter
enough, in 1750-1765, for scores of romances, but who now can write
them? But the Master did not now begin his deeds of bale. Stevenson's
stepson, Mr. Osbourne, then very young, himself wrote "The Finsbury
Tontine; or The Game of Bluff," and I was info