antrae to
the Rescue"--the sound was promising, but I do not know who was to be
obliged by the Master.

After the list of chapters was completed, Mr. Osbourne used to write the
first draft, "to break the ground," and then each wrote and rewrote, an
indefinite number of times. The style, the general effect produced, are
the style and the effect of Stevenson. "He liked the comradeship." More
care was taken than on a novel of which I and another were greatly
guilty. My partner represented Mr. Nicholas Wogan as rubbing his hands
after a bullet at Fontenoy (as history and I made quite clear) had
deprived Mr. Wogan of one of his arms. There is no such error in the
"Iliad," despite the unnumbered multitude of collaborators detected by
the Higher Criticism.

In June, 1888, Stevenson sailed out on the Pacific in search of health,
and followed the shining shadow through the isles and seas till he made
his last home at Samoa. It was a three years' cruise among "summer isles
of Eden." Perhaps no book of Stevenson's is less popular than his
narrative of storm and calm, of beachcombers and brown Polynesian
princes. The scenery is too exotic for the general taste. The joy and
sorrow of Stevenson was to find a society "in much the same
convulsionary and transitional state" as the Highlands and Islands after
1745. He was always haunted, and in popularity retarded, by History. He
wanted to know about details of savage custom and of superstitious
belief, a taste very far from being universal even in the most highly
cultivated circles, where Folklore is a name of fear. He found among the
natives such fatal Polynesian fairy ladies as they of Glenfinlas, on
whom Scott wrote the ballad. He found a medicine-man who hypnotized him
from behind his back, which nobody at home had been able to do before
his face. He exchanged stories with the clansmen--Scots for Polynesian;
they were much the same in character and incident. He had found, in
Polynesia, the way out of our own present. He met a Polynesian Queen--a
Mary Stuart or a Helen of Troy grown old. "She had been passed from
chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war"; a "Queen of
Cannibals, tattooed from head to foot." Now she had reached the Elysian
plain and a windless age, living in religion, as it were: "she passes
all her days with the sisters."

She was not a white woman: none of these people, so courteous and kind,
were white, were up-to-date. In London and New York amat