who interested you so little, was in a
state of mind extremely mingled and unpleasant; harassed with work which
he thought he was not doing well, troubled with difficulties to which
you will in time succeed, and yet looking forward to no less a matter
than a voyage to the South Seas and the visitation of savage and desert
islands.
"Your father's friend,
"ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON."

The portrait was finished in bas-relief and many copies were made of it.
The most familiar is the one giving only Stevenson's head and
shoulders, but the splendid big one placed as a memorial to him in St.
Giles's Cathedral in Edinburgh shows him as he must have looked that day
lying in bed, writing to Homer St. Gaudens.

Another man in New York whom Stevenson had admired for years and longed
to meet was General Sherman. The war was long past, and he was then an
old gentleman living very quietly. One day St. Gaudens took Stevenson to
call on him, and he was asked afterward if he was at all disappointed in
his hero.

"Disappointed," he exclaimed. "It was simply magnificent to stand in the
presence of one who has done what he has, and then to find him so genial
and human. It was the next thing to seeing Wellington, and I dare say
the Iron Duke would not have been half so human."

The anticipation of a train trip across the continent was so distasteful
that a proposed visit to Colorado was given up, and they decided to try
the climate of the Adirondacks for the winter instead.

They chose Saranac, not far from the Canadian border, and rented a
cottage there.

The climate was as unpleasant as possible. It rained, snowed, sleeted,
and froze continually. The cold at times was arctic, the thermometer
dropping thirty degrees below zero in January. "Venison was crunching
with ice after being an hour in the oven, and a large lump of ice was
still unmelted in a pot where water was steaming all around it."

Their cottage was dubbed "Hunter's Home." It was far from the railroad,
few luxuries were to be had, and they lived a simple life in earnest.

Of course, they had a dog; no "hunter's home" would be complete without
one, but Louis scouted the idea of adding things as unfitting as plush
table-covers and upholstered footstools. The table went bare, and he
fashioned a footstool for his mother out of a log, in true backwoods
fashion.

His wife and mother found the cold hard to bear, but he s