rather poor, became worse, and on reaching
London the doctor ordered him to Mentone in the south of France, where
he had been before as a boy.

There he spent his days principally lying on his back in the sun reading
and playing with a little Russian girl with whom he struck up a great
friendship. His letters to his mother were full of her sayings and
doings. He was too ill to write much, although one essay, "Ordered
South," was the outcome of this trip, the only piece of writing in which
he ever posed as an invalid or talked of his ill health.

At the end of two months he improved enough to return to Edinburgh, but
gave up the idea of the English bar. His illness and absence seemed to
have smoothed out some of the difficulties at home, and after he
returned things went happier in every way.

On July 14, 1875, he passed his final law examinations, and was admitted
to the Scottish bar. He was now entitled to wear a wig and gown, place
a brass plate with his name upon the door of 17 Heriot Row, and "have
the fourth or fifth share of the services of a clerk" whom it is said he
didn't even know by sight. For a few months he made some sort of a
pretense at practising, but it amounted to very little. Gradually he
ceased paying daily visits to the Parliament House to wait for a case,
but settled himself instead in the room on the top floor at home and
began to write, seriously this time--it was to be his life-work from now
on--and the law was forgotten.

His first essays were published in the _Cornhill Magazine_ and _The
Portfolio_ under the initials R.L.S., which signature in time grew so
familiar to his friends and to those who admired his writings it became
a second name for him, and as R.L.S. he is often referred to.

He was free now to roam as he chose and spent much time in Paris with
Bob. The life there in the artists' quarter suited him as well as it
had at Fontainebleau. There, among other American artists, he was
associated with Mr. Will Low, a painter, whom he saw much of when he
came to New York.

One September he took a walking trip in the Cevenne Mountains with no
other companion than a little gray donkey, Modestine, who carried his
pack and tried his patience by turns with her pace, which was "as much
slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run," as he tells in the
chronicle of the trip.

A visit at Grez in 1876 was to mark a point in his life. Heretofore the
artists' colony had been composed only