the cottage "Skerryvore," after the famous lighthouse he had
helped to build in his young days, and it was their home for the next
three years--busy ones for R.L.S.

[Illustration: Skerryvore Cottage, Bournemouth]

It was a real joy to have his father and mother and Bob Stevenson with
them again and his friends in London frequently drop in for a visit.

His health was never worse than during the Bournemouth days. He seldom
went beyond his own garden-gate but lived, as he says, "like a weevil in
a biscuit." Yet he never worked harder or accomplished more. He wrote in
bed and out of bed, sick or well, poems, plays, short stories, and
verses.

He finished "Treasure Island," the book that gained him his first
popularity, and wrote "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," which made him famous
at home and abroad.

"Treasure Island" had been started some time previous to please Lloyd,
who asked him to write a "good story." It all began with a map.
Stevenson always loved maps, and one day during a picture-making bout he
had drawn a fine one. "It was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully
colored," he says. "The shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it
contained harbors that pleased me like sonnets.... I ticketed my
performance Treasure Island."

Immediately the island began to take life and swarm with people, all
sorts of strange scenes began to take place upon it, and as he gazed at
his map Stevenson discovered the plot for the "good story."

"It is horrid fun," he wrote, "and begins in the Admiral Benbow public
house on the Devon coast; all about a map and a treasure and a mutiny,
and a derelict ship ... and a doctor and a sea-cook with one leg with
the chorus 'yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,' ... No women in the story,
Lloyd orders."

Parts of the coast at Monterey flashed back to his mind and helped him
to picture the scenery of his "Treasure Island." "It was just such a
place as the Monterey sand hills the hero John Hawkins found himself on
leaving his mutinous shipmates. It was just such a thicket of live oak
growing low along the sand like brambles, that he crawled and dodged
when he heard the voices of the pirates near him and saw Long John
Silver strike down with his crutch one of his mates who had refused to
join in his plan for murder."

[Illustration: The Treasure Island map]

As the story grew he read each new chapter aloud to the family in the
evening. He was writing it for one boy, but found he had more in