ill
I make a very good fight." In this battle of wits they found intense
enjoyment, and it was, in fact, an intellectual comradeship that few
writers have been fortunate enough to enjoy in their own households.

While at Bournemouth an occasional respite from illness enabled them
to enjoy the society of friends in a limited way--among them their
neighbours, Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, Sir Henry Taylor and his
daughters, and many people of note who came down from London to see
them. The incidents of these friendships have been fully dealt with in
Balfour's _Life of Robert Louis Stevenson_, and need not be treated
extensively here. One of their neighbours, Miss Adelaide Boodle, who
was given the jocose title of "gamekeeper" when she assumed charge of
Skerryvore after their departure from England, writes thus of her
attachment to Mrs. Stevenson: "Among all her friends here there was
never one who loved her more whole-heartedly than her 'gamekeeper,' to
whom in after years she gave the sweet pet name of the 'little brown
deer.' From the first day that we met at Skerryvore she took entire
possession of my heart, and there she will forever bear sway. There is
an old gardener here, too, who was her devoted slave at Skerryvore. Of
course she never trusted him the length of her little finger, but she
used him as extra hands and feet. Her parting charge to me--given in
his presence--has never been forgotten by either of us: 'Remember,
child, if you ever see Philips approach my creepers with a pruning
knife you are to snatch it from his hand and plunge it into his
heart!"

Among the visitors was John Sargent, the American painter, who came to
paint Mr. Stevenson's portrait--a picture which was regarded as too
peculiar to be satisfactory. When Sargent painted it he put Mrs.
Stevenson, dressed in an East Indian costume, in the background,
intending it, not for a portrait, but merely as a bit of colour to
balance the picture. It was a part of the costume that her feet should
be bare, and this fact gave rise to a fantastic story that has often
gone the rounds in print, and will probably continue to do so till the
end of time, that when she first came to London she was such a savage
that she went to dinners and evening entertainments barefoot. This was
but one of the many strange tales that appeared from time to time
concerning her, all of which she refused to contradict, no matter how
false or malicious they might be, for she felt t