194

Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson. 262

The house at Hyde and Lombard Streets, San Francisco,
with some alterations in the way of bay windows, etc.,
which have been made since Mrs. Stevenson sold it. 266

The house at Vanumanutagi ranch. 274

Stonehedge at Santa Barbara. 298

The last portrait of Mrs. Stevenson. 306

The funeral procession as it wound up the hill. 332

The tomb, showing the bronze tablet with the verse from
Stevenson's poem to his wife. 336

THE LIFE OF MRS. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

CHAPTER I

ANCESTORS.

To arrive at a full understanding of the complex and unusual character
of Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, which perhaps played as large a part
as her beauty and intellectual charm in drawing to her the affections
of one of the greatest romance writers of our day, one must go back
and seek out all the uncommon influences that combined to produce
it--a long line of sturdy ancestors, running back to the first
adventurers who left their sheltered European homes and sailed across
the sea to try their fortunes in a wild, unknown land; her childhood
days spent among the hardy surroundings of pioneer Indiana, with its
hints of a past tropical age and its faint breath of Indian
reminiscence; the early breaking of her own family ties and her
fearless adventuring by way of the Isthmus of Panama to the distant
land of gold, and her brave struggle against adverse circumstances in
the mining camps of Nevada. All these prenatal influences and personal
experiences, so foreign to the protected lives of the women of
Stevenson's own race, threw about her an atmosphere of thrilling New
World romance that appealed with irresistible force to the man who was
himself Romance personified.

Fanny Stevenson was a lineal descendant of two of the oldest families
in the United States, her first ancestors landing in this country in
the early part of the seventeenth century. In 1642 Joeran Kyn, called
"The Snow White," reached America in the ship _Fama_ as a member of
the life-guard of John Printz, governor of the Swedish colony
established in the New World by King Gustavus Adolphus. He took up a
large tract of land and was living in peace and comfort on the
Delaware Riv