plot, which, while not so dramatic as the original, was at least not quite so distressing. In this second story the device of the executioner who is selected by chance is replaced by a train which is scheduled to start once a month at midnight from Charing Cross, and is to carry all those who during the month have decided that life has no further attractions for them. The train is to be the last word in modern luxury, with a dancing-car for those who would dance and a dining-car for those who would dine, furnished with the most dainty and delectable dishes, and provided with champagne and fine liqueurs of the most expensive brands. The track is to be cleared, and the train started, without an engineer or a train crew, direct for the cliff of Dover, over which it is supposed to plunge at a moment unknown to any of the passengers, and when the revelry is at its height.

The mutual admiration of the two Stevensons was a delight to see, and that it was destined to be a lifelong affection is shown by the long series of "Vailima Letters" addressed to Bob. Fundamentally, of course, their mutual attraction for each other was due to the fact that both were true men; but it was doubtless partly attributable to the added fact that the quality of their genius was as different as was their outward appearance. Louis, as we all know, was of the blond, appealing Northern type, but Bob was as black and as fiery as an Andalusian. One could not help feeling that one of his ancestors at least must have been a Spaniard-one of those Spanish adventurers perchance who were wrecked upon the coast of Scotland at the time when the last ships of the Spanish Armada were dispersed in that historic storm which, with the assistance of Lord Howard and Drake, saved England. Legend has it that the daughters. of the isles were kind to the handsome and unfortunate waifs from the sea, and that the black Highlanders of the Scottish Hebrides have more than a little Spanish blood in their veins.

At this time Stevenson was publishing a series of studies of men and things in

"The Cornhill Magazine," and he was
also engaged upon "An Inland Voyage"
and parts of the "New Arabian Nights."
As if this were not sufficient to satisfy
the cravings of the greediest of workers,
he was also writing various stories and
essays which he called "Studies," but
which he afterward destroyed.

I have a vivid recollection of a most
interesting shop-talk with him about this
time which occurred during a long walk
to Fontainebleau. As we tramped along
under the shade of the tall poplars, he out-
lined to me the writer's credo as he knew
it, and explained his own methods of
work.

And

"You painter-chaps make lots of studies,
don't you?" he exclaimed.
"And you
don't frame them all and send them to the
Salon, do you? You just stick them up
on the studio wall for a bit, and presently
you tear them up and make more.
you copy Velasquez and Rembrandt and
Vandyke and Corot; and from each you
learn some little trick of the brush, some
obscure little point in technic. And you
know damn well that it is the knowledge
thus acquired that will enable you later on
to deliver your own message with a fine
and confident bravado. You are simply
learning your métier; and believe me, mon
cher, an artist in any line without the
métier is just a blind man with a stick.
Now, in the literary line I am simply
doing what you painter-men are doing in
the pictorial line-learning the métier."

"Yes, but how do you work the game?"
I inquired. "We artists use paint and
canvas and brushes precisely as the masters
did."

"Well, I use pen and ink and paper precisely as did the masters of the pen," laughed Stevenson, "only a pencil is quite good enough for me at present. Just now I am making a story à la Balzac, with a French plot, French local color, and every little touch and detail as close to the old boy as I can possibly make it. And is n't he a wizard! Look at 'Cousine Bette' and 'Peau de chagrin' and the 'Médecin de campagne.' Are n't they just marvels of literary perfection! Really, I believe that

Shortly after his arrival, the law of general amnesty was passed, and Salis was once more free to return to his beloved Paris. But, alas! he had nothing to return to. Communism was no longer a profession that paid a living wage, and to return to Paris without a profession meant certain starvation. So Stevenson called a special meeting of the colony to consider the "Question Salis," and to devise ways and means by which the owner of the name could live and thrive reasonably once more in Paris. He elected himself chairman of the meeting, and in the opening address stated that there was only one sure and never-failing method by which one could always and anywhere be certain of making money, and that was by the sale of drink. In England, where drink is dispensed at the "pub," it was not a particularly cleanly or attractive profession, to be sure; but in Paris it was different, he said. For what could be neater or more appealing than the little whitemarble tables outside a boulevard café, with the prim little hedge of arbor-vitæ dividing off its special strip of sidewalk from the area pertaining to the adjoining shop? Moreover, a café could be of any desired character, musical, artistic, or literary. The Café Salis should be all three of these in one. Right here we had the

painters who would cover the walls with their pictures, the poets who would recite their own poetry of evenings, and the musicians who would be only too pleased to discourse sweet sound for the price of a bock or a fine that was not charged up. The bourgeois would repay, what? But the Café Salis needed a name. Neither a book nor a picture was quite sure of success without a taking title, and this was still more true of a café.

Just at this time it happened that Hawkins, one of our group, had sent to the Salon a picture which had achieved a considerable success despite the fact that its subject was most lugubrious-nothing less than a forlorn orphan weeping at the grave of her mother. One day as Hawkins was working on his nearly completed canvas in the village cemetery it chanced

that a black cat went slinking along the stone wall in the background, arching its back and resting occasionally to survey the landscape. Suddenly it occurred to the artist that this little bit of life in the canvas might égayer his picture a bit, while the sable color of the creature would keep it fairly within the scheme.

"How about Hawkins's black cat?" cried one of the committee. "Stamped out of black iron it would make a bully sign to swing over the door."

The suggestion was carried by acclamation, and the "Café of the Black Cat," which was opened in the Quartier des Batignolles that autumn, had an immediate and bewildering success; so much so indeed that presently its proprietor, grown prosperous and sleek, the communard utterly submerged in the successful bourgeois, was swept into the French senate on the tide of his prosperity. Before leaving Grez, Salis rowed up to the house of a murderous miller, a sinister person who was known positively to have killed his old mother in cold blood, although the crime could never be fastened upon him, and calling him to the door of his mill, recited in stentorian tones and with much dramatic gesticulation Victor Hugo's "Assassin.' Taken all in all, a picturesque person was Rodolfe Salis.

"

This little incident was very characteristic of Stevenson, and it illustrates what always seemed to me the most salient and dominating force in his nature—an intense interest in the human drama which was being enacted about him, the artist's ability to see it as a drama, and an uncontrollable desire to mix in the fray himself and, playing the part of a kindly deus ex machina, to bring the fifth act of the play to a happy or an artistic conclusion.

I do not think that in those early days he appeared to any of us as specifically a genius, an exceptional man set apart for great accomplishments. Indeed, had we been solemnly assured that he would share the honor, with only one or two possible competitors, of being the foremost English writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century, we would certainly have received

the assurance with a smile. What! Louis! so simple, kindly, natural; so all-round. a good fellow; so like all the rest of us, only nicer!

And I am quite sure that in his inmost heart at this period he could never really have looked forward to or expected the fame which later came to him, and which grows and expands as time gives us the perspective wherewith to view it in all its roundness and bigness and essential simplicity. In fact, in introducing himself to me, he remarked simply that he was "a writer-chap," or hoped to be one.

I was told of another rainy afternoon "blague party," at which I did not chance. to be present, during which Bob Stevenson amused himself by forecasting the future careers of those present. When he came to his cousin he remarked with a satirical little smile: "There sits Louis, as smug and complacent as any old type de bourgeois. I have not the least doubt that he fondly imagines that one of these days they will be publishing all of his dinky, private correspondence-'the letters of R. L. S.'-in boards." And Louis joined as heartily as any one in the laugh which the sally raised. Bob, at least, did live to see the publication of the "Vailima Letters," and I have often wondered if he remembered this little incident as he thumbed their leaves.

But I would not give the impression that the artist colony of Grez during that memorable summer was wholly masculine in its make-up, for this was far indeed from being the case, and most of the unforgetable dramatic quality of the place and the time would have been lacking but for the presence of a very fair proportion of the female element. There was a certain return to primitive standards in the relation between the sexes, but primitive standards, nevertheless, in which honor and a regard for the square deal held a high place. In matters of morals Stevenson himself was the least censorious of judges, providing there was no infringement of the law of nature or the law of friendship; though perhaps it would be truer to say that he entered no judgment

either for or against the accused, preferring to leave the decision in such matters to the Maker of all laws.

But if he heard of anything mean or underhand, any tricky blow beneath the belt, he was a very firebrand, flaming with a fury which nothing could quell. I remember one case in which he forced two very unwilling opponents to accept a duel. as the only possible solution of an entanglement involving an unmanly act on the part of one of the pair. Fortunately the duel was never fought, the chief offender considering discretion the better part of valor and deciding that the woods. about Barbison at that particular season of the year offered better material for the painter than the river at Grez.

I would not, however, by any means have it understood that there was in the colony no sense of decency or morality in the ordinary acceptance of those terms, for that would be a misstatement as manifestly unfair and untrue as to claim a standard of rigid puritanism for the whole region. If there was a fair sprinkling of the grisette and the model element, which had followed the painters down from Paris, there were also a certain number of very serious women-painters who were studying hard, and some of whom were destined to make an enviable place for themselves later on. Among these I may mention. Mlles. Loestadt and Lilienthal, Swedish painters of genuine talent, and more particularly the lady "Trusty, dusky, vivid, and true" to whom Robert Louis Stevenson inscribed the most beautiful love-song of our time, and who later on was destined to become his wife. Mrs. Osbourne could not at the time have been more than thirty-five years of age, a grave and remarkable type of womanhood, with eyes of a depth and a somber beauty which I have never seen equaled-eyes, nevertheless, that upon occasion could sparkle with humor and brim over with laughter. Yet upon the whole Mrs. Osbourne impressed me as first of all a woman of profound character and serious judgment, who could, if occasion called, have been the leader in some great movement. But she

belonged to the quattrocento rather than to the end of the nineteenth century. Had she been born a Medici, she would have held rank as one of the remarkable women of all time.

That she was a woman of intellectual attainments is proved by the fact that she was already a magazine writer of recognized ability, and that at the moment when Stevenson first came into her life she was making a living for herself and her two children with her pen. But this, after all, is a more or less ordinary accomplishment, and Mrs. Osbourne was in no sense ordinary. Indeed, she was gifted with a mysterious sort of over-intelligence which is almost impossible to describe, but which impressed itself upon every one who came within the radius of her influence. Napoleon had much of this; likewise his arch-enemy the great Duke of Wellington; and among women Catharine of Russia and perhaps Elizabeth of England. She was therefore both physically and mentally the very antithesis of the gay, hilarious, open-minded, and open-hearted Stevenson, and for that very reason, perhaps, the woman in all the world best fitted to be his life-comrade and helpmate. At any rate, we may well ask ourselves if anywhere else he would have found the kind of understanding and devotion which she gave him from the day of their first meeting at Grez until the day of his death in far-away Samoa; if anywhere else there was a woman of equal attainments who would willingly, nay, gladly, throw aside all of the pleasures and comforts of civilization to live among savages, and the still rougher whites of the South Pacific, in order that her husband might have just a little more oxygen for his failing lungs, a little more chance for a respite and an extension of his shortening years? Probably no one ever better deserved than she the noble tribute of verse which her husband gave her, and from which I have quoted the opening line.

Both she and her daughter Isobel had been studying art in Paris through the winter, and had joined the regular AngloSaxon migration to Grez in the early sum

mer. The latter, then a bewitching girl
of seventeen, later became widely known
as Mrs. Strong, Stevenson's amanuensis
and biographer.

The last time that I ever saw Stevenson
was a year or two later and in semi-tragic
circumstances. The Osbournes had re-
turned to their native California, whither
Stevenson had journeyed some little time
later as "An Amateur Immigrant," and
where he had lived for a space as "The
Silverado Squatter." In the early spring
of the following year, however, he and
Mrs. Stevenson returned once more to
their old haunts about the forest of Fon-
tainebleau. In the meantime I had been
to Italy, whence I had just brought back
to Paris the usual six-by-ten-foot Salon
canvas. Having seen this precious work
of art duly delivered at the doors of the
Palais de l'Industrie, I hastened to join
the gay and care-free cavalcade which at
that season always makes for the woods,
generally toward Barbison or Fontaine-
bleau. This time our own band of half
a dozen, including my brother Alexander
Harrison, the marine-painter, and Ruger
Donoho, the landscape-man, were headed
for Barbison and the Pension Siron, where
we arrived late one evening, only to be in-
formed that all sleeping accommodations
were taken, and that the best we might
expect was a row of cots in the bare loft
of the annex, on the opposite side of the
village street. This was no hardship, how-
ever, and as an excellent late souper was
soon steaming on the table, we accepted
the situation gaily enough, smoking a pipe
after supper in the still aisles of the forest
before retiring for the night.

It was only at the very earliest peep of
dawn that the disadvantages of our com-
munal sleeping-apartment became appar-
ent. One of our party woke between
three and four o'clock A.M., and, after
lying with open eyes for half an hour or
so, decided that this sort of thing was not
fair play. Whereupon he rose silently,
seized a pillow, and moving from cot to
cot, delivered to the occupant of each an
impartial and sounding thwack.

Instantly there was pandemonium in