ROBERT LOUIS STEvENSON

1. The famous Scotch author, Robert Louis Stevenson, was born in Edinburgh, November 13, 1850. He was a delicate child with a sweet temper and a happy, unselfish disposition,who bore the burden of ill health bravely in childhood as in later life. In “The Land of Counterpane,” a poem which you may remember, he tells some of the ways in which he amused himself during the idle days in bed.

Robert Louis Stevenson

2. When he was well enough to be up, he invented games for himself and took keen delight in the world of out-door life.

3. His education was carried on in a somewhat irregular fashion. He attended schools in Edinburgh, and studied with private tutors at places to which his parents had gone for the benefit of his health or of their own. He thus became an excellentforeign life and manners. He early showed a taste for literature, beginning as a boy the careful choice of language which made him a master of English prose.

4. Stevenson’s father had planned to have him follow the familyprofession of engineering. With this in view he was sent to Edinburgh University in the autumn of 1868. Later he gave up engineering and attended law classes; but law, like engineering, was put aside to enable him to fulfil his strong desire for a literary life.

5. His first stories and essays, published in various magazines, met with favorable notice. In 1878 he published his first book, “An Inland Voyage,” the account of acanoe trip with a friend.

6. The mists and east winds of his native Scotland proved too harsh for his delicate lungs, and year after year he found it necessary to spend more and more time away from his Edinburgh home. On one of these journeys inemigrant train from New York to San Francisco. It was on this visit to California that he met Mrs. Osbourne, who became his wife in 1880.

7. “Treasure Island,” a stirring tale of adventure, was published in 1883. It was followed by two other boys’ stories, “The Black Arrow” and “Kidnapped.”

8. In 1887 Stevenson and his wife again visited America. They hired ayacht and spent two years sailing among the islands of the South Seas, finally visiting Apia in Samoa. Samoapleased Stevenson, and as the climate suited him, he decided to make his home there. At Vailima, his Samoan home, he spent four happy years with his wife and his mother. Then his health failed, and he died suddenly, December 3, 1894. He was buried, as he had desired, on the summit of a mountain near his home.

9. Besides many novels and volumes of essays, Stevenson was the author of four volumes of poetry. The best known of these is “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” a book of delightful child poems from which the poem “Travel” is taken.