During the two years and nine months of Stevenson's residence at
Bournemouth preceding the date of his father's death, he had made no
apparent progress toward recovery. Every period of respite had been
quickly followed by a relapse, and all his work, brilliant and varied
as it was, had been done under conditions which would have reduced
almost any other man to inactivity. The close and frequently recurring
struggles against the danger of death from hemorrhage and exhaustion,
which he had been used, when they first occurred, to find exciting,
grew in the long run merely irksome, and even his persistent high
courage and gayety, sustained as they were by the devoted affection of
his family and many friends, began occasionally, for the first time,
to fail him. Accordingly when in May, 1887, the death of his father
severed the strongest of the ties which bound him to the old country,
he was very ready to listen to the advice of his physicians, who were
unanimous in thinking his case not hopeless, but urged him to try
some complete change of climate, surroundings, and mode of life. His
wife's connections pointing to the West, he thought of the mountain
health-resorts of Colorado, and of their growing reputation for the cure
of lung patients. Having let his house at Bournemouth, he accordingly
took passage on board the steamship Ludgate Hill, sailing for New York
from London on August 17, 1887, with his whole party, consisting of
his wife, his widowed mother, whom they had persuaded to join them, his
young stepson, and a trusted servant, Valentine.
It was the moment when his reputation had first reached its height
in the United States, owing especially to the immense impression
made by the _Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. He experienced
consequently—for the first time—the pleasures, such as they were, of
celebrity, and also its inconveniences; found the most hospitable of
refuges in the house of his kind friends, Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild, of
Newport; and quickly made many other friends, including the owner and
the editor of this Magazine, from whom he immediately received and
accepted very advantageous offers of work. Having been dissuaded from
braving, for the present, the fatigue of the long journey to Colorado
and the extreme rigors of its winter climate, he determined to try
instead a season at the mountain station of Saranac Lake, in the
Adirondack Mountains, New York State, which had lately been coming into
reputation as a place of cure. There, under the care of the well-known
resident physician, Dr. Trudeau, he spent nearly seven months, from
the end of September, 1887, to the end of April, 1888, with results
on the whole favorable to his own health, though not to that of his
wife, who at these high altitudes was never well. His work during the
winter consisted of the twelve papers published in the course of 1888
in SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE, including, perhaps, the most striking of all
his essays, _A Chapter on Dreams_, _Pulvis et Umbra_, _Beggars_, _The
Lantern Bearers_, _Random Memories_, etc.; as well as the greater
part of the _Master of Ballantrae_ and _The Wrong Box_—the last
originally conceived and drafted by Mr. Lloyd Osbourne—and the ballad
of _Ticonderoga_.
[Illustration:
Lloyd Osbourne. Mrs. Stevenson. R. L. Stevenson.
On the Porch of the Cottage at Saranac, in the Adirondacks, U. S. A.
(From a Photograph.)]
The following letters are extracted from those which tell of his voyage
to New York and his reception there at this date, and of his winter's
life and work at Saranac:
NEWPORT, R. I., U. S. A. [September, 1887].
MY DEAR COLVIN,—So long it went excellent well, and I had a
time I am glad to have had; really enjoying my life. There
is nothing like being at sea, after all. And O why have I
allowed myself to rot so long on land? But on the Banks I
caught a cold, and I have not yet got over it. My reception
here was idiotic to the last degree.... It is very silly, and
not pleasant, except where humor enters; and I confess the
poor interviewer lads pleased me. They are too good for their
trade; avoided anything I asked them to avoid, and were no
more vulgar in their reports than they could help. I liked
the lads.
O, it was lovely on our stable-ship, chock full of stallions.
She rolled heartily, rolled some of the fittings out of our
state-room, and I think a more dangerous cruise (except that
it was summer) it would be hard to imagine. But we enjoyed
it to the masthead, all but Fanny; and even she perhaps a
little. When we got in, we had run out of beer, stout, cocoa,
soda-water, water, fresh meat, and (almost) of biscuit. But
it was a thousandfold pleasanter than a great big Birmingham
liner like a new hotel; and we liked the officers, and made
friends with the quartermasters, and I (at least) made a
friend of a baboon (for we carried a cargo of apes), whose
embraces have pretty near cost me a coat. The passengers
improved, and were a very good specimen lot, with no drunkard,
no gambling that I saw, and less grumbling and backbiting than
one would have asked of poor human nature. Apes, stallions,
cows, matches, hay, and poor men-folk all or almost all came
successfully to land—Yours ever,