Coming by chance upon the Robert Louis Stevenson memorial at San
Francisco, on the edge of Chinatown, I copied its inscription, and in
case any reader of these notes may have forgotten its trend I copy it
again here; for I do not suppose that its application was intended
to cease with the Californian city. It is counsel addressed to the
individual, but since nations are but individuals in quantity such
ideals cannot be repeated amiss:
To be honest; to be kind; to earn a little; to spend a little less; to
make upon the whole a family happier for his presence; to renounce when
that shall be necessary and not to be embittered; to keep a few friends,
but these without capitulation; above all, on the same grim condition,
to keep friends with himself--here is a task for all that man has of
fortitude and delicacy.
It is a far cry from San Francisco to Saranac, yet Stevenson is their
connecting chain, with the late Harry Widener's amazing collection
of Stevensoniana, in his memorial library at Harvard, as a link. The
Saranac cottage, which on the day of my visit was surrounded by the
sweetest lilac blooms that ever perfumed the air, is still a place of
pilgrimage, and one by one new articles of interest are being added to
the collection. It was pleasant indeed to find an English author thus
honoured. Later, in Central Park, New York, I was to find statues of
Shakespeare, Burns and Sir Walter Scott.
It was, oddly enough, in the Adirondacks that I came upon my only
experience of simplified spelling in the land of its birth. It was in
that pleasant home from home, the Lake Placid Club, where one is adjured
to close the door "tyt" as one leaves a room; where one drinks "cofi";
and where that most necessary and mysterious of the functionaries of
life, the physician, is able to watch his divinity dwindle and his
dignity disappear under the style "fizisn."