o starve.

Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Osbourne were married May Tenth,
Eighteen Hundred Eighty. "The Silverado Squatters" shows how to spend a
honeymoon in a miner's deserted cabin, a thousand miles from nowhere.
The Osbourne children were almost grown, and were at that censorious age
when the average youngster feels himself capable of taking mental and
moral charge of his parents.

But these children were different; then, they had a different mother,
and as for Robert Louis, he certainly was a different proposition from
that ever evolved from creation's matrix. He belongs to no class, evades
the label, and fits into no pigeonhole.

The children never called him "father": he was always "Louis"--simply
one of them. He married the family and they married him. He had captured
their hearts in France by his story-telling, his flute-playing and his
skilful talent with the jackknife. Now he was with them for all time,
and he was theirs. It was the most natural thing in the world.

Mrs. Stevenson was the exact opposite of her husband in most things. She
was quick, practical, accurate, and had a manual dexterity in a
housekeeping way beyond the lot of most women. With all his
half-invalid, languid, dilettante ways, Robert Louis adored the man or
woman who could do things. Perhaps this was why his heart went out to
those who go down to the sea in ships, the folk whose work is founded
not on theories, but on absolute mathematical laws.

In their fourteen years of married life, Robert Louis never tired of
watching Fanny at her housekeeping. "To see her turn the flapjacks by a
simple twist of the wrist is a delight not soon to be forgotten, and my
joy is to see her hanging clothes on the line in a high wind."

The folks at home labored under the hallucination that Robert Louis had
married "a native Californian," and to them a "native" meant a
half-breed Indian. The fact was that Fanny was born in Indiana, but this
explanation only deepened the suspicion, for surely people who lived in
Indiana are Indians--any one would know that! Cousin Robert made
apologies and explanations, although none was needed, and placed himself
under the ban of suspicion of being in league to protect Robert Louis,
for the fact that the boys had always been quite willing to lie for
each other had been very well known.

Mrs. Stevenson made good all that Robert Louis lacked. In physique she
was small, but sturdy and strong.

Mentally she was ver