for a lifetime with no fear of reducing them to the trim similitude of a
Dutch garden. His bountiful and generous nature could profit by a spell
of training that would emaciate a poorer stock. From the first, his
delight in earth and the earth-born was keen and multiform; his zest in
life

'put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him;'

and his fancy, light and quick as a child's, made of the world around him
an enchanted pleasance. The realism, as it is called, that deals only
with the banalities and squalors of life, and weaves into the mesh of its
story no character but would make you yawn if you passed ten minutes with
him in a railway-carriage, might well take a lesson from this man, if it
had the brains. Picture to yourself (it is not hard) an average suburb
of London. The long rows of identical bilious brick houses, with the
inevitable lace curtains, a symbol merely of the will and power to wash;
the awful nondescript object, generally under glass, in the front
window--the shrine of the unknown god of art; the sombre invariable
citizen, whose garb gives no suggestion of his occupation or his tastes--a
person, it would seem, only by courtesy; the piano-organ the music of the
day, and the hideous voice of the vendor of half-penny papers the music
of the night; could anything be less promising than such a row of houses
for the theatre of romance? Set a realist to walk down one of these
streets: he will inquire about milk-bills and servants' wages, latch-keys
and Sunday avocations, and come back with a tale of small meannesses and
petty respectabilities, written in the approved modern fashion. Yet
Stevenson, it seems likely, could not pass along such a line of brick
bandboxes without having his pulses set a-throbbing by the imaginative
possibilities of the place. Of his own Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich he
says:

'The succession of faces in the lamplight stirred the lieutenant's
imagination; and it seemed to him as if he could walk for ever in that
stimulating city atmosphere and surrounded by the mystery of four
million private lives. He glanced at the houses and marvelled what
was passing behind those warmly lighted windows; he looked into face
after face, and saw them each intent upon some unknown interest,
criminal or kindly.'

It was that same evening that Prince Florizel's friend, under the name of
Mr. Morris, was giving a party in