d a
right to the 'particle.' He suffered less from ill treatment than from
the sense of being made ridiculous. The prisoners were dressed in
uniform,--'jacket, waistcoat, and trousers of a sulphur or mustard
yellow, and a shirt of blue-and-white striped cotton.' St. Ives
thought that 'some malignant genius had found his masterpiece of irony
in that dress.' So much is made of this point that one reads with
unusual interest the letter in which Stevenson bewails his 'miserable
luck' with _St. Ives_; for he was halfway through it when a book,
which he had ordered six months before, arrived, upsetting all his
previous notions of how the prisoners were cared for. Now he must
change the thing from top to bottom. 'How could I have dreamed the
French prisoners were watched over like a female charity school, kept
in a grotesque livery, and shaved twice a week?' All his points had
been made on the idea that they were 'unshaved and clothed anyhow.' He
welcomes the new matter, however, in spite of the labor it entails.
And it is easy to see how he has enriched the earlier chapters by
accentuating St. Ives's disgust and mortification over his hideous
dress and stubby chin.

The book has a light-hearted note, as a romance of the road should
have. The events take place in 1813; they might have occurred fifty or
seventy-five years earlier. For the book lacks that convincing
something which fastens a story immovably within certain chronological
limits. It is the effect which Thomas Hardy has so wonderfully
produced in that little tale describing Napoleon's night-time visit to
the coast of England; the effect which Stevenson himself was equally
happy in making when he wrote the piece called _A Lodging for a
Night_.

_St. Ives_ has plenty of good romantic stuff in it, though on the
whole it is romance of the conventional sort. It is too well bred, let
us say too observant of the forms and customs which one has learned to
expect in a novel of the road. There is an escape from the castle in
the sixth chapter, a flight in the darkness towards the cottage of the
lady-love in the seventh chapter, an appeal to the generosity of the
lady-love's aunt, a dragon with gold-rimmed eyeglasses, in the ninth
chapter. And so on. We would not imply that all this is lacking in
distinction, but it seems to want that high distinction which
Stevenson could give to his work. Ought one to look for it in a book
confessedly unsatisfactory to its author, and a b