read Darwin's _Origin of Species_, and talked of it
with my Michigan man. And then I took to Savage Landor and learnt some
of his _Imaginary Conversations_ by heart. I could have repeated _AEsop_
and _Rhodope_.

But the one thing I for ever fell back upon was an old encyclopaedia. I
should be afraid to say how much I read, but to it I owe, doubtless, a
stock of extensive, if shallow, general knowledge. Certainly it appears
to have influenced me to this day; for given a similar one I can wander
from shipbuilding to St. Thomas Aquinas; from the Atomic Theory to the
Marquis de Sade; from Kant to the building of dams; and never feel dull.

Now when I come across any of these books I am filled with a curious
melancholy. The _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ means more to me
than to some: I hear the whirr of the buzz-saw as I open it; even in its
driest page I smell the resin of fir and spruce; Locke's _Human
Understanding_ recalls things no man can understand if he has not
worked alongside Indians and next to Chinamen. As for Carlyle, I never
hear him mentioned without seeing the mountains and glaciers of the
Selkirks; in his pages is the sound of the wind and rain.

There are some novels, too, which have attractions not all their own. I
remember once walking into a store at Eagle Pass Landing on the Shushwap
Lake and asking for a book. I was referred to a counter covered with
bearskins, and beneath the hides I unearthed a pile of novels. The one I
took was Thomas Hardy's _Far from the Madding Crowd_. And another time I
rode into Santa Rosa, Sonoma County, California, and, while buying
stores, saw Gissing's _Demos_ open in front of me. It was anonymous, but
I knew it for his, and I read it as I rode slowly homeward down the
Sonoma Valley, the Valley of the Seven Moons.

These are but a few of the books that are burnt into one's memory as by
fire. All I remember are not literature: perhaps I should reject many
with scorn at the present day; nevertheless, they have a value to me
greater than the price set upon many precious folios. I propose one of
these days to make a shelf among my shelves sacred to the books which I
read under curious circumstances. I cannot but regret that I often had
nothing to read at the most interesting times. So far as I can
recollect, I got through five days' starvation in Australia without as
much as a newspaper.

A VISIT TO R. L. STEVENSON

It was late in May or early in June, f