d years,
building lighthouses along the Scottish coast, and it was natural that his
father should have expected Robert Louis to follow in the family
footsteps. But the slim boy with brown eyes, who at eight had written a
"History of Moses," and illustrated it with his own pen; who was slow to
learn from books, but quick to understand things that he saw and felt; the
boy who carried a volume of history in one pocket and a notebook in
another, had other plans for himself, and even his father came to see the
wisdom of his son's choice of a literary life. As early as 1873, when
only twenty-three years old, Stevenson was ordered south for the winter by
his physician, to ward off impending consumption. For more than twenty
years, or until his death in Samoa late in 1894, he was never far from
this pursuing enemy. It followed him over tossing seas and through many
lands as he journeyed in search of health; yet through all these years he
carried a brave and happy heart, and wrote at the end this Requiem, the
last three lines of which are upon his tomb on the mountain-top in Samoa;

"Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
"This be the verse you grave for me:
_Here he lies where he longed to be;_
_Home is the sailor, home from sea,_
_And the hunter home from the hill_."

Robert Louis Stevenson's first book, "An Inland Voyage," was published in
1878, when he was twenty-eight years old, and is a fresh and charming
account of a canoe trip up the rivers of Holland. It was during this
journey that he wrote: "If we were charged so much a head for sunsets, or
if God sent around a drum before the hawthorn came into flower, what a
work we should make about their beauty! But these things, like good
companions, stupid people early cease to observe."

The next year came his "Travels With a Donkey," which told in the same
naive style the story of his journey through the Cevennes Mountains with
no other companion than a donkey, whose gait he describes as being "As
much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run."

He first visited America in 1879, in search of health, returning in 1880
to Scotland with Mrs. Stevenson, whom he had married in California. In
1887 he came again with the hope that a dry winter in the Adirondack
Mountains would stand off the hand of Death. But he was little benefited,
and took up his