until at last I don't
really think we quite did. Little black insects also passed over us and
in the same half wanton manner we pretended we could not distinguish
them from the birds. There was a splendid sunlit silence about us, and
as Katharine said the heavens seemed to be dropping oil on us, or
honey-dew--it was all so bland.

_Thursday evening_.--I have seen Bob again, and I am charmed at his
convalescence. Le bon Dieu has been _so_ bon this time: here's his
health! Still the danger is not over by a good way; it is so miserable a
thing for reverses.

I hear the wind outside roaring among our leafy trees as the surf on
some loud shore. The hill-top is whelmed in a passing rain-shower and
the mist lies low in the valleys. But the night is warm and in our
little sheltered garden it is fair and pleasant, and the borders and
hedges and evergreens and boundary trees are all distinct in an equable
diffusion of light from the buried moon and the day not altogether
passed away. My dear friend, as I hear the wind rise and die away in
that tempestuous world of foliage, I seem to be conscious of I know not
what breath of creation. I know what this warm wet wind of the west
betokens, I know how already, in this morning's sunshine, we could see
all the hills touched and accentuated with little delicate golden
patches of young fern; how day by day the flowers thicken and the leaves
unfold; how already the year is a-tip-toe on the summit of its finished
youth; and I am glad and sad to the bottom of my heart at the knowledge.
If you knew how different I am from what I was last year; how the
knowledge of you has changed and finished me, you would be glad and sad
also.--Ever your faithful friend,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO MRS. SITWELL

The strain of anxiety recorded in the two last letters had given a
shake to Stevenson's own health, and it was agreed that he should go
for a yachting tour with Sir Walter Simpson in the Inner Hebrides.

_[Edinburgh, June 1874], Thursday._

I have been made so miserable by Chopin's _Marche funebre_. Try two of
Schubert's songs, "_Ich unglueckselige Atlas_" and "_Du schoenes
Fischermaedchen_"--they are very jolly. I have read aloud my death-cycle
from Walt Whitman this evening. I was very much affected myself, never
so much before, and it fetched the auditory considerable. Reading these
things that I like aloud when I am painfully excited is the keenest
artistic p