f the graver symptoms of his malady obliged him
to seek sunnier skies and warmer climates.

Scotland which he loved, the grey skies, the greyer mists, the snell
winds,--that even in his happy Samoan life his exile's heart hungered
for to the last,--were fatal to his delicate lungs, and year by year he
was compelled to live less and less in his old Edinburgh home.

In 1880 when he brought his wife to Scotland to visit his parents his
health was so precarious that he had to hurry abroad before the winter,
and he and his wife and stepson went to Davos where they met and formed
a pleasant friendship with Mr J. A. Symonds and his family. On their
return it was hoped that the climate of the south of England might suit
Mr Stevenson and be conveniently near London for literary business and
literary friendships, so he, and his wife and son settled at Bournemouth
in a house called Skerryvore, after the famous lighthouse so dear to all
the Stevensons. Here too, alas! his enemy found him out; and chronic,
indifferent health, with not infrequent attacks of lung disease in its
more serious forms, finally obliged him about 1887 to take another
journey to America in the hope that it might do him good.

Through all his life the shadow of death was never quite out of sight
for him or for those who loved him; the skeleton hand was continually
beckoning to him. When we think what that means, in a man's life, we
realise with amazement his charming cheerfulness, his wonderful courage,
and the magnitude of his work, the exactitude of his methods, the
carefulness of his research, appeal to us as something positively heroic
in one so handicapped by adverse fate.

When many men in despair would have given in he fought on; and the sum
of his work, the length of his years--comparatively short as these
were--witness to the truth that _will_ can do many things. He willed to
fight, he willed to live, he scorned to drop by the wayside, or to die
one day before the battle was hopeless, and he fought his fight with a
smiling face and a gay courage that was as fine a thing in its way as an
act which has won a Victoria Cross; nay, finer, perhaps, for the
struggle was not of minutes, or of hours, but of a lifetime, a stern
prolonged tussle with death, in which he was never selfish, never
peevish, always thoughtful of others, invariably merry and bright, with
a wonderful sparkling whimsical mirth that had in it no touch of
bitterness or of cynicism. Even