and seen from
above, like a vast white billowy ocean, by the squatters on their
mountain ledge. Bret Harte, for whom and for whose works Mr Stevenson
had a sincere admiration, also alludes graphically to the curious scenic
effects of the mist rising from the Pacific. Very interesting, too, are
the papers on wine and wine-growers, and the two vineyards on the
mountain side; and Scotch hearts, warm even to the Scotch tramp who
looked in at the door, and to the various fellow-countrymen who arrived
to shake hands with Mr Stevenson because he was a Scot and like
themselves, an alien from the grey skies and the clanging church bells
of home.

'From the dim sheiling on the misty island
Mountains divide us and a world of seas,
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,'

he quotes and adds--

'And Highland and Lowland all our hearts are Scotch.'[5]

One last notice of his prose is connected with Edinburgh, and very
probably with a church charity, for to help some such sale as churches
patronise he wrote _The Charity Bazaar: a Dialogue_, which was given to
me by its author at 17 Heriot Row one day very long ago, and which,
rather frayed and yellow, is still safely pasted in my Everyday Book
with the initials 'R. L. S.' in strong black writing at the end of it.

Mr Stevenson has done so much in prose that the general reader is very
prone to forget those four thin volumes of verse which alone would have
done much to establish his fame as an author. The first published in
1885 was _The Child's Garden of Verses_, and anything more dainty than
the style and the composition of that really wonderful little book
cannot be imagined, nor has there ever been written anything, in prose
or in verse, more true to the thoughts and the feelings of an
imaginative child.

_Ballads_, published in 1890 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, the firm who
have published all the essays, is a collection of very interesting
narrative poems. The first two, 'Rahero, a Legend of Tahiti' and 'The
Feast of Famine, Marquesan Manners,' deal with native life in the sunny
islands of the tropics, and show, with the same graphic and powerful
touch as his South Sea tales do, that human life, love, hatred, and
revenge are as fierce and as terrible there as in the sterner north.
With the north are associated the old and curious Scotch legends,
_Ticonderoga_ and _Heather Ale_. The first gives in easily flowing lines
a Highland sl